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Co-Creation Lab
Artists from different forms, in one room, making one work together. Not a showcase of separate pieces, but a new piece that none of them could have made alone.
Common Breath
The first Co-Creation Lab: five days, nine artists and one shared work, made with the sarod player and composer Soumik Datta.
- When
- 1 to 5 December 2025
- Where
- Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi
- Artists
- Nine, across music, film, dance, theatre and research
- Lead artist
- Soumik Datta
- With
- Soumik Datta Arts, with support from Teamwork Arts
How a lab works
A Co-Creation Lab starts with a question, not a script.
For Common Breath, nine artists working in music, film, dance, theatre and research spent five days at Triveni Kala Sangam listening to each other's practices, finding a shared language and building a single work out of it.
The lab closed with a public showcase, and its work became part of a larger global presentation for Earth Day 2026.
Made with
Soumik Datta
Common Breath began in June 2025, when Soumik Datta, touring India with Melodies in Slow Motion, was introduced to W.I.P Labs.
A first call between Soumik, Baan G and Kirti Sharma about sound and the climate crisis turned into a lab we designed together over the following months: Soumik as lead artist, W.I.P Labs as co-developer and producer, and his charity Soumik Datta Arts giving every one of the nine artists in Delhi a full scholarship. Sound recordist Vidhaat Raman and anthropologist Sarover Zaidi joined as facilitators, with a research walk through Nizamuddin on how air pollution shapes the lives of people who live with it most.
“Common Breath is an invitation to listen differently: to the world, to each other and to the fragile ecologies we inhabit.”
About Soumik
A British-Indian sarod player and composer, and Artistic Director of Soumik Datta Arts.
A student of Pandit Buddhadev Das Gupta, Soumik has taken the sarod into collaborations with Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Nitin Sawhney, Akram Khan, Anoushka Shankar, the BBC Singers and the Philharmonia Orchestra. He won the Aga Khan Music Award, is an Honorary Fellow of Trinity Laban and an Earth Day Network Ambassador for India, and made Songs of the Earth, a British Council commission for COP26. His work uses music to address the climate crisis and social justice.
From the lab
Next labs
We run Co-Creation Labs with partners: arts organisations, festivals, foundations and institutions that want to commission new work made across forms. If you would like to host or support a lab, or be considered as an artist for the next one, write to info@wipcollective.in.
See also our productions, which often begin as conversations like these.