Renu is announced as part of Arts Depot’s Artist Residencies 2025
Renu Arora has been selected for artsdepot’s 2025-26 Artist Residency programme, supporting the next research and development phase of The Burgundy Book and providing creative space for Renu and her collaborators to explore how a work rooted in music, song and spoken word can become a digitally immersive musical theatre experience - an opportunity to test not only how the story is told, but how an audience might enter its world.
The Burgundy Book has grown from the accident and near-death experience Renu had in 2017, during which she saw a life review in the form of three books: one holding her past, one her survival and one the future she had not yet lived, and the work takes its title from that final, unopened book.
The residency marks a significant transition for a project that began as a deeply personal creative response and developed into a concept album with support from Arts Council England and Help Musicians; at artsdepot, it can begin to expand into space, performance and technology.
The research and development process will consider how digital tools can deepen connection rather than distract from it, while at the heart of the work remains Renu’s voice and the emotional precision of a story about the before and after of trauma: what changes, what endures and how a person begins to imagine an unwritten future.
Renu brings more than 20 years of experience as a multi-award winning actor, singer and writer to the residency, alongside the perspective of a disabled South Asian artist creating work on her own terms.