Cyn/Sandra SKYPE call: rough script

 Here is a rough draft of the script of Cyn calling Sandra that would lead to hidden tamarind.

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS: 
(1) How is the tone?  Is it too academic or does it work for a general audience?
(2) Length - too long or too short?  If the former, what would you cut?  If the latter, what needs to be expanded?
(3) Do you like the order in which the conversation unfolds, or would you move some sections around?
(4) Are there any parts that you don't understand?

Cyn at computer.  Trying to write a paper but failing.  In frustration, Cyn calls Babli on Skype. Babli answers in classical costume while taking off classical jewelry and Kuchipudi braid. [Contingent on the actual time during the show and whether Babli can get up and get dressed so early.]

Cyn: Hey Babli

Sandra: Hi

Cyn: Sorry to bug you so late at night; I'm was wondering if I could pick your brain about something.

Sandra: Sure, no problem.

Cynthia Ling Lee: Wait, were you just performing?

babli: yes just finished

Cynthia Ling Lee: where was the gig

babli: oh at the local ethnological museum

Cynthia Ling Lee: oh not again. on display as tradition eh? did they make you not
speak in german so that you would seem more indian?

babli: actually, i got to make my own announcements this time. translating abhinaya seems to be
the other option. [clarify what "abhinaya" is?]

Cynthia Ling Lee: well there's some progress...you get to have something of a voice .

BABLI: What was it that you wanted to talk about?

Cynthia Ling Lee: I'm writing this paper for that conference on performance, sexuality, and power in the UK, but I'm having the hardest time. i wanted to look at the history of the tawaif (the courtesan) and kathak, but there's like, NOTHING written in the archive. i keep running into these tantalizing hints, like a brief mention of how the courtesans were in the highest economic bracket in the tax archives, or a footnote about how she used to sing the same love songs for patrons in the court and at sufi ceremonies, but they're just fragments.

babli: you will just have to work from the fragments then..... its so crucial to draw attention to those gaps and offer thoughts on what may be missing

Cynthia Ling Lee: but the thing is, i feel like i'm just making her up. you know, this empowered, independent woman in charge of her own art and sexuality who would move between between the secular and sacred, the hindu and muslim, between the carnal and the divine. but maybe that's just the tawaif i would like to have as the ancestor of my form and not who she really was.

babli: well who she really was may not be possible to reconstruct but that does not mean its not worthwhile exploring the fragments. The most important part is how to frame it

Cynthia Ling Lee: what do you mean

babli: i mean there is analysis by historians out there who work from postcolonial or subaltern studies approaches who draw attention to the lack of documented facts [clarify that subaltern voices have been written out of History?]. This allows you to talk about the politics of basing History solely on facts and also the politics of documenting. For example, what gets documented by who and why. And what do we take seriously as a document-
http://vinaylal.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/thesis-one-postcolonialism-never-mounted-an-effective-critique-of-history/
[Cyn likes the part about "alternative modes of accessing the past" and myth cause may be a nice transition into using the body/choreography as a mode of remembering]

babli: a believable one
babli: scientifically speaking
Cynthia Ling Lee: right, history gets written by the winners, right?
babli: yes
babli: could you imagine that kind of approach?
babli: well there are fragmented facts
babli: and there are facts of exclusion that beg for analysis

Cynthia Ling Lee: you know what that makes me think of? how the body remembers parts of history that aren't documented in the archive. i feel like my sense of the tawaif - her sensual power and how it was erased - comes largely out of the physical tradition of kathak that i've learned. there are these hints of her sensuality, femininity, and power in, say, the way we use our eyes, but then that that sensuality gets domesticated and turned into something...spiritual. there's this moment i always remember from class. i was in calcutta, we were practicing that thumri "kahe rukata," and this one girl performs a line in a really coy bollywoodish way. my guru got really mad and told her, "not sringara, bhakti!" you know, "not sensuality, devotion!"

babli: well, you could speak as a practitioner-researcher. hence dancing and training becomes research and evidence of some sort

Babli: i remeber this article by saly ness in the book corporealities, where she takes dance lessons she took in indonesia and the philippines as her field research and constructs her paper around her fieldnotes. and her observations of the bodily experience of learning the techniques as well as the interactions with the teachers

Cynthia Ling Lee: interesting, i'll have to look that up.

Babli: yes. also remember the piece we saw together in delhi fabian barba's reconstruction of Mary Wigmans work? {YOU COULD SUGGEST I DO A PERFORMATIVE PAPER; IE WRITE THE PAPER THROUGH THE ACT OF CHOREOGRAPHING }

Cynthia Ling Lee: ah, yes. the venezuelan modern dancer who felt that the form of modern dance practiced in quito and the wigman tradition were connected, so he did all this extensive archival research to reconstruct the dances.

Babli: while he did not present a paper but a evening of dances and there seems to be no lack of documentation of Wigman's work he still had to fill in the gaps since there was no video yet. And there were only films of three short dances he worked with

Cynthia Ling Lee: you know what that makes me think of - at the end of the day i am a choreographer, and i make sense of my fragemented legacy through choreographing - imagining possibilities through the body. so maybe instead of writing a traditional paper, I should do a performative paper, in which I perform my imagined dance of the tawaif. you know, based on both my physical knowledge and the research I've done so far. {I THINK AFTER I MAKE THIS STATEMENT IT SHOULD SEGUE TO HIDDEN TAMARIND FAIRLY SOON}
Cyn starts putting on tawaif costume as the conversation continues.

Babli: and what - for me- made his interpretation sincere, i believe was that he was very clear about how he positions himself vis-a-vis the material. and that lended it integrity,even if a lot of what he presented was his guess of what the pieces may have looked like

Cynthia Ling Lee: so you think i should start the performative paper by positioning myself - as a taiwanese american feminist postmodern dancer who started learning kathak 9 years ago and who senses some sort of contradictions surrounding sensuality and the hidden voice of the tawaif in the tradition she learned. And maybe acknowledge that my abhinaya is messed up and "impure" because I also learned a little while from a bharatnatyam teacher.

Babli: yes, because that will give the reader a sense of how you are interpreting the fragments and connecting them without filling the gaps {CYN: WHAT DO YOU MEAN WITHOUT FILLING THE GAPS?}

Babli: i think that ok as long as you frame it that way

Babli: yes. so be attentive to, how knowledge is produced and validated and be self-reflexive about how and from where you interpret and clear about what is documented and what is interpreted. After all there are a number of books out there about the Tawaif and about courtesans more generally. THere is some amount of documentation- historical and ethnographic.
i think thats the best that can be done. and, you know. i think if framed right the contribution of a dancer thinking about these issues can add a valuable layer to the research done about the tawaif historians will do a different kind of research, ethnographers yet different

Babli: all these different knowledges and research approaches all have their place

Cynthia Ling Lee: okay great, this is really helpful. i will try to choreograph that dance then. :) you're probably tired, i'm sorry for keeping you up so long!

babli: oh no worries
babli: always love our nerdy chats

Cynthia Ling Lee: yes, always good to have a SKYPE adda with you. i'll go start working then. thanks for all your help! bye now :)

babli: bye!!!!!!



Segue into hidden tamarind.

Also, as reference, here is the actual introduction to the paper I am supposedly to be struggling with  during the Skype call:

"In a talk-back after the recent Indian Film Festival screening of Sringaram – Dance of Love, a

film about the devadasis, director Sharada Ramanathan stated that sringara rasa, the emotion of erotic love, is unique for its constant oscillation between the mortal and the divine.  Mystical traditions such as bhakti and Sufism position longing for one’s beloved as a metaphor for the devotee’s longing for God: this is usually the justification given for depicting romantic love in Indian classical dance.  Yet, the spiritual interpretation can so easily descend into the carnal, evoking shadowy memories of singing, dancing prostitutes suggestively peeling back their veils to lascivious male gazes.  I distinctly remember my Kathak (North Indian classical dance) guru Bandana Sen correcting a student in class, saying, “Not sringara, bhakti!” (Not sensuality, devotion!).  Anxiety about performing the erotic plagues the modern-day Indian classical dancer, and examining this anxiety reveals a knotty, naughty history.  

Without a doubt, I admit to sharing that anxiety.  In a way, this paper is a small attempt to

unravel my complicity with Kathak’s sanitized, hegemonic history, being an American feminist who studied Kathak in India under a fellowship entitled “Dancing the Body Divine: Religious Dance.”  Yet how to (re)write such a history?  As scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty have shown, History, as a coherent, authoritative set of facts following a linear chronological development, is a European modernist construct.  Attempts to emulate that historiographical model inevitably leave the non-West as the sad figure of lack and inadequacy, as became painfully obvious to me during the research process: there is so little written documentation on Kathak that the attempt to write its history seemed, and still seems, an impossible task.  

Research-wise, I have chosen to deal with this problem in two ways: first, by coming at Kathak’s history through the back door of its somewhat more well-documented music, focusing on the thumri vocal genre, and second, by regarding the dance itself as containing embodied traces of the past. 1  In choreographing my writing, feeling my way into a complex, fragmented, and barely documented dance history, I have been inspired by three models.  First, I have tried to make space for incomplete memories and imaginative speculations, following the subaltern theorists, who have proposed “reconceptualizations of history as a contested narrative, where supposed ‘facts’, documented in texts privileged as sources of ‘truth’, grapple with human memories and dreams, engage with oral histories and incomplete memories” (Chatterjea, 143).  Second, much of my writing emulates Marta Savigliano’s model of scholar as detective.  Lastly, I have been inspired by the choreographic techniques embedded in Kathak itself.  Abhinaya, the story-telling aspect of Kathak, consists of improvised interpretations of song texts.  As a performer-historian, abhinaya requires you to visualize and become emotionally invested in the (historical) images you conjure, to imagine and feel in order to express.  Poetic lines repeat, allowing you to bring multiple interpretations to the same text (historical evidence).  Non-linear, abhinaya doubles back on itself, makes unexpected connections, suddenly metamorphoses.  Within a single song, you shift from narrative description (historical facts, situations) to taking on the persona of a particular character (self-reflexivity and outright impersonation).  Abhinaya as history-telling privileges image and evocation over argument, holding the ambiguity of multiple possible meanings in radical tension."