KARANDA launches with first original production, UBU

Karanda Founder Brandon Ingram 

 New Sri Lankan creative company will work across Performance, Learning and Publishing, with transformation at the heart of its work

KARANDA, a new Sri Lankan creative company, will present its first production, UBU, in Colombo from 5 to 8 November 2026. 

It will run for six performances, including matinees on 7 and 8 November, at Trace City (Bay 7), Maradana. Ticket details will be announced soon.

UBU is inspired by Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi and is set inside The Feed, a world in which performance and reality overlap. Across screens, livestreams and private spaces, its characters navigate power, identity, grief and influence, and the question of what remains true when everything can become content.

The production brings together an ensemble of established and emerging performers, including Sebastian Durfee, Niroshi Perera, Andre Howson, Tracy Jayasinghe, Nethma Mettananda, Nabeel Nooramith, Anuda Heenatigala, Veenadari Jayakody, with Ruvin de Silva and Tehani Chitty. It uses live performance, multimedia and shifting theatrical spaces.

KARANDA’s founder Brandon Ingram said: “UBU asks what happens to us when we surrender our attention, our identities and eventually our realities to the systems around us. Underneath the humour is a human question: can we step outside the feed long enough to encounter ourselves and each other again? That made it feel like the right work with which to introduce a company devoted to transformation.”

KARANDA was founded by Ingram, following over a year in development that drew on his work across brand, creativity, theatre, writing, facilitation, and personal and professional development. The company works across three interconnected areas: Performance, Learning and Publishing, exploring how stories, experiences, knowledge and ideas can change the way people see themselves and the world around them.

“KARANDA is really about one thing: what moves a human being from one state into another,” says Ingram. “Sometimes that happens in a theatre. Sometimes it happens through a conversation, an experience, a piece of learning or something you read. Performance, Learning and Publishing may look like very different disciplines, but for us they all have the same possibility at their centre: transformation.”

Perform KARANDA will create and produce theatre, live work and other creative experiences for audiences.

Learn KARANDA will focus on personal and professional development through programs, workshops and facilitation concerned with how people understand themselves, relate to others and function within organisations and communities.

Publish KARANDA, the company’s third area, will develop over time as a home for books, original writing and ideas.

The three areas will develop at different speeds. Together, they form KARANDA’s wider ambition: a Sri Lankan platform through which creativity, learning and ideas can meet.

UBU is KARANDA’s first public production. Further work in Performance and Learning is planned ahead of the eventual development of the Publishing arm. The company will remain based in Sri Lanka while seeking to create work capable of travelling beyond it.

“I want KARANDA to be unmistakably from here without believing that being from here limits where our ideas can go,” Ingram adds. “Sri Lanka has an extraordinary creative and intellectual voice. KARANDA is one small attempt to create another space in which that voice can experiment, question, play and make things that move people.”