Ruwaxi intro with Shy's hands

Shy and I started working on transforming Ruwaxi's origin story into a live performance for our show at Highways in August.  We're thinking that Shy will play Urvashi, Ruwaxi's former incarnation, who narrates the story.  The footage doesn't show Shy, but in the performance she would be seen onstage facing a live feed camera.

EXCERPT: (for full rehearsal footage, see https://vimeo.com/45816206 password: ruwaxi)

password: once upon a time

SCRIPT:
Once upon a time in the urban sprawl of the City of Angels (La Ciudad de Los Angeles) there was a gated community (reeee) named the Middle Kingdom (That’s an ancient name for Chi-na!) where there lived a girl, Wu Ruwaxi (a made-up name meaning Western Confucian Doll!).  The only child of a hard-working immigrant family, Ruwaxi was loving, dutiful, and the embodiment of the Asian-American dream.

By day she studied assiduously in her elite prep school, mastering calculus derivatives (gi gi go go go, eeeeeeee)  formulating political theories to explain current Sino-US relations (ahem!  mmm (throaty, protesting) growl, bam! zap!  pow!), and writing impeccable eight legged essays analyzing the English literary canon.  (The eight-legged essay, baguwen, was a writing style used for the imperial examinations in ancient China.   Its rigid structure used heavy parallelism and redundancy, rhetorical features that survive in modern Chinese expository writing.) 

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) What moments draw you in?  Where do you lose interest?
(2) How might you imagine the piece evolve visually and physically from here?  (Next in the story, Ruwaxi dresses up in her combat-butch outfit and goes to the club.)
(3) How might you see this integrate with other material developed (chakradar, trailer, etc)?
(4) Thoughts about sound/music?

Shy's UnEpic Encounter, Assignment #3

 Part 4: Encounter
 Password: Ganga

Every day to Epic from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.




Part 1:  Epic Woman
Not all of this made it into part 4 of the assignment and I wanted to get feedback on other parts of the movement so I included it here (My every day woman is all in the part 4 video above, from the beginning until the music starts).  
Password: Ganga

Ganga study from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


Questions:
1. What movements are most interesting in both videos?  what least?
2. What do you think about the use of sounds in the first video?
3. Do you get any sort of narrative or other associations of meaning in either video?
4. Is the material more interesting in conversation or separate? (together is part 4, separate is Part 1 by itself and the first couple min or Part 4 before the music starts)
5. What could be the next steps with this material?

Cynthia's Response to UnEpic Assignment #3

Here's my response to this month's assignment:

password "dhet talang"

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) How would you describe the movement vocabulary?  Suggestions on how to develop further, or parts that don't fit/are distracting?
(2) Who do you see as being the "ordinary" and "epic" woman in this study, and what adjectives or qualities would you use to describe them?  How does this correspond to the characters detailed in my trailer and origin story?  Are there qualities depicted in those earlier studies that are not represented here and which you would like to see expressed in the movement vocabulary?
(3) What story, if any, do you see?
(4) Do you have ideas about costumes and how that could be integrated into the existing movement?
(5) Music/sound ideas?
(6) Other comments?