Artists Reach Out: Ainesh Madan

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Ainesh Madan

Ainesh Madan
(photo: Noah Emrich)

Ainesh Madan is a choreographer and performer, currently based in Bangalore. Madan attended Bard College (USA) on a full-tuition scholarship, attaining a Bachelor of Arts in Dance and Economics. Madan premiered his first evening-length solo, titled Phantasies, as part of the University Settlement Guest Artist Series program in New York City for which he received the Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He is a recipient of the WorkUp Residency at Gibney (NYC), the BAX (NYC) Upstart Residency, and the DanceWEB Scholarship (2016). Madan recently premiered Impressions (Four Solos), and Sketches, as part of The Platform festival (Bangalore), and The Shoonya Ticket (Bangalore), respectively. He was recently selected to receive the BangaloreREsidencey-Expanded for a residency at Weltkunstzimmer, Dusseldorf from August 3 to September 30, 2020. www.aineshmadan.com

Ainesh Madan
(photo: Joshua Sailo)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

Two artist friends (Dayita Nereyeth and Joshua Sailo) and I were working on an evening of solos, Solitude - Solos on Life, Death and Joy. The show was to be premiered at Bangalore International Center (India) on April 24 and was to be lit by another friend (Bharavi). Around the time of the outbreak, I was towards the last stages of choreographing a new work, The Dance Song, which has been inspired by Nietzsche’s writing from his seminal work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Dance Song is supposed to be in residence at Weltkunstzimmer, Düsseldorf (through Max Mueller’s bangaloreREsidency-Expanded) from August 3 to September 30. Time will tell how the work develops, and gets performed, in the future.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I got involved in dance because of my brother. He inspired me to start attending summer classes at the age of fourteen. He noticed my affinity towards performance, and strongly directed me towards pursuing a non-traditional discipline for my college education. It was at Bard College that I really began to kindle a practice and to find myself as an artist.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

If I had to call it one thing, it would be "consciously-directed creativity." I recently started a four-year course in becoming a certified Alexander Technique Teacher. My day begins with "working on my self" for forty-five minutes. I recently studied a book on Mudras (Indian hand gestures) when a friend, Anishaa Tavag, reminded me that the book was in my collection. This lead me to morph my yoga practice into Mudra meditation sessions three times a day. I frequently set up fifteen to thirty-day phrase work challenges for myself, where I take 15-30 minutes to craft a phrase that I then video-record or put in writing.

I maintain a gratitude journal which I update twice daily. I have also taken to reading a lot this year and make it a point to read for at least an hour every day. And then there are all practices that are involved with living in a household.

The vision is to utilize my relatively more long-term training in becoming a choreographer, and my more recently begun training in Alexander technique, to teach future generations to become better-coordinated creative agents. More tangibly, the idea is to help create a space where artistic disciplines can be taught, and pursued, through skillful, informed use of oneself.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I am privileged to have been born to parents that are well disposed, and inclined, to help me garner a quality education. They have always been very particular in making sure I don’t commit the same mistakes they made, nor that I am impinged by the same restrictions they had. My practice and vision is aimed at garnering tools that can help future generations make new mistakes so as to delve into the unknown.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

We seem to be living in a time when it takes a crisis for us to finally pause and reflect. Perhaps if we put aside a little bit more time in our schedules to meditate on our existence, we could avert such emergency situations. We have come a long way from fighting malnutrition, plagues, and famines, on a grand scale, but humanity is now posed with a completely new set of problems with regards to the impact it has made (and is making) on the environment.

We, more than ever, need our actions to be mindful and thoughtful. We need to reformulate our foundations and prioritize inaction ("inhibiting," in Alexander language) over action (direction). My practice is an attempt at ensuring that the actions I commit to are thoughtful, and I attempt to achieve this by, in most cases, not acting at all. Saying "no" is a powerful tool that we can all learn to employ more judiciously.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Ainesh Madan returns with "Phantasies"

Phantasies
Ainesh Madan
Speyer Hall, University Settlement
May 24-25, 2019

The play of children is determined by their wishes, really by the child's ONE wish, which is to be grown-up.... He always plays at being grown-up; in play he imitates what is known to him of the lives of adults. -- Sigmund Freud, "The Poet and Daydreaming"

Superbly skillful dance artist Ainesh Madan has worked with noted choreographers such as Bill T. Jones, Pramila Vasudevan, RoseAnne Spradlin and Heidi Latsky. He won a 2018 Gibney Work Up residency and intrigued audiences with his developing solo, Phantasies, on a strong program shared with performers Evelyn Lilian Sánchez Narvaez and Marion Spencer. He now lives and works in his native India but is back in New York this weekend with a handsome production of Phantasies.

This solo, now roughly 40 minutes, is episodic, stark sections tightly spliced together by changes in Emma Matters's lighting and distinguished by unexpected imaginings of ways in which props (coins, umbrellas) can be used. Apparently tireless, Madan seems suspended between adulthood and childhood--his rendering of a Sigmund Freud quote, above, about child's play inspired the piece--drawing a palpable vitality from being in that liminal state.

His choreography for the piece, though informed by contemporary aesthetics, invokes qualities of classical Indian dance--percussive force and sweep and a breathtaking precision and speed of arm and hand gestures conveying a narrative. Only, with Madan, that narrative often remains elusive. Why Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee?" That music drops into the atmosphere like a memory, and might well be one, the significance of which we're left to imagine.

The piece, which opens with the sharp-pitched sounds of song birds, reads like a long series of random journal entries--or short-short stories, or a cycle of songs--each entry its own shiny facet in the diamond.

Here, by the way, is the original text of the quote from Freud's 1907 talk, "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming."

A child’s play is determined by wishes: in point of fact by a single wish–one that helps in his upbringing–the wish to be big and grown up. He is always playing at being “grown up,” and in his games he imitates what he knows about the lives of his elders. He has no reason to conceal this wish. With the adult, the case is different. On the one hand, he knows that he is expected not to go on playing or fantasying any longer, but to act in the real world; on the other hand, some of the wishes which give rise to his fantasies are of a kind which it is essential to conceal. Thus he is ashamed of his fantasies as being childish and as being unpermissible. 

In that talk, Freud also spoke of the way artists learn to draw a veil across personal elements in their work, sparing us what we might perceive to be TMI. I think it's possible to enjoy Phantasies without gaining entrance to all that's going on within it--which is surely a lot--and to leave that to the dazzling performer at work.

Phantasies concludes this evening with an 8pm performance. For information and tickets, click here.

Speyer Hall, University Settlement
184 Eldridge Street (between Rivington and Delancey), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

Subscribe in a reader