Aruna Antonella Handa

I write songs about the human condition that attempt to answer what Noam chomsky refers to as George Orwell's question: how when we know so much do we do so little. I might sing about plastics, elephants, love or addiction, in idioms of art song, folk, and jazz. Whatever the song, whether it's one of my originals, a jazz standard or an interpretation of a folk or punk tune, I try to sing from within the song, within the motivation of the piece.
Recent festival appearances include Women from Space, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Open Tuning and Canadian Music Week. I also compose instrumental and electronic pieces, including pieces of ballet/jazz. My Future Food Salon has toured Toronto, NYC, Austin, and Montreal with the third series an immersive theatrical performance exploring fungi. "Have You Seen My Sister?", a recording based on my song cycle originally composed and performed at Nuit Blanche Toronto, was a response to pandemic surges in gender-based violence, and was nominated "Single of the Year" (Canadian Folk Music Awards, 2024). Together with Aruna & the Sirens, or with bassist Michael Broadhead and guests, I perform the entire song cycle now and again. With Aruna & the Sirens, I am crossing my fingers that our LP "Of Bones & Addicts" will actually drop this spring/summer, and a single from that record drops in May 2024.
People have asked lately whether I would do song-writing workshops, and the answer is an emphatic "yes". I love working with other musicians in collaborative settings and just about all my performance practice is collaborative in one way or another. I also enjoy working with very young children on music exploration and composition, though I have not done much of this in Kingston yet.
I am also interested in theatre workshops for high school students exploring thoughts, hopes and concerns about the environmental, social and interpersonal issues that confront us all, as we stumble in this climate emergency and associated turmoil. This series will launch here in Kingston soon, and it's called the Explorations Workshop series.