For her hour-long Saturday-morning set at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 50th-anniversary celebration, MCA Hearts Chicago, Lakshmi Ramgopal has put together the biggest ensemble of her musical career. Though she’s played in bands (most notably synth-pop duo Love and Radiation, with ensemble member Adele Nicholas) and enlisted the occasional musician to support her solo project, Lykanthea (which debuted in 2014 with the EP Migration), she’s never attempted anything as ambitious as the nine-piece group she’ll debut this weekend. Her MCA show will also add movement art and ritual to the music she plays as Lykanthea, elaborating on its nuanced expression of personal and collective identity.
Till now, Ramgopal has mostly kept the specifics of her personal experience out of her music. “I’m in my 30s and thinking, ‘What am I creating? What does it mean to be creating as an Indian woman?'” she says. “My brother just had a baby, and I’m thinking a lot about what I would want her to know about me. I’m thinking about myself in the way I think about my grandmother, almost as an embodied history of knowledge and culture. What do I have to pass on? What is it about me that’s Indian? I didn’t really ever think about this stuff when I was in my 20s, but I’m thinking about it a lot now, and I think that has to do with my grandmother’s death and this particular political moment as well.”
Ramgopal doubts that communication between cultures benefits from an effort to universalize the message. “Even though we’re dealing with culturally specific ideas, I think the more specific you are, the more it can speak to people who don’t necessarily share your background,” she says. “The people I invited to the performance were the people I knew were going to be able to create something complex and nuanced with me. I don’t see identity as being monolithic. I can describe myself in so many different ways: as an Indian, as an Indian-American, as an American, as a woman, and so on. My own identity is so complicated and so fraught as a second-generation Indian woman who often feels trapped among different cultural expectations. It makes sense to work with an incredibly diverse cast of artists, because we’re creating a performance that has its own complex identity. We’re reflecting everyone’s particular identities while creating a cohesive whole. There is so much that’s positive to mine in the spaces that we don’t share with other people.”
