Buddhadeva by Akaina Ghosh

In Buddhadeva, Akaina Ghosh creates a tender, searching solo performance in conversation with the life and work of their great-grandfather, the prolific Bengali writer and poet Buddhadeva Bose.

Set along the banks of the Ganga River, the piece moves through poetry, memory, love, loss, and translation. As Ghosh attempts to conjure a relationship with an ancestor known largely through scattered words and inherited fragments, they explore their own identity as a non-binary, second-generation American-Bengali artist.

What is lost in translation? What can be recovered from the pieces of a family’s past? Buddhadeva is an intimate meditation on language and lineage—an invitation to consider the people, stories, and silences that shape who we are.