Sneak Peek for "Trace" on Nov 7-8: SKYPE music

Here is the final soundscore that I created with the assistance of Loren Nerell to accompany our Skype call video installation.  It'll be shown as part of "Trace" at Sea and Space Explorations on Nov 7-8.

The soundscore includes kathak rhythmic compositions by Bandana Sen and a ghazal by Begum Akhtar.  Parhant (rhythmic recitation) by Cynthia Lee and Shyamala Moorty.

"Trace" Performance/Installation on Nov 7-8 in LA

The first artistic products of our long-distance creative process will be shown in just a few weeks in Los Angeles! 

Here's the information on the show:

“Trace”
Sea and Space Explorations Gallery
4755 York Blvd Los Angeles CA 90042

Saturday, November 7: gallery open 7-10 PM, performance at 8:30 PM
Sunday, November 8: gallery open 1-5 PM, performance at 2:30 PM followed by reception
FREE Admission

a courtesan beckons from a storefront window...cross-rhythmic voices interrupt and lose each other on a SKYPE call... fragments of precolonial Indian erotic poetry are scattered on the floor, waiting to be reframed by a los angeleno audience in the here and now...

How do our bodies remember, dismember, and reshape the traces of the past?  In "Trace," Cynthia Lee and Shyamala Moorty grapple with a fragmented South Asian aesthetic legacy through a contemporary lens, combining live performance, interactive installation, video, and poetic documentation.   With long-distance contributions from Sandra Chatterjee and Anjali Tata, the work includes traces from the Post Natyam Collective's ongoing transnational creative project (www.postnatyam.blogspot.com), which re-routes the erotic artistic legacy of (pre)colonial South Asian courtesans through internet technologies, translating them into the specifics of our contemporary geographic locales.  The evening also features an improvisational score created by Carol McDowell especially for the performers.

“Trace” is part of INSTRUMENTS OF RISK, a performance series curated by Asher Hartman and Carol McDowell at Sea and Space Explorations (www.seaandspace.org).  The curators state: “Performance is up and out of the margins again, lately as a hybrid of practices that highlight the collective exchange between performer, gesture, spectator, and space, whose lineage can be traced back to performance constructions of the 1970s....This is physical conceptual performance with an unabashed theatricality and rigorous abstraction, steering through the unresolved complexities of our world.  Focusing on the body as a compass, the artists in this series grapple with multiple means through which we understand history, speech, location, culture, force, and self in relation to the world around them and within.”

And a sneak peek from Cynthia's Skype call:

Adda with the Ancestors: an improvisational score

Interdisciplinary artist and contemporary dancer Carol McDowell has been creating an improvisational score on Shyamala and myself for our upcoming performance and installation, "Trace," at Sea and Space Explorations.  We've been working with our personal dance memories, which are quite varied and hybrid for both of us, though differently so.  Having a conversation -- a dialogue -- about our dance memories is central to the score.  It is a gift to discover so many new things about Shyamala (she once did a Hungarian bottle dance?) when I thought I knew her so well as a mover and person.

What is your first dance memory?  What is your most vivid dance memory?  What is your favorite dance right now?  Where in your body do you remember the dance?  Can you do you a finger dance of it?  Does this dance have a name?

Among other sources, we've been drawing on the somatic practice of Authentic Movement, with a witness or spirit guardian who protects the body-who-moves-in-remembering.  I had never heard of the witness referred to as a spirit guardian before (though I have posited the witness as the rasika in past explorations of mine).  Since my family is Taiwanese, and ours is largely a culture of ancestral worship, a spirit guardian made me think of an ancestral spirit.  And in our rehearsal last Monday, Carol introduced the idea of an ancestor to our score.  We went through our memories and wrote down whom we thought would be the ancestor of each particular dance memory.  They included: the wind, Medha Yodh, Mama Kariamu, mud, Eiko Otake, a Taiwanese aborigine.  

What would it be like to have an honest conversation with the ancestors of your dance memories?  How might this structure enable imagined dialogues with our teachers and historical predecessors that might be impossible in real life?  

The score was as follows: (1) do a small dance of your memory (2) take a step back, name your  ancestor, and respond to the first dance as the ancestor (3) take a step back, respond as the protector.  The audience can ask questions throughout.

The results were sometimes poetic, sometimes argumentative, at times downright hilarious.