Navigating two worlds at the Brighton Festival

It comes from Aditya Prakash as he brings to life his 2023 album ISOLASHUN, using live music, soundscape, an Akram Khan dance film made specifically for the project, video projection and personal stories to illuminate the immigrant experience and offer a hopeful look at bridging cultures, generations and musical traditions.

The project draws on Aditya's experiences growing up in Los Angeles, training in India, performing from a young age, and his deep engagement with Karnatik music and contemporary sounds. The show is in Brighton Dome Corn Exchange from Wednesday to Friday, May 21-23.

“My identity is a meeting of two worlds, growing up in the States in a family rooted in Indian culture,” he explains. “It's about trying to navigate the poles of America and India and feeling like I didn't belong in either place. And that was difficult. It's about trying to express it and I think art was my way of trying to navigate the poles. From the time I started my own band that fused Karnatik music with jazz, it was about expressing a sense of identity.”

The album was rooted in the pandemic, Aditya explains: “George Floyd had happened and the #metoo movement had happened and I think collectively there was a sense of people reconnecting with history and questioning history. There was a new sense of introspection and I personally channelled that into the countries I called home through my music.

“There is a problematic part of the history (of Karnatik music) that is not talked about and that is ignored but is really part of the music. It was only during the pandemic when everything stopped and there was no distraction except being by yourself with yourself that I looked at that history which is a history of marginalisation. The way that we are taught the music is that it is glorified, and we are taught a version of history that is very washed over with all the details washed out. It deals with how the music is thousands of years old years old and emerges from the scriptures and uses music as a form of enlightenment. But the reality is that it comes from a history of caste and oppression. I come from an upper caste and the music comes from an upper caste primarily.

“And I think the first thing you've got to do is to acknowledge that. I was ignoring it in my music in my life. I was just consumed with the music. Music for music’s sake can be dangerous when you overlook things. That's when beauty and poetry and music can be a smokescreen to hide behind. So the first thing you have to do is acknowledge it and I did some research.”

It was never a question of simply not performing it: “I'm not going to cancel the music. It is part of me. I'm not going to stop playing Karnatik music, but you have to engage with the messiness of it and keep navigating and adapting.

“A lot of the time music can become so fossilised just because it is played the way it has always being passed down, and that is ironic because the people that were considered to have created it as an artform were actually pushing the boundaries. They were innovating. Constantly they were adapting but it has been music that's been put on a pedestal as a kind of museum object. But once you learn that this music has changed and is changing then something breaks. You can feel that it is set now. It is freeing in a way. I'm not doing it now just for the sake of music for music’s sake but trying to acknowledge the history and the troubles and it becomes a music that can be adapted.”

And it took the pandemic to realise this: “It has taught me that I need periods where I slow down if I'm to grow as an artist and that's tricky. It's easy to get sucked into that capitalist whirlpool of non-stop activity. But the idea of this show is introspection and the need constantly to re-evaluate your own choices and maybe push back on those choices.”