Sunny Jain: Love Force

Friday, September 27, 2024 at 8:00pm
CFA Theater

$20 general public; $15 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $8 for Wesleyan students and youth under 18.

Catch a preview of the latest music theater work by composer Sunny Jain, 2023–2024 CFA Artist in Residence. Love Force is a powerful ritual of gathering, using hybrid musical styles and building on the composer’s own experience of diaspora, that illuminates the power of song to create unity in the face of divisive systems of oppression.

Created and conceived by Brooklyn-based composer Sunny Jain, Love Force draws on the musician’s autobiography to create an immersive performance inspired by the concept satyāgraha (which means “insistence or holding firmly to truth”). Coined by Mahatma Gandhi during his nonviolent protest against British colonialism in India, and also adapted by B.R. Ambedkar and Martin Luther King Jr. as “soul force” and “love force,” satyāgraha is both a theory and a method of enveloping the oppressor with compassion. Through a deeply personal journey, Love Force draws parallels between the caste system in India and the history of American racism. In doing so, it makes vibrant the power of performance to bring unity to audiences—a power of “collective effervescence” that may be essential in confronting these ongoing systems of oppression.1

Music meets storytelling as Jain takes audiences on a journey that questions cultural traditions and religious dogma, reflecting on the multiple identities so many immigrant families confront in the process of staying connected to the past and imagining new futures. Combining baraat music (South Asian wedding processionals) which Jain first encountered at an early age, progressive rock and Bollywood classics recalled from his youth in Rochester, New York, and his training in the Black American jazz tradition (with teachers such as Kenny Barron)—the sounds of Love Force reflect the multiplicity of Jain’s own identities, creating a resonance between these rhythms that perhaps escapes words alone.

Each element of Love Force is carefully crafted for frequencies, rhythm, and vibrations that tell more than his personal story, but rather unleash a powerful ritual of gathering through song and story.

This event is part of Democracy 2024 at Wesleyan. Learn more about how the University is fostering the democratic values and practices that make free inquiry and teaching possible at www.wesleyan.edu/d2024.

¹ “Collective effervescence” is a concept borrowed from French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s study of religion, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, first published in 1912. Though Durkheim coins the concept to refer to the transcendent, almost delirious, state induced by religious assemblies—his text provides little explanation of this phenomenon, almost as though the experience itself exceeds any description language could provide.

CREDITS

Created and conceived by Sunny Jain.

Performed by Sunny Jain on dhol and drumset, Almog Sharvit on bass, Alison Shearer on saxophone and flute, David Adewumi on trumpet, Armando Vergara on trombone, and Julia Chen on keyboards.

Directed by Katie Pearl, Assistant Professor of Theater.

Lighting/Projection Design by Courtney Gaston, Assistant Professor of Theater and Design and Engineering Studies.

Additional support for the development of the work provided by faculty from Global South Asian Studies program, graduate music student Shawn O’Sullivan, Asher Weintraub ’26, Tanvi Navile ’25, Akhil Joondeph ’26, and students from Shakti, Wesleyan's South Asian Students' Association.

READING LIST

The following works inspired Sunny Jain in the creation of Love Force:

Hazrat Inayat Khan - The Mysticsm of Music, Sound and Word
B.R. Ambedkar, Arundhati Roy & S Anand – Annihilation of Caste
Isabel Wilkerson - Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Émile Durkheim - The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Barbara Ehrenreich – Dancing in the Streets
Leo Tolstoy – The Kingdom of God is Within You
Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience
Harold S. Kushner - When Bad Things Happen to Good People
Viktor E. Frankl - Man’s Search for Meaning
Steven Pinker - Enlightenment Now
Priya Parker - The Art of Gathering
Adrienne Maree Brown - Emergent Strategy

This Spotify playlist gathers some of Sunny Jain's many musical influences in the creation of Love Force.