Anjali's Response to June Assigment

Translating one sahityam (verse's) line from Anandabhairavi Varnam. The heroine says, "My Lord, please come quickly so that we can be united once again. Love in separation.

Cynthia's Response to June Assignment: Harassing the Sanskrit Heroine

In response to the June 09 creative assignment, "Translating Each Other, Translating the Past," I created an artbook that interrogates the North Indian light classical song form of thumri, which is traditionally danced by kathak dancers. I was interested in revealing the form's historical layers, erasures, and troubled eroticism by combining poetic text and photographic image. In many ways, the book is a companion piece to an academic article I have written, titled "the erotic trace/erasure of the courtesan in kathak dance and thumri music."

Here is a pair of images from the book, which is currently titled writingthruthumri:

Photo by Shyamala Moorty; text from “Thumri: The Role of Aesthetic Theory in the Interpretation and Performance of a Modern Genre” by Lalita Du Perron. The SOAS Literary Review (2), July 2000. 

And here, from another section of the book, is a poem I wrote as an imaginative expansion on a single word, “wrist,” from the traditional thumri, “Kahe Rukata,” by Bindadin Maharaj.  The writing style emulates that of African-American poet, Harryette Mullen, in her work Trimmings, which is itself an emulation of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. How does a woman come to be signified by and objectified into her body parts? 

]wrist[

a delicate bandage a bone a twiggy little snap.  oh slim white stab of a waist unwrapped.  blackened sweet.  a virgin chocolate bar crinkles her glittery skirt but such a disapproving purse.  disapproving she twists her bittermelon mouth splitting shut.  oh.  oh oh no.  white hot mirchi stops dead in her tracks.  cut red.  a rough and ready grab, a wolf whistling fist, an iron bangle tapping her curved rear.

Shyamala's response to June assignment

Cyber Chat, Cyber Spat (Shyamala's perspective) from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

I was so excited by Cynthia's music from the last assignment. I imagined a group choreography inspired by all of us on a "skype call" to the music. Sometimes one person would be the "speaker" (gesturally), and the rest would listen (stillness) or respond in different ways, sometimes all would speak at once. Once in a while someone would get "dropped" from the call (disappear from the stage) and as the moderator I'd have to "drag" her back.

But, since I couldn't choreograph the whole group, I just made my own end of the skype call....on a particularly frustrating day, since you can hear all the distractions and interruptions in the music and the rhythm felt argumentative to me. I chose to use the song in the background for my "daydream" section in the middle.

June Creative Assignment: Translating Each Other, Translating the Past

by Cynthia Lee

The root of translation is “to carry across.”

Choreograph a study that translates (1) a previous study choreographed by another PN member during our online creative assignment process and/or (2) a “traditional” abhinaya song/courtesan text. The latter may be from your classical repertoire or found through research. Translate this material into your own body, aesthetic sensibility, physical training, geographic locale, contemporary situation, in a way that resonates for you.

Feel free to mistranslate, to steal unapologetically, to treat translation as transformation. You could steal movement vocabulary, poetic phrases, images; you could translate compositional structure or spatial design to a new context; you could translate across disciplines and dance styles and historical period...

-June 2009