Queering Abhinaya Assignment 7: Colonial Mapping

For this cycle of queering abhinaya, I was paired with Shyamala.  She helped me brainstorm ways to bring performative life to the Chinese colonial travel accounts of Taiwan from "triple-weave."


colonial mapping I (in-progress study) from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password "confucian"

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
1) What draws you in; what do you find compelling?  Are there parts where you're bored, confused, or otherwise not engaged?
2) I'm thinking of giving the Chinese language a greater presence in the piece.  I can do this by adding Chinese to the labels and/or possibly finding the original travelogue texts and getting a native Mandarin speaker to read them before the English translations (this will be much more work).  Are you interested in this possibility, and if so, how much Chinese would you like to be present?
3) How might you imagine this being translated into live performance?
4) What relationship do you see with "blood-run"?
5) Other thoughts?

BACKGROUND/CONTEXT:
I've been continuing to read Emma Jinhua Teng's Taiwan's Imagined Geography, which has shed some light on the nuances of the particular colonial writings excerpted in triple-weave.  According to Teng, there are two main colonial perspectives on Taiwan during this era of Qing expansionism: (a) a "rhetoric of privation" that constructs the Taiwanese aborigine as a brutish savage and (b) a "rhetoric of primitivism" that romanticizes the aborigine as a sort of "noble savage" (62).  The rhetoric of privation is deeply informed by classical Confucian texts, while the rhetoric of primitivism is very much the product of Taoist philosophy and imagery.  This study draws more on the texts written from the "rhetoric of privation" perspective.

Teng also describes the changing cartography in the Ming (the Han Chinese dynasty preceding the Qing dynasty) and Qing dynasties.  Whereas Ming maps portray China as a naturally bounded territory (Taiwan being a terra incognita far away beyond the seas), Qing maps include Taiwan as a peripheral part of China at the very edge of the world/map.  I was particularly fascinated that some maps were not drawn from a bird's eye view, but instead as if standing on the south-eastern coast of China in the Fujian province looking across the roiling waves at Taiwan.  This perspective positions Taiwan as separate from the Qing empire and informs the camera angle that I used in my study.  Many of the labels on the rocks (country of women, dogs, two-bodied people, hairy people, etc.) are from actual maps from the late Ming period (40).

I was planning to create two more approaches to mapping: one reflecting the Taoist-primitivist-bird's eye view map, and one highlighting Taiwan as part of Austronesia, but did not manage for this round.

REFERENCES
Teng, Emma Jinhua.  2004.  Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895.  Harvard East Asian Monographs: Cambridge.

Queering Abhinaya Assignment 6: Shyamala's intergenerational explorations

I was paired with Sandra and we discussed her interest in framing connections between some of our assignments in the German context through writing and perhaps even a video installation of the work.  I believe she was interested in the idea or action of problematizing exoticisms as a common theme for some of the solos, and thus creating a transnational alliance between us. 

I was interested in deepening some of my work.  A few months ago, my mother moved in with me and I found out that I am pregnant, thus, I have been strongly aware of my position between generations.  Thus, the inter-generational nature of the study I did for assignment 4, "alternative translations" seems the most interesting to me to continue at this moment.  For my study, each Post Natyam member interpreted some the words describing how to do the dance movement from a padam that I had learned from my first Bharata Natyam guru, Medha Yodh.  Our interpretations were unusual, quirky, and at at times subversive.   I had planned to thread my favorites of each of our interpretations together into a new version of the padam...  thinking about how a new generation might re-interpret and re-purpose this dance that was passed on to me through Medha, from her guru, Balasaraswati.

Additionally I'm creating a new piece in collaboration with a Cambodian American visual artist,

Sayon Syprasoeuth and a Cambodian American dancer, Jack Nguon.  In relation to the "alternate translations." I'm thinking it would be interesting to see how Jack might interpret the text in his classical Cambodian dance influenced body.  I also have been doing some inter-generational writings that I feel will help inform the piece, either with sound or images.  

Themes exploring: pleasure and discomfort of waiting, transformation, life cycle of seed to flower blossoming/birthing, inter-generational (dis)connections

Below is an image of a sculpture we'll be working with: 

Sculpture by Sayon Syprasoeuth (our costumes hopefully will be similar variations of this)

Texts to draw from:  

Velavare (Padam I learned from Medha Yodh), the gist is about a maiden waiting for her lord.  Perhaps the music itself would be interesting to use.

 Two poems I've written recently:

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love letter at week 6

My first signs of you were my queasy belly and your beating heart-

Fast, erratic, a pulsing white light, a beacon of your existence. 

My emotions ran wild.

Your heart in my belly, making it flutter.

My gasping breath making you falter.

The realization that you were all heart was so immense…

This tiny light leading you into the world, before all thought, before all reason, guided only by your inner rhythm.

And as I cradled you in my womb,

Your love, so vast, encompassed me.  

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Free-fall at 11 weeks

S/he is tumbling, free-falling except for the pulsing bungee cord of flesh that connects her to me.  Neither of us holding on with our limbs, connected instead from our insides out.

There is no light here to see, all is intuited from behind thinly shut lids.   

He does not feel my singular pain, oblivious to the sacrifices of one, 

but instead is tuned into the rhythms of my breath, the pulsing of my blood, 

and the pull of gravity within an ever changing rotating sphere of existence. 

A packed, but organized, freeway flows between us, 

where ancestors riding water buffalo intermix with sturdy caballeros, 

and still others traverse in dusty covered wagons. 

None are surprised by each others existence, nor by the occasional sighting 

of never before seen modes of transportation passing at lightening speed. 

Testing her strength and agility, 

each movement is magnified in tight quarters. 

Falling, twisting, turning until he bounces 

against the soft womb walls in a soft reverberating, rebound. 

Our bodies, united together, 

share unfathomable mysteries, 

that despite our interconnection, 

will lead to unavoidable separation.

 Feedback:

1.  What ideas/images stand out to you, especially ones that might inspire movement or visual images/actions, from...

a. the sculpture

b the week 6 poem

c. the week 11 poem 

2.  Do you have any thoughts about ways to tie or layer the sculpture, poems and Padam together?  

3.  Any other thoughts?

Queering Abhinaya Assignment 6: blood-run

For this cycle of queering abhinaya, I was paired with Meena.  We identified common theoretical-artistic interests in further investigating the queer desiring female gaze in a way that positions the camera as performer and the person on camera as a viewer.  We also talked about simultaneously occupying the position of colonized and colonizer.  She expressed interest in continuing to work on her blueberry piece, while I was interested in bringing some performative aspect to the ideas in my writing, "triple-weave."

I did a little more reading from Taiwan's Imagined Geography, and I ended up making a video called "blood-run," which Meena shot for me.  Below are two versions of the video: one with text and one without.  The password for both is "aborigine".


blood-run (no text) from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.


blood-run (with text) from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

After Shy's feedback, I did a quick re-edit with slightly less text -- most of it cut from the end.

blood-run (less text) from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

 FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) How does the two different videos affect you differently?  Do you prefer one or the other, and why?  Would you prefer less text?  If so, what would you recommend cutting, and what would you like to keep?  Other thoughts about sound?
(2) Any imagery that you find particularly striking?  Any parts where you are less interested?
(3) How might you imagine any aspect of this video and/or the original text being brought into live performance?

I'm also sharing the abstract for the paper that I'm writing about Queering Abhinaya.  I wrote it while thinking about the blueberry piece, the Maud Allan video, the Sher-Gil writings, and triple-weave when reading it.  I welcome any feedback or theory/reading recommendations that you might have.

Rerouting the Gaze: the Post Natyam Collective’s

Choreographies of Queer Affect

Cynthia Ling Lee

This performative paper looks at emergent choreographies of queer affect by analyzing selected aspects of Queering Abhinaya, an ongoing collaboration of the Post Natyam Collective.  The Post Natyam Collective is a transnational, web-based coalition of women dance artists critically and creatively interrogating South Asian dance.  Queering Abhinaya engages in praxis-based research on queering, queerness, and abhinaya through an open-ended, dialogical, and collective process mediated by internet technologies.  We examine notions of queering beyond the borders of North American identity politics to include German notions of quer (“oblique,” or going against the grain) and South Asian embodiments of gender fluidity and erotic possibility that are distinct from performing western LGBT identities.  As our primary aesthetic technique, we draw on an expanded notion of abhinaya, usually associated with Indian classical dancers interpreting love poetry through gesture and facial expression.  

The raw, in-progress studies emerging from the Queering Abhinaya process reimagine classical Indian affective techniques of embodied performance while rerouting dominant colonial, male, and heterosexual mechanisms of the gaze through dance, video, and poetic text.  They ask: how can racialized, hybrid, (post)colonial female subjects gaze back at the masculinist and Orientalizing gaze of the colonizer?  How do the colonizer and colonized live together inside one body?  How might we choreograph an emergent queer female gaze that overturns the western camera’s male gaze and the hetero-patriarchal narratives of love and desire that inform Indian abhinaya viewing conventions?  How might we perform from the position of a postcolonial, queer, desiring female viewer of color?