In "Trace," Los Angeles met South Asian courtesan poetry met Skype in a combination of art installation, live performance, and audience participation structures. We were blessed to have a warm, curious, and diverse cross-section of the visual/performance art, dance, theater, and music communities, along with loved ones attend.
First, these were the artworks:
Make Your Own Padam - The love poetry performed by courtesans and by Indian classical dancers is part of a living oral tradition that changes and adapts to new contexts and historical circumstances. We invite you to create your own poem out of the fragments of courtesan poetry scattered on the floor, which includes works by Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Bindadin Maharaj, Ksetrayya, and Annamaya. Mixed among the fragments are blank pieces of paper that may be filled in with your own word(s). Please tape your poem to the wall when finished!
Cyber Chat, Cyber Spat - This dance-for-camera work, which sprang out of our long-distance collaboration process, is an artistic version of the Post Natyam Collective’s administrative meetings, which are held via webcam conference calls on Skype - complete with dropped calls, baby cries and kathak rhythms. The work was filmed in four separate geographic locales - Munich, Kansas City, Long Beach and Santa Monica - with video editorial arrangement by Sangita Shresthova and additional sound engineering by Loren Nerell.
]wrist[ - Cynthia Lee’s poem imaginatively expands upon a single word, “wrist,” from the thumri, “Kahe Rukata,” in a writing style inspired by experimental language poets Harryette Mullen and Gertrude Stein. Anjali Tata’s video translates the poem into a dance composed of close-ups on the wrist (caressing animal-like choking wrist/neck suddenly wild, clean us off, dirty girl) and is a product of the Post Natyam Collective’s long distance collaborations, where members translate each other’s work into their own artistic products.
Harassing the Sanskrit Heroine - This artbook, written and designed by Cynthia Lee with photography by Shyamala Moorty, combines poetic text and photographic image to explode the North Indian light classical song form of thumri. Thumri was performed by high-class North Indian courtesans and is danced by modern-day kathak dancers. These imaginative contemporary translations reveal the historical layers, erasures, and troubled eroticism embedded in the thumri form.
And then, of course, there was the live performance, which unfolded as follows.
The audience started outside on the sidewalk, where they watched me (Cynthia) perform hidden tamarind, an abhinaya piece inspired by a fragment from an Annamaya padam, while sitting in the storefront window.
I then invited the audience inside, where they took their seats to see Shyamala perform When We're Alone, a poignant and powerful solo incorporating inverted Bharata Natyam, rhythm, and voice to express the emotional crisis of a young South Asian woman struggling to untangle herself from cultural and familial webs.
Shyamala and I then performed Adda with the Ancestors, an improvisational score created by Carol McDowell. The score enacts an “adda” or conversation between two dancers with hybrid histories, the real and imagined ancestors of their dance memories, a guardian, and a curious friend. The audience was encouraged to ask us questions during the performance, and it was wonderful to have some of the actual ancestors of our dance memories in the audience itself.
Then we gave the audience a short break to make more poems (Make Your Own Padam), which provided the material for the next performance piece. The above poem was actually used in performance on the second day.
(Sara Kumar and Gayle Fekete in Rasa Re-routed)
(Sara Kumar and Prumsodum Ok in Rasa Re-routed)
A remarkable group of guest artists hailing from theater, performance art, post/modern dance, and Cambodian dance backgrounds made the final piece, Rasa Re-routed, come alive. The performers (four on each day) were Rebekah Davidson, Latrice Dixon, Gayle Fekete, Carmela Hermann, Carol McDowell, Prumsodun Ok, Sara Kumar, and Lailye Weidman. Working together in duets of one reader and one mover, the same poem, selected from the poetry created by the audience that day, was interpreted nine times through the nine rasas (emotions) of Indian classical aesthetic theory: sringara (love), hasya (laughter), raudra (anger), karuna (compassion), bibhatsa (disgust), bhayanaka (fear), vira (courage), adbhuta (wonder), and shanta (peace). It was a gift to see the tradition of abhinaya reinterpreted boldly, rigorously, and in such radically diverse ways according to the individual sensibilities and training of the performers.
