Dec 05 2025 to Dec 05 2025 6:30 p.m.

Price: 600 Book/Buy

Where

Courtyard Koota

Ground floor, Good Earth Tarana Good Earth Malhar, near Rajarajeswari medical college Kambipura, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560074

Event Description

About Portal Waiting:

As the global project of growth and development hurtles us towards an uncertain future, perhaps it is time to pause for a moment and take stock of where we are; to ask who we are and what we are looking for and ultimately what the essence of being human is about (in an increasingly AI dominated world). Even if not to provide answers, perhaps this work tries to raise these questions and reckon with them. In Portal Waiting, Abhi Tambe presents a solo immersive performance that fuses theatre, sound art, and live music. The show is a homage to sound as a medium, and is experienced entirely on headphones by the audience.

The main character in the play is Abhi Tambe playing himself; a musician stuck in his home studio during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and trying to make an album. The audience follows him on his lonely musical journey as he muses about big existentialist questions and then slowly begins to unravel in the process. The line between reality and fantasy starts to blur as he engages in conversations with a fictitious audience and then imagines himself boarding a flying machine that is trying to escape from Earth itself. Will he be able to make it back in one piece?

Through headphones, the intricate sound design is experienced in a way that creates an isolated intimacy that is vital to the play’s ethos; the audience is literally inside the main character’s head. As one might expect from Tambe, the lush soundscape and live music are the centrepiece of this performance.

The title of the piece is inspired by Arundhati Roy’s 2020 essay titled “The Pandemic Is A Portal.” The play also draws from Simon McBurney’s The Encounter, Forest 404 (a BBC sounds eco thriller), David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus, Jyoti Dogra’s Black Hole, and Appupen’s Moonward.

About Abhi Tambe:

Abhi Tambe works at the intersection of music, theatre and sound art. With a background in rock music, he expanded his repertoire in the 2010s to include music composition and sound design for theatre and films. This experience opened up his interest in longer format storytelling and led eventually to the creation of Portal Waiting during the lockdowns of 2020; a time when the global pandemic forced us all to stop and take a second look at the disparity around ourselves and to reconsider our own roles in the economic machine that drives it.

Age 15+