Elsewhere in India is a live trans media collective that operates at the intersection of music, visual and performance art. Their art is vivid, moving, meaningful and laced with electronic-Carnatic music. Avinash and Murthovic (MRS Murthy) have shared stages several times in the past while working in the electronic music scene. They also built the soundscape of theatrical dance opera, Antariksha, together. We connected with them to know more about their journey in the arts and the collective.
The Collective
Avinash: Elsewhere in India is one of the offshoots that came about from our video game Antara, produced by the Antariksha Studio. Our effort was to imagine a future of the cultures and performing traditions of India through a narrative that supports preservation, but in a modern context of electronic music and visual experiments in XR.
During the pandemic, the limitations faced by performing arts piqued our interest in digital humans for virtual performances. Our first draft of this project was titled Master & Thief, a duo of outlaws encountered during an expedition to the island of Antara. Elsewhere in India is our second, more nuanced and reflective, iteration. It explores the narrative of preservation that looks into the future, while Antara tells the story through the lens of the past.
We pitched our concept to the British Council’s India/UK Together Season of Culture 2022-23, a cultural exchange programme celebrating India’s 75 years of Independence, and friendship between the UK and India. We were fortunate in securing a partnership that helps us co-create this project with UK-based Crossover Labs, a specialist digital storytelling practice, to bring our evolving live performance concept to festivals in India, UK, and the world.
The Sensibility
Murthovic: Elsewhere in India gravitates more towards the outcomes of our collaborative project with the British Council. In this expedition, we explore the roots of different performing arts in the country and their cultural histories, imagining the possibilities of existence in a future yet to come.
Avinash: The name ‘Elsewhere in India’ was inspired by a curation of films from the British Film Institute (BFI) titled Somewhere in India, which are films missing the provenance of geographical and cultural specificity, though capturing Indian society and culture in great beauty. Leaping off this idea, we imagined ‘Elsewhere’ to be a speculative world in a far away future of India, where ‘Elsewhere in India’ represents our ongoing experimentation to define a ‘post-cyberpunk’ aesthetic that can better represent Asian cultural futures through an interplay of utopian and dystopian themes.
The Creative Process
Murthovic: When you’re going solo, you’re curating the night on your own. But when it comes to being a duo on stage, we’re getting into a whole new format of storytelling. By now we have come to understand each other’s modus operandi and are always bouncing off of each other’s creative processes. When we get out there as Murthovic & Thiruda, we get to explore our own media, while working in the rhythm we have with each other — setting the sound of the night clubs to a cinematic screenplay of a new universe.
Avinash: We both have an immensely free flowing style and complement each other's diverse interests in music and visuals. This is so rare in the Indian scene to enjoy with an artist that I instantly gravitated to his music, but much more to the person he is. After the pandemic, where we have all suffered in the past three years, the main excitement is just being out there in a high energy, beautiful space with Murthovic and seeing how we can shape people's evenings into memorable, transformative ones.
The Debut Show
Avinash: Magnetic Fields was our first choice to debut our project and we are thrilled we were able to fulfil that. To be showcasing our work at arguably the most important festival in India is something to look forward to! And it’s a super exciting showcase of talent that we are honoured to be around.
Murthovic: We’re eager to share what’s been cooking in the multiverse of Antariksha Studio. The music for this episode has been a long time in the making, and we’re excited to bring it to the people who will be joining us at the festival.
This article is an all exlcusive from our year end EZ. To read more such articles, follow the link here.
Words Hansika Lohani
Date 09-12-2022