Written and performed by: Aditya Prakash
With ROOM-i-NATION, Aditya Prakash has taken music from his recent album ISOLASHUN and sculpted a show around it that grounds it in context. It’s a neat amalgamation of theatre and music that shows Prakash as a talented musician as well as actor and storyteller.
A mock-up of a studio apartment takes up the stage. There’s a real bed and a lamp with a projected wall complete with window and widescreen TV. Prakash tells us about his background growing up the son of Indian immigrants in America. He has a conversation with his father’s disembodied voice, who nags him about leaving the light switched on, drilling into his a lesson about knowing the value of money.
Then we hear more voices as we’re led into an explosion of opinions on what kind of music he “should” be playing. This is the real crux of the piece. It digs right into the conflicting influences we have to untangle when we make art, especially heightened for a classically trained Indian musician living in America. The voices tell him how the styles he should be singing and he obeys, trying to please everyone. Not only is it a humorous evocation of someone having a musical personality crisis, it’s evidence of his musical prowess, his ability to sing impressively in many different styles.
He tells us of his shifting relationship with the Karnatik classical music tradition in which he trained, the privilege of his caste, the sociological aspect that he found himself starting to question, the sometimes unhelpful dichotomy between traditional and contemporary. Then he starts to play his own music and we know that this is his true expression. Compared with the snatches of Indian classical music we’ve heard so far, this music is intense and experimental. He builds up loops of his voice and a plucked string instrument, creating a nightmarish cacophony that seems to encapsulate some kind of pain.
The projections that have been static up until this point start surprisingly to change. There’s a storm outside, rain hammering against the window, and then the TV comes on. The moving images come to encompass the whole of the backdrop with a striking Akram Khan dance film that Prakash accompanies on the drum. It’s a continually imaginative production that gives a vital, personal insight into the creative building blocks of this complex music.
Runs until 23 May 2025
