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.