Ranbir Sidhu
2009 Swing Space Resident, 100 Church Street
Ranbir Sidhu’s roots go back to the working class immigrant communities of 60s London, where he was born and grew up. His family were originally refugees from the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and his Swing Space project is an attempt to come to terms with the lingering memories of violence which still surround the event.
Ranbir is the author of the plays: True East..., Sangeet, and Conquistadors, and his work has been developed and supported by MCC Theater, LaMama ETC, Disha Theater, CUNY’s Prelude Festival, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. His fiction appears widely, most recently in the current issue of Fence Magazine, and he is a recipient of a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He is also a past winner of the Pushcart Prize and has been awarded residencies by the Atlantic Center for the Arts and Villa Montalvo.
The Partition Project: In collaboration with the actors Sarita Choudhury and Chris Baskous, we are preparing a text that attempts to come to terms with the continuing echoes of the violence inflicted during the Partition of India and Pakistan. The work was initially imagined as a sort of mash-up of the Jason and Medea story, the story of Partition, and the struggles of an Indian-American woman in the contemporary US business world.
