Punjabi Princess, Smoking Black Cloud
Nicola Singh
Edited by Priya Jay
Part poem, conversation, anecdote and song, Punjabi Princess, Smoking Black Cloud is set in an artist’s studio on the beach in St. Ives, Cornwall, UK. It traces a period of interrupted experimental research; the gory aftermath of an artist residency programme.
Written out of a ritualised practice that incorporates movement, vocal and hatha yoga practices, the text forms an embodied and psychic reckoning of a body buckled by St. Ives waves and whiteness. In an exercise in restorative healing, Singh negotiates the racial imaginary through autobiography, Yogic Philosophy and a diverse range of cultural reference points.
ISBN: 978-1-9162351-1-3
Design: aw-ar.studio
Published by COPY 2024.
All content copyright COPY and Nicola Singh.
Nicola Singh
Nicola is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher and pedagogue based between the UK and India.
Her work is rooted in contemporary performance art. Her research interests are voice, sound and song as cultural signifiers, as tools for spiritual practice and as a means of interrogating language. She work’s across sonic traditions, with improvisation techniques and via different modes of listening. She is interested in trans-national techniques of mantra and meditation, and how language, sound and repetition are used as transcendental vehicles in these practices. She also uses mantra-like repetition and improvisation to demonstrate the mutability and difficultly of language.
Nicola integrates her expanded vocal technique with the influence of Yogic breath practices and classical North Indian vocal music. She is currently training in Dhrupad with Pandit Uday Bhawalkar. She also experiments with modes of listening and somatic practice in performance, pedagogic and social justice settings. Most recently, using Yoga Nidra as a tool to support global majority activists in connecting to ancestral wisdoms. She uses prop and costume to play with the aesthetics of sound, as well as exploring the physicality of the ‘improvising body’ – testing out embodied states as performative devices. These experiments include weight training and ritual fasting as a precursor to vocal improvisation.
She also makes speculative and post-performance works on paper.
