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!