Greetings Traveller! My name is ArunDitha (born Deborah Arunditha Emmanuel, 1988) and I am a poet and shapeshifter. For me poetry takes many forms but it is all the essence of that which is abstract taking shape as lyrical image. Some of my shapes are as the frontwoman for the music project Mantravine and as a founding co-organiser at Opens, a para-academic forum to catalyse alternative discourse. In my practice I am always a kind of hybridised consciousness, the self and the other at the same time. My self within a larger universe. Channeling the non-human is fundamental to poetic reworlding, wherein creative psychospiritual technologies like song and spoken word birth deviant realities through the bodies of instigators. Through poetic reworlding we illuminate new fictions, showing us how we could be— for ourselves and for the collective. May we dream a different world into existence, one Act at a time.

 

My work has been shared and performed in a variety of settings in Singapore where I was born, and beyond. Some of these places include TEDx Singapore, The Esplanade Singapore, the Barcelona International Poetry Festival, Wonderfruit (Thailand), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, and The Watermill Center (New York) where I debuted ‘Hush’, my first performance art piece. I have opened for or toured with poet-performers like Sarah Kay, Luka Lesson, Anthony Anaxagourou and Alok Vaid-Menon, and won poetry slams in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and Germany.

 

My first poetry collection, When I Giggle In My Sleep, was published by Red Wheelbarrow Books early 2015. Rebel Rites, a creative non-fiction work, was self-published/crowdfunded in 2016. My third book Genesis: Visual Poetry Collection was launched in 2018. My poetry and prose has been published by entities like The Straits Times, Math Paper Press, Ethos Books, and Penguin Random House (India). My most recent publication is the first folio with Afterimage Press, Rib/Cage, shared with Rosaly Putchechary and Zeha. I have also released multiple music albums as a lead vocalist and collaborated on a number of sound works. This includes Mantravine and Polymorphism, which have toured internationally.

 

In recent years, my practice has been most influenced by spiritual research, political & feminist discourse, as well as contemporary & indigenous poetry. My current experimentations explore poetry as sound and body through looping as a tool of deconstruction, and Butoh as imbricated image- a body of text.