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Ansuman Biswas, BA Hons (Dartington)

Ansuman

Lecturer in Live Art and Contemporary Performance

Email: a.biswas@qmul.ac.uk
Website: http://ansuman.com

Profile

I was born in Calcutta, India and emigrated to London with my parents. I studied Drama at Manchester University and Music at Dartington College of Arts. Since then I’ve developed an international creative practice encompassing music, film, live art, installation, writing and theatre. My work is hybrid, inter-disciplinary, and inter-cultural – often taking place between science, art and religion, for instance, or between music, dance and visual art, or between Indian and European sensibilities.

Over the last few years my practice has included directing Shakespeare in America, translating Tagore from the Bengali, designing underwater sculptures in the Red Sea, living with wandering minstrels in India, being an ornamental hermit in the English countryside, touring with Björk, surviving blindfolded in an unknown place, travelling with nomadic shamans in the Gobi Desert, playing with Oasis, collaborating with neuroscientists in Arizona, living for a week with nothing but what spectators chose to give me, singing for 24 hours non-stop, organizing grassroots activists in Soweto, meditating in a box for ten days with no food or light, creating a musical in a maximum security prison, bathing strangers, being a soloist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, holding seminars in a Burmese monastery, running a club for women in Hamburg’s red light district, playing with terminally ill children, making a radio telescope sing and dance, being locked in a Gothic tower alone for forty days and nights, flying on a real, live, magic carpet, and stopping time.

I have been a Senior Lecturer at Dartington College of Arts, helping to develop an MA in Arts and Ecology there in association with Schumacher College. From 2013 to 2016 I was Creative Director of the Tagore Centre UK. Between 2017 and 2020 I was a Lecturer at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I am an External Examiner at Westminster University.

I am Co-Chair of the Live Art Development Agency, a Trustee of Longplayer, a thousand-year-long musical composition, and a Director of Arts Catalyst, working between science and art. I have been the Chair of Studio Upstairs, a therapeutic community and Artists’ studio.

I’ve been an Associate Artist at Battersea Arts Centre. I’ve pioneered new models of interdisciplinary collaboration at Hewlett-Packard's research lab in Bangalore and have been artist-in-residence at the National Institute of Medical Research in London. I was part of a ground-breaking study group for the European Space Agency on Cultural Utilization of the International Space Station.

My work as a musician spans many genres, from free improvisation to pop, and from jazz to classical musics from around the world. I’ve worked as composer in theatres around the world including off-Broadway, London’s West End, the Royal National Theatre, and the Royal Ballet. I‘ve been commissioned by the Sonic Arts Network, the English National Opera and Guangdong Modern Dance Company in China, among others. From 2016-17 I was Musical Director at Shakespeare’s Globe.

I have worked with the BBC, Channel Four and MTV and as a percussionist alongside Courtney Pine, Evan Parker, Butch Morris, The London Improvisers Orchestra, John Renbourn, Jerry Dammers, The Specials, Robert Cray, Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, Bjork, Oasis, Cornershop, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, etc. I am also an experienced teacher of music in individual and group contexts.

My theatre composition credits include Life is a Dream at the Donmar Warehouse, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Tempest, and Dr Faustus at the National Theatre, Peer Gynt at The Contact Theatre, Manchester, Beauty Sleeps at The Young Vic, River on Fire at the Lyric Hammersmith, Oedipus Tyrranos, and Othello Music at Battersea Arts Centre, A Yearning at Birmingham Rep, The Seagull, Ion, and Iph… at the Mercury Theatre Colchester, Pericles at Portland Stage Company, Maine, USA, A Tacit Assembly at GMDC, Guangzhou, China, Genesis at Tara Arts, Go Noah Go and Odessa and the Magic Goat at The Little Angel.

As a visual artist I have shown work at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, The South London Gallery, The Whitechapel Gallery, the ICA, the Edinburgh Festival, and I have had residencies at the National Institute of Medical Research (London), at the Headlands Centre (San Francisco), at Portsmouth Cathedral, at the Guangdong Modern Dance Company (China), at The National Review of Live Art, (Glasgow), and at NICA (Networking Initiatives in Culture and the Arts, Yangon, Myanmar).

I have undertaken artist’s residencies in Sikkim, Bangalore, Mongolia, Greece, Italy, South Africa, South America, China, California, and throughout the UK.

Underpinning all this diversity is the discipline of vipassana meditation which has informed my commitment to the primacy of listening and the fluidity of identity.

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