Greetings Traveller! My name is ArunDitha (born Deborah Arunditha Emmanuel, 1988) and I am a (mostly) South Asian diaspora poet, singer, actor, educator and movement artist born and intentionally based in Singapore. I am the frontwoman for the music project Mantravine and a founding co-organiser at Opens, a para-academic forum to catalyse alternative discourse. I am driven to unapologetically embody my diasporic-extraterrestrial nature through acts of creation, in practice of being a cosmic void of decentered self, which might also be known as a planetary body/earth, as hybridised deity consciousness or a collective societal human/less/ness. 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 in work and beingness— 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 locally and abroad. Some of these places include TEDx Singapore, The Esplanade Singapore, the Barcelona International Poetry Festival, Wonderfruit (Thailand), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (first Singaporean resident writer), 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 the likes of The Straits Times, Math Paper Press, Ethos Books, and Penguin Random House (India). My next publication is the first folio with Afterimage Press, Rib/Cage, forthcoming in February 2025. I have also released multiple music albums as a lead vocalist and collaborated on multiple sound works. This includes my current biggest projects 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 movement of words.