• Brandon Ingram on launching Karanda, reimagining Ubu Roi for the digital age and creating space for performance that moves people

There is something about performance that gives us permission to confront ideas we might otherwise avoid. Politics, power, identity, grief, and the ways we relate to each other all become easier to examine when placed at a slight distance, played out by somebody else on a stage.

For Brandon Ingram, this ability to move people has long been at the heart of his relationship with theatre. Now, after years spent moving between performance, writing, facilitation, and personal and professional development, he is bringing these different strands together through Karanda, a new Sri Lankan creative company built around a deceptively simple idea: transformation.

Karanda will make its public debut this November with ‘Ubu,’ an original production inspired by Alfred Jarry’s ‘Ubu Roi’. Running from 5 to 8 November at Trace City, Maradana, ‘Ubu’ takes Jarry’s absurd examination of power and places it within a world shaped by a distinctly contemporary force: the feed.

For Brandon, the production is both an introduction to Karanda and an opportunity to ask some uncomfortable questions about the world we have created, the people we place in power, and the systems through which we now experience much of reality.

A space for transformation

“Karanda has been a dream of mine for some time,” Brandon told The Sunday Morning Brunch, explaining that he had initially thought less about creating a company and more about creating a movement that would allow conversations around transformation to take place.

Over the years, much of his work outside theatre has centred on personal and professional development, from working with organisations and teams to facilitating conversations with individuals. What interested him throughout was the possibility of seeing people change, develop, and better understand themselves.

Karanda, he explained, became a manifestation of this. The company operates across three areas: performance (Perform Karanda), learning (Learn Karanda), and, eventually, publishing (Publish Karanda). While these might appear to be separate disciplines, Brandon sees all three as different routes towards the same destination.

Performance is perhaps the most familiar territory. Theatre and the arts have been a major part of Brandon’s life, and he sees performance as a means through which people are able to navigate different periods of their lives, encounter perspectives outside their own, and process emotion.

Learn Karanda will draw more directly from his work in personal and professional development, looking at how people work, connect, and function within organisations, while helping individuals develop the skills required to grow within those environments.

Publishing will come later. Brandon is deliberately taking more time with this arm, wanting first to better understand contemporary publishing, the changing role of books, and how people consume written ideas today.

Power in the age of The Feed

It is fitting, then, that Karanda’s first public work, ‘Ubu,’ is one concerned with transformation of another kind: what happens to people, institutions, and societies when power begins changing the way they behave.

‘Ubu’ began with Brandon wanting to respond to the state of global politics. The starting point was ‘Ubu Roi,’ Jarry’s late 19th century play about the grotesque Père Ubu, whose pursuit and abuse of power became a vicious parody of leadership. Its deliberately crude, absurd approach was startling for audiences of its time, and the work would later be regarded as an important precursor to movements including the Theatre of the Absurd.

Almost 130 years later, Brandon found its central ideas uncomfortably familiar. “It was about leaders who were in power but behaving like children,” he said, adding that the fact that these themes continued to resonate said something about how little certain relationships with power had changed.

‘Ubu Roi’ has consequently been reinterpreted repeatedly across cultures and political contexts. Brandon saw an opportunity to draw from its central concerns without simply restaging Jarry’s play. 

‘Ubu’ therefore builds its world from scratch. Rather than being situated in Sri Lanka, the production takes place within a fictional world known as The Feed, where performance and reality increasingly overlap. It is a world of screens, livestreams, private spaces, and public identities, where power is shaped as much by attention as authority.

For Brandon, this reflects a fundamental shift in how people experience the world. Online, national boundaries become less important. Someone might be Sri Lankan, American, or French, but when entering a social feed they also enter a shared digital space with its own language and behaviours. Likes, shares, comments, and reactions are immediately understood, regardless of where someone comes from.

Attention itself has become a form of currency. “If you don’t have the right kind of engagement, nobody pays attention to what is going on,” Brandon observed.

‘Ubu’ plays with this relationship between power and performance, asking what happens when governance, influence, identity, and even tragedy are processed through systems designed around engagement.

There is still a distinctly Sri Lankan element within this otherwise placeless world. ‘Ubu’ is bilingual, with Sinhala incorporated into the production and one significant character speaking entirely in Sinhala, a decision Brandon described as intentional.

The result is a world recognisable enough to feel familiar without being tied to a single country, allowing its questions about leadership, influence, and collective responsibility to travel beyond a specifically Sri Lankan political reading.

Why performance matters

Brandon’s own relationship with performance stretches back to childhood. He began performing at around five or six and continued through school, later studying speech and drama and completing his examinations through the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). 

One of his earliest major productions was ‘Chatroom’ by Mind Adventures Theatre Co. in 2007, a play set largely within online conversations and dealing with cyberbullying, isolation, and suicide.

Nearly two decades later, there is an interesting line connecting ‘Chatroom’ and ‘Ubu’. Both examine spaces created by technology and what happens to human behaviour within them. 

For Brandon, though, what stayed with him most strongly from ‘Chatroom’ was what happened after the performance. The production generated conversations around issues people were often reluctant to discuss openly. That experience helped shape his understanding of what theatre was capable of doing.

“There are so many things our culture doesn’t get into,” he said. Theatre offers another route into those conversations, allowing people to encounter difficult subjects through characters and stories before sharing their own perspectives.

Over the years, productions including ‘Paraya,’ ‘The One Who Loves You So,’ and his work around the film ‘Funny Boy’ have reinforced this belief.

Brandon recalled filmmaker Deepa Mehta telling him during the making of ‘Funny Boy’ that ‘all art is political’ whether an artist consciously sets out to make a political statement or not. Brandon believes the act of making art and asking an audience to respond to it carries a position. It is this ability to generate reaction that continues to draw him towards performance. 

“I love that art can do that and help people share their perspectives in a far freer way than if they were simply asked questions about the topic head-on,” he said. 

Making the arts sustainable

Creating spaces for those conversations, though, requires more than creative intent. One of the biggest challenges facing Sri Lankan performance is still the question of sustainability.

From childhood, Brandon recalled hearing that becoming an actor or writer was something to consider as a sideline because it would not sustain a livelihood. Decades later, that assumption continues to shape the sector. 

“There are a few of us really striving to ensure we can build enough capital to make companies thrive and flourish in a way that allows people connected to the arts to make it their sole source of income,” he said.

Doing so requires a stronger relationship between artists, cultural organisations, corporate partners, sponsors, and individual patrons. Brandon believes the conversation around performance as an investment is long overdue.

The tension is familiar. Creative practitioners understandably want the freedom to make work on their own terms, while investors need to understand what their support produces, whether through visibility, audience engagement, or other measurable outcomes.

For Brandon, neither position has to invalidate the other. “Both parties need to come together and make this work,” he said. “How do I build and support performance where performers can make it a livelihood and sustain themselves while doing what they love?”

‘Ubu’ itself illustrates the difficulty. Brandon shared that the team approached numerous corporates while seeking support for the production, but ultimately moved ahead with little to no corporate funding. Much of the production is being financed by Brandon himself alongside a small number of interested donors. The goal is still to make the production financially viable, pay everyone involved, and generate enough of a return to contribute towards putting the next production on stage. 

It is perhaps one of Karanda’s most important challenges. Transformation is the idea at the centre of the company, but sustaining the spaces in which transformation takes place requires practical structures around creativity.

Beyond ‘Ubu,’ Brandon sees Performance Karanda continuing to grow, but Learn Karanda is the area into which he hopes to place much of his energy. At a time when artificial intelligence is rapidly changing workplaces and creative industries alike, he is interested in a question that feels increasingly pressing: where does the human being fit?

Understanding individuals, collective organisational problems, and how people continue to develop in changing environments will form a large part of that work. Publishing will follow as Karanda itself evolves.

For now, though, there is ‘Ubu’.

Brandon is reluctant to prescribe what audiences should leave the theatre thinking. For a production filled with questions about power, attention, and the realities we construct around ourselves, he would rather leave interpretation to the individual.

What he wants first is much simpler. “I want the audience to be thoroughly entertained by what they see,” he said, adding that in an age of short attention spans and endless competing feeds, getting people to sit together, watch something unfold, and perhaps continue thinking about it after they leave felt like a fitting place for Karanda to begin.