"the sins of such wonderful flesh"

For our next Post Natyam process, we are developing a collaborative project that stemmed out of our Queering Abhinaya Process:

"the sins of such wonderful flesh"

Combining​ ​video​ and South Asian abhinaya (modes of expression) to queer the gaze, “the sins of such wonderful flesh” performs erotically charged desire between women​​. The work is inspired by the figure of Maud Allan​, a white female North American dance artist who toured her “Oriental" dances in Europe at the turn of the 20th century.  ​​Maud Allan was a Canadian-born, California-raised dancer whose dance career took off in Germany.  She was all the rage for a couple of years around 1908 in London, where she gave 250 performances of the Vision of Salome at the Palace Theatre. Allan was a complex figure: anti-suffrage despite being an unmarried, financially independent woman; whose longest romantic relationship was with her female secretary and lover, despite suing ​the British right-wing MP Noel​ Pemberton-Billings for accusing her of being a lesbian; who performed sexuality through the guise of Orientalist spirituality.​ ​”the sins of such wonderful flesh” asks: what would it mean for a brown female spectator to perform desire for Maud Allan-as-Salome?​  What is the difference between desire and identification (aka self-exotification)? ​How might the erotic charge and fluid reciprocity of South Asian abhinaya complicate these dynamics?

We are excited that the piece will be performed in EXPLODE! Queer Dance, curated by Clare Croft in May 2019 at UC Riverside!

Here is an early experiment:

Post Natyam Collective: Feminist Camera and Queer Desire. Experimentations. from meena murugesan on Vimeo.

concept and voice: Cynthia

choreography and performance: Sandra

videography: Meena

text: publicity for the Vision of Salome circulated by Alfred Butt, the manager of the Palace Theatre

Background:
This project started in our Los Angles residency in June 2014 with the process Queering Abhinaya. Shyamala gave an assignment to embody alternative interpretations of a text (open up, subvert, or contradict the text). In response, Cynthia chose a piece of publicity on the Vision of Salome by Maud Allan. Cynthia directed us to each create a study to subvert the original meaning of the text. Sandra's subversion led to a collaboration between Cynthia, Sandra and Meena to use reciprocal gaze theory with a live camera. Now, four years later, we are revisiting the piece with Shyamala as creative process facilitator.

*The phrase, "the sins of such wonderful flesh," is taken from piece of publicity on the Vision of Salome circulated by Alfred Butt, the manager of the Palace Theatre.