Name: Sutra - with Monks from the Shaolin Temple
Start: 2025-10-29T19:30:00-07:00
Location: The Granada Theatre Santa Barbara

Sutra - with Monks from the Shaolin Temple

Contemporary dance and ancient martial arts combine in this award-winning collaboration between Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, sculptor Antony Gormley, composer Szymon Brzóska, and 20 Buddhist monks from the Shaolin Temple in China’s Henan Province. Sutra is a breathtaking spectacle which explores the Shaolin kung fu tradition in a contemporary context. A cadre of monks perform flying kicks, backflips and shadow-boxing in a humorous fable about a European outsider entering their monastery. With clever set design and a specially-commissioned score, Sutra has been called “a brave, thrilling, elliptical piece” and an “odyssey into the mind of a Zen Buddhist” (The Telegraph, U.K.).