Kamala believes in the communal power of live performance. An audience coming together to view a work can experience moments of transcendence–despite our disparate backgrounds, for that time together we are all seeing and feeling the same things. We experience empathy for the performers and for each other. This feels particularly important at this historical moment. She is most interested in the moments of shared empathy that a multi-disciplinary artwork can provide. She also believes that telling diverse stories and putting diverse performers onstage is a practice of centering that perspective. For this reason, she has dedicated her career to supporting underrepresented perspectives and performers.
This is the throughline that connects even her most experimental work with her work in the more traditional genres of opera and theater. For example, her opera "Thumbprint" fuses European and South Asian classical music traditions to tell the story of Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman who overcame incredible odds to become an advocate for women’s education. By centering Indian classical music in the composition, she wanted Western audiences to gain a new perspective on an unfamiliar culture. She took a similar approach when creating an opera for the trees of Prospect Park– she interviewed tree researchers and learned that tree music is the sound of a healthy forest. She then created a 10-hour free public art installation from field recordings she captured in a forest upstate. Centering the tree’s perspective, audiences were asked to shift their own perspective on what music can be.
