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.
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?
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?
(1) How does the two different videos affect you differently? Do you prefer one or the other, and why?
ReplyDeleteThey were powerful images without text, but only clues to the depth which I got with the text. Without text the blood (boy does that look real!!!) and the wildrice are the images that stand out to me the most. The blood as a violent force of eradication, and the wildrice as an indicator of indigenous knowledge/values. For some reason it left generally a more violent impression on me as I didn't know if the person leaving bloody footprints at the end was leaving behind some horrible situation that they had inflicted, even though I also had the feeling of a very calm ritual throughout, with the "cleansing" of the hands with the blood, the specific placing of the rocks, the mixing/preparing of the foods, the incense. There is some inherent contradiction with the ritualistic nature of the images and my own associations with blood.
With the text, I found the images took on various meanings: The blood became not just the violence against a people, but also the naming of a people as "barbarians;" the rocks seemed to represent various forms of ordering, naming and placing, even memorializing, and then later became the deflated basketballs, and the whole image a river bank; the flour was more charged with whitness, Chineseness (is that a word?) and assimilation; and finally the bloody footprints seemed more pensive then ominous.
I generally liked the text version better, though there's something about the non-text version that possibly is more implicating at the end. Like the idea of the immigrant vs. colonizer seems very abstract when spoken, but there's something about the ambitiousness of violence and disappearances that stands out with the ending image more to me without the words.
Would you prefer less text? If so, what would you recommend cutting, and what would you like to keep? Other thoughts about sound?
See my last comment above. I feel like there could be moments where we are left seeing the image a little longer without sound, but primarily it is the end walk away. There were a lot of verbal ideas packed into the end and I felt I didn't get the impact of them as much as I might have if there were less.
Also while the text gave new layers to the images, the images helped me hear the text more then if I was just listening to it or reading it on a paper.
The music was pensive, I think it supported the voice and images.
(2) Any imagery that you find particularly striking? Any parts where you are less interested?
All of the images were interesting, but without the words seemed slightly long and as I said earlier, the blood and rice stood out as the most charged to me without text. with text I found all the images to be quite compelling.
(3) How might you imagine any aspect of this video and/or the original text being brought into live performance?
I could see all of these images being done as a live ritual on stage, or maybe in a gallery setting in and around audience.
I am really excited by this abstract! I appreciate how you situate the ideas of queering without negating the US LGBT identities, but also choosing to explore German and South Asian influences to expand the notion. This is the clearest I have ever understood the possibilities of queering abhinaya yet and also the most comfortable I have been with it. It sounds like a really exciting paper that truly opens up boundaries and possibilities, and I would totally want to read it!
ReplyDelete(Post, below, from an email exchange between Cynthia and colleague / community-based theater maker Will MacAdams)
ReplyDeleteAs for the video, I responded to many things. Foremost among them was its sense of ritual. It comes from the carefully-chosen objects/parts of you (hands, feet, blood, stone, rice) the repetitive actions, and the symbolic meaning of these particular things (many of which I have explored in my own work, especially hands and stones).
I don't know if I have seen many rituals in a digital form and, if I have, I haven't seen one so beautifully done. It feels as if they are building blocks of an identity - not one you know how to fully form, but one that you are piecing together from the fragments you have.
The word 'building blocks' evokes another part of the piece that resonates, which is that it feels as if it is seen from the perspective of a child: the way you are speaking, the questions you are asking your dad, and the way you are placing the objects down - in the way that children have a sense of something deeper with objects, like they just know.
I also believe, fundamentally, in what the piece is doing - through movement, articulating the ancestry that is within you, even if it's unnamed. That resonates with the way I view the world.
That brings me to what I love about the piece (apologies for the circuitous nature of this email - I am learning as I write!). It is beautiful. That is something - to talk about enormous violence, but to create beauty.