Tawaif Inscribed: hidden tamarind to skin

After performing at NET, I decided to return to the idea of inscribing societal discourse on the tawaif's performing body (or on my body doing sitting abhinaya).   Carole Kim had advised using white words on a black background to minimize spillage, and Sangita had advised that I use fewer words from Sumita Chakravarty's text to make them more readable, knowing that if this served as a transition into the "skin" video, that the full text would soon be visible in "skin."  Sangita also suggested taking off my blouse to transition into skin.  [As reference, see Tawaif, Interrupted for my earlier unsuccessful experiment.]

Here is a close-up view of myself doing abhinaya with the words.


password: "scribblebai"

A few caveats: (1) Because of how the camera picks up light, the words often blow out and become blindingly white here.  In real life they stand out nicely on my skin as well as my shirt.  (2) I did not perform the abhinaya very well, since I had no music to cue me and was mostly concerned with where the words were falling on my body rather than my inner motivation.  (3) I laid this music on afterwards.  If I were to keep working with this idea, I would want to have something with a distinct semi-classical sound that references the kotha, such as the sarengi here, but to have it become gradually more and more electronically distorted until the "skin" video comes on at the end.

Here is a wide-angle view, which allows you to see the transition from the abhinaya to skin more clearly.  In performance someone else would douse the front projector, so you wouldn't see the funny adjustment in the video.

password: "scribbleskin"

I skipped the first image of the video, where it is a little hard to tell that it is a body, and started with the second image, which looks clearly like a back, so as to make a direct correspondence between my live back and the back on the video.  I also didn't play the skin video the whole way through here -- I just let it run enough to get a sense of how the transition would feel.

QUESTIONS:
1. Is the sitting abhinaya + text compelling, or should the idea be retired for good?
2. Are the particular words being projected on me effective?  What about the text-movement relationship?  I chose movements from "hidden tamarind" that allow the text to be seen visually (or otherwise interact with it), such as "sexual" emerging from my mouth, but generally the meaning of the words are unrelated to my abhinaya, which has a different internal dialogue informing it.  Would you like to see a more direct relationship between the movement and the words' meaning?
3. Would you rather see me dressed as a courtesan, as myself (as I am here), or as some odd mixture of the two?
4. Would you like to see this vignette as the conclusion of Tell Me, Sister (as performed at NET), or in another context?  If the latter, what do you imagine might precede it?

Lots of thanks to Loren for his technical help in executing this experiment!

LACMA Lucknow Exhibit and Oldenberg Talk

This Saturday, Shyamala and I went to the LA County Museum of Art to go see a new exhibition, "India's Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow," and to hear a lecture by Veena Oldenberg entitled "The Rise and Fall of Courtly Lucknow: A Courtesan's Perspective."  The array of visual, historical, and ethnographic information sparked a lot of creative thoughts about our project, SUNOH!  Tell Me, Sister for me.  I was also completely tantalized as a Lucknow-trained kathak dancer interested in critical historicization of my form.

Here are some of my thoughts inspired by the exhibition and lecture.

HYBRIDITY

I have known, for a long time, that kathak is fundamentally a syncretic form, being historically born out of the melding between secular and sacred contexts, between Hindu and Muslim cultures.  My knowledge of this fact allows me to continue feeling at home in the form when I run into diasporic identity politics (ie, "Why do you dance kathak when you're not Indian?").  Even knowing this, the hybridity of courtly Lucknow (aesthetic, racial, content-wise) as evidenced in this exhibition was still a huge eye-opener.  It made me think about how Post Natyam negotiates hybridity in so many ways, with some of our members being mixed race, with how we draw on multiple dance styles and artistic disciplines. 

Here are some illustrative examples from the exhibition:

In the watercolor below, Christ (Jesus) as a Child in the Temple by Mir Kalan Khan, we see Christian subject matter rendered in an Indo-Islamic miniature painting style:

In the following watercolor, Venus by Mihr Chand, we see standard European subject matter and techniques of modeling the human form, but decoratively framed in a way reminiscent of miniatures.

 In Mir Kalan Khan's Lovers in a Landscape, we see Lucknow's racial diversity: the two lovers appear to be of Persian ancestry, whereas the woman musician has more Indian features.

In "European Woman Seated on a Terrace Smoking a Water-Pipe," we see a European woman with a Venetian water pipe again rendered in miniature fashion.  However, the 2D graphic and decorative approach of the miniature coexists with some use of linear perspective (in the chair), a European artistic technique.  This aesthetic conjunction, which can be harmonious or create an interesting visual friction, can be seen in many of the works in the exhibition.

 And here in "Wajid Ali As A Prince," we see the last ruler of Lucknow, credited for much of the development of kathak.  Notice how he is dressed in Lucknowi style clothing but surrounded by European furniture and paintings.

Elsewhere in the exhibit were Euro-style oil painting portraits of Lucknow rulers. 

FRAMES

Given all the video being used in SUNOH, we've been talking about exploding the idea of the screen in our performance.  As one participant in a technology workshop at the recent NET MicroFest said, "You would never make one actor enormous and stick him against the back wall for the whole show.  Why would you do that with a video projection?"  The frequent use of framing in miniature paintings - surrounding the scene by highly decorative borders - suggests a possible way to rethink screens.  It also offers food for thought regarding the visual art exhibit that we've been thinking about doing in conjunction with our live performance, which could involve traces from our own process and/or material from the SAN women.

Here's an example (I like its asymmetry):  

It occurs to me that rather than having ornamental flowers as the frame, we could use a pattern of mudras in silhouette to create a 2D graphical pattern as frame for the video inside, which would have more depth and dimensionality, both visually and content-wise.  Other frames could include handwritten choreography or research notes.

We could also use architecture (a latticed window, an archway, a doorway) as a frame.  I remember Shyamala used her stairwell as a frame in her July 2010 assignment.

 

Imagine how a frame could open onto a hidden, intimate, or illicit scene of love-making:

Or there could even be an actual curtain to physically lift up (here the very old photo underneath is light-sensitive, thus the velvet cover to protect it):

Here's a higher tech example showing how one might use frames to break up and scale down video:

Also consider how frames are already used in the split screen Skype call format:

COSTUMES IN LAYERS

Much of the clothing in the paintings from that era involved multiple layers, some of them transparent.  It occurs to me that we could use this technique to layer our identities, much as Sandra does in her projection video, where a hooded sweatshirt, boots, wide pants, and dupatta are layered in an understated cultural collision.  I was chatting with Sangita on the phone the other day about techniques of making our own voices more visible in our performance work, so that we don't "become" the courtesan but instead remain ourselves trying to understand, physically embody, and imagine her, and thus understand her impact on our (dancing) bodies.  Costumes could be a tool for achieving this.  It could also be a way to indicate, mix up, or layer gender, regional dance style, geographical location, and historical time.

   

COEXISTENCE OF DIFFERENT WORLDS

It is a big challenge to figure out how to relate, thread together, and overlap our different solo material into cohesive ensemble material.  The following image reminded me that it can occasionally be okay to have multiple scenes exist onstage at the same time (I'm thinking Cunningham, Pina Bausch), without forcing them into a single visual narrative or story.

HOMOEROTICISM:
This image struck me as blatantly homoerotic: the two women gaze magnetically at each other, buttocks and hips angled towards each other, while one of them kills a snake (likely a phallic symbol?).

During Veena Oldenberg's lecture, she mentioned that 8 out of the 35 courtesans she met had other women as their primary love partners.  She also showed us a beautiful silver box, which the tawaifs had given her as a gift, whose cover had a painting of two women with their arms intimately twined around each other.  She also mentioned a volume of poetry detailing erotic women-women love that was published during the nawabi period in the rekhti genre, written in a unique women's language.  (See Carla Petievich for more on rekhti.)

"You idiot.  My partner has been sitting next to me all of these days."  

LECTURE NOTES

In a strange connection to our own transnational status, the court during this era was nomadic, a mobile camp.  The birth of Nawabi Lucknow - the period when the city's artistic, decorative, and architectural arts flourished - started after precisely after the alliance of the Nawab of Awadh, the Nawab of Bengal, and the Mughal emperor was defeated by the East India Company in 1764.  The British forbade the Lucknow court to employ military or spend money on anything political; yet Lucknow's revenue was more than twice as much as the entire GDP of the UK at the time, so there was plenty of money to spend on the arts.  Lucknow's reputation as debauched and effete was thus in large part produced by this political situation.  Oldenberg sees the courtesans as being the only people who showed any defiance, resistance, or spunk.  They were in the highest income bracket in the 1862 tax register, owning palaces, orchards, tombs; they helped fund the resistance against the British and would covertly spy by performing at the court of the British Resident, getting him drunk, asking the enemy's next move, and then reporting back; the only political letters of resistance in the archives were written by them.  Also, Wajid Ali Shah's queen, Begum Hazrat Mahal, was his courtesan before she became his queen.  She took up arms herself during the resistance.

Some delightful quotations: 

"I met them in the archives."  

On the reasons to wear a burqa in public: "We sell our wares; we don't want to give them out for free."  

On being characterized as selling their bodies for money: "So, you don't sell your body...you sell your mind."

Of Wajid Ali Shah: "This is my left nipple guy."

Reference: "Beauties of Lucknow" - black and white photography of courtesans.

My Silent Cry: 2 versions

Since first making a study out of Uma's story as a survivor of domestic violence, I have had the opportunity to perform it and grow it a few times. Here are two versions...

1. Here's the most recent version I just performed at the NET Microfest.
I'm working on the right balance of how much words to use and developing the movement more with Cynthia. Got a lot of great responses, including some interesting thoughts about the use of the breath and mouth under the fabric which I'd like to explore more...

My Silent Cry (NET Microfest) from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

2. Previously, I premiered it at the South Asian Network's Annual Banquet with Uma telling her story live! It was a very powerful experience to be a part of her sharing her story for the first time in public...

"My Silent Cry" from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

NET MicroFest

Here are the latest versions of some of our work-in-progress material, as performed at the NET MicroFest on Dec 5.

I choreographed my live dance in relation to Sandra's video, which originally integrated abhinaya and theory on exoticism.


password "NET"
Here is the latest experiment with expanding Tell Me, Sister.  I post this only for the sake of dialogue, for the footage taken this day stays zoomed out the whole time, which unfortunately means that you can't see any of the video on my back or the nuances of abhinaya, and thus lose the majority of the intent of the work.  However, several things may be useful to watch.  If you watch the end starting at 9:30, you'll get a sense of the transition from the sitting abhinaya to skin. Currently I don't think this works, as it seems to visually distract from my performance rather than undermining the courtesan by inscribing her with societal discourse or making the audience aware of their gaze upon her.  Also under debate is how I transition from widow to courtesan, which not everyone is finding believable.  To see this transition as currently stands, watch from 5:50.


At the moment I feel this solo is no longer holding together as a cohesive whole -- like it's trying to accomplish too much and exploding at the seams.  At this moment I'd like to let it explode, fragment, be blown apart and freed from the narrative structure it's currently encased in to see what might happen.  Incidentally, a friend who's experienced abuse compared the experience to being exploded apart -- fragmented -- and that as you try to put yourself together, you never quite achieve the same "wholeness" as before.  So too the histories of the courtesan are fragmented, incomplete, and irrecoverable.  I wonder if we can reflect this compositionally.


Also, here are notes I took based on the feedback session we had after the Sunday show, with respondents Carole Kim (who focuses on live video performance and performance-based video installation) and Carol McDowell (dancer, improviser, interdisciplinary artist).