Premiere: Sunoh at the Miles Playhouse!

If you saw the show please leave feedback in the comments below!

New Video documentation is thanks to Carol McDowell and photos are thanks to Amish Desai


password "voice"

1. Preshow:
Sandra's shadow on back wall
bollywood clips on small scrim
Shy collecting cliches/stereotypes from audience about themselves and Cynthia putting them into live feed on big scrim.




2. Cyber Chat 1 on big scrim
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSY5o4P_-vI&feature=player_embedded




3. Mixed Bag


Password: "Miles"


Mixed Bag from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

4. Wall of cliches stay up as Cyn sadly cleans up the stage

5. Learning to Walk Like Radha



password "oh krishna"
footage from Feb Highways performance
6. cliche wall stays up on main screen with Sad courtesan on back wall

7. Cyber Chat 2 on small scrim
http://www.vimeo.com/21902064


Cyber Chat 2 from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


8. Shy's letter

Password: "Miles"
http://www.vimeo.com/21967391


I see, but from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


Intermission-----------------------


1. Sandra's Skype call on small scrim

password: interlude


Sunoh Interlude from Sandra Chatterjee on Vimeo.


2. The Thorn the Leaf and the Butterfly
password "Uma"

3. Anj's skype/blog response
skype on little scrim
dance video on big scrim

4. Ranri
http://vimeo.com/21967464
password: "Miles"


Ranri from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


5. Marks
http://www.vimeo.com/21968225
password: "Miles"

Marks, Miles from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


BOW:


Our collaborators left to right: Ravi Deo, Cynthia Ling Lee, Shyamala Moorty, Loren Nerell, and Sangita Shresthova. Not pictured: Carole Kim, Mona Heinze, Kedar Lawrence and the rest of the Post Natyam Collective -Anjali Tata and Sandra Chatterjee!

Welcome to the Kotha! - hidden tamarind

We decided to nix the idea of the live SKYPE call with Sandra because of technical issues and it being too long to hold the audience's attention in a theatrical performance.  So I came up with the following beginning to frame the dance.  In this script, I envision that Shyamala would talk to the audience (not sure if she's my pimp or what) - and that I would communicate by holding up my lines on a big placard.

Shyamala: Welcome to the exclusive salon of Rasulanbai, the renowned courtesan!
Cynthia: Actually, it’s just me, Cynthia.
Shyamala: She is master of the refined arts of Lucknow’s courtesans.
Cynthia: I’ve never been to a courtesan’s salon...so I’m going to have to invent this dance.
Shyamala: The finest courtesans in Lucknow come to her for training, for her fount of artistic knowledge is endless.
Cynthia: I know! I’ll do everything that my classical dance teacher told me I couldn’t do because it was too vulgar.
Shyamala: She is schooled in the intricacies of Urdu poetry, and her voice captures the subtleties of Hindustani ragas, enhanced by the most delicate facial expressions.
Cynthia: Um, I can’t sing. Nor do I speak Urdu or Braj Bhasa. And the only courtesan text I could find was a South Indian padam translated into English.
Shyamala: Come be seduced, come fall in love, come to her salon...and come with your pockets filled with gold!
Cynthia: It’s true that a courtesan can’t dance without a patron. Can I have a volunteer from the audience join me onstage? Raise your hand, and Shyamala will escort you. Don’t worry, I won’t really ask for money.  After all, you already bought your tickets.

Shy would then bring the patron onstage where he would sit on the floor facing me with a live feed camera between us.  The live feed of my face would show up in one of the Mughal miniature frames, so the audience would only see the side of my face but could see my abhinaya through the camera.  Another simpler version would be to have my garden footage play in the window while I do the piece live with my patron, which would cut out the need for the live feed.

password "cynthiabai"


Another thought that was briefly broached today was to combine Ranri and hidden tamarind by performing the two simultaneously.  I could see hidden tamarind upstage dimly lit behind the scrim and my face on the live feed, with Shy doing Ranri downstage.  Perhaps hidden tamarind, which is shorter, would occur during wrist.  Again this could be simplified by using pre-recorded footage of my abhinaya rather than live, though I think I would have to re-record it in Mughal-style costume.  Would have to figure out how to get an audience member onstage though...and the music would need to work for both of us.

Babli/Cyn Skype Call

Here is a mock-up of my Skype call with Sandra about the courtesans. We filmed it twice - the audio is much clearer the second time around, though there's not quite enough lighting for my live body. The second clip is my old hidden tamarind study, which this would supposedly segue into.

cyn/sandra skype call (password "skype")


hidden tamarind (password "cynthiabai)


QUESTIONS:
(1) How is the revised script? Is it more accessible and is the content interesting and relevant to the rest of the show?
(2) Is it visually interesting enough? Should Sandra and I "dance" or choreograph ourselves for the camera more? Alternately I was thinking that Shyamala could be in another part of the stage, perhaps silhouetted behind the big scrim, dancing something (maybe cliche material?) that she could do without sound. Any suggestions about staging would be appreciated. :)
(3) Is the length of the conversation good? If too long, do you have suggestions on what to cut?
(4) Any ideas for a back-up plan in case Skype doesn't work?
(5) How might you imagine this transitioning (physically, sonically, staging, multimedia) into hidden tamarind?
(6) Any ideas about how to re-contextualize hidden tamarind for a theatrical space so that I retain my control over the audience's gaze? Would love to hear both ideas that involve multimedia and ones that do not (in case Carole cannot workshop further material).
(7) Any music ideas? One idea I had was the sounds of instruments tuning while I acquire a patron, and something light classical Hindustani (violin perhaps, since sarangi is impossible to come by, with a sensual-raw-refined kotha sound) for hidden tamarind. I was also wondering if there was any way for the original English words to be present.

Note: for reference here are my initial ideas and video mock-up from the Jan residency:
CYN SKYPES SANDRA/HIDDEN TAMARIND
Cyn also had a new idea for introducing the courtesan in her full performative glory (rather than as an abject victim of abuse), while also acknowledging Cyn's positionality and her scholarly relationship with Sandra. Here's a super rough mock-up of the first portion:
password "skype"

Skype with Sandra: writing subaltern courtesan histories from Cynthia Ling Lee 2 on Vimeo.
I envisioned that this could be a real SKYPE call during the show, with me sitting onstage with my computer live, and my computer desktop projected onto the scrim. I couldn't test this with Sandra, so I pretended here using a screenshot -- which is pretty funny and could perhaps be a back-up if a theater doesn't have wireless.
In the live version, I imagined that when Sandra answered the phone, she would be in the middle of undressing from a classical Kuchipudi costume, including taking off a fake braid to reference my Logomotion solo. I might also bring in the same books and kurta that I wear during Cyber Chat.

After finishing up the call, I would invite an audience member to join me as my patron, as shown in the video. During this time the set-up would shift to a similar one as Shy's face dance, with the frames and one live feed camera upstage, and N. Indian light classical music would start floating in. I'm imagining the central arch could look like a lattice work window. The stage crew and/or other performers set up cushions and a rug upstage behind the scrim and escort my patron to his privileged viewing position upstage of the scrim behind the live feed camera. The rest of the audience would peer at our live bodies through the lattice work while also seeing my face/body doing "hidden tamarind."

Tawaif Inscribed: hidden tamarind to skin

After performing at NET, I decided to return to the idea of inscribing societal discourse on the tawaif's performing body (or on my body doing sitting abhinaya).   Carole Kim had advised using white words on a black background to minimize spillage, and Sangita had advised that I use fewer words from Sumita Chakravarty's text to make them more readable, knowing that if this served as a transition into the "skin" video, that the full text would soon be visible in "skin."  Sangita also suggested taking off my blouse to transition into skin.  [As reference, see Tawaif, Interrupted for my earlier unsuccessful experiment.]

Here is a close-up view of myself doing abhinaya with the words.


password: "scribblebai"

A few caveats: (1) Because of how the camera picks up light, the words often blow out and become blindingly white here.  In real life they stand out nicely on my skin as well as my shirt.  (2) I did not perform the abhinaya very well, since I had no music to cue me and was mostly concerned with where the words were falling on my body rather than my inner motivation.  (3) I laid this music on afterwards.  If I were to keep working with this idea, I would want to have something with a distinct semi-classical sound that references the kotha, such as the sarengi here, but to have it become gradually more and more electronically distorted until the "skin" video comes on at the end.

Here is a wide-angle view, which allows you to see the transition from the abhinaya to skin more clearly.  In performance someone else would douse the front projector, so you wouldn't see the funny adjustment in the video.

password: "scribbleskin"

I skipped the first image of the video, where it is a little hard to tell that it is a body, and started with the second image, which looks clearly like a back, so as to make a direct correspondence between my live back and the back on the video.  I also didn't play the skin video the whole way through here -- I just let it run enough to get a sense of how the transition would feel.

QUESTIONS:
1. Is the sitting abhinaya + text compelling, or should the idea be retired for good?
2. Are the particular words being projected on me effective?  What about the text-movement relationship?  I chose movements from "hidden tamarind" that allow the text to be seen visually (or otherwise interact with it), such as "sexual" emerging from my mouth, but generally the meaning of the words are unrelated to my abhinaya, which has a different internal dialogue informing it.  Would you like to see a more direct relationship between the movement and the words' meaning?
3. Would you rather see me dressed as a courtesan, as myself (as I am here), or as some odd mixture of the two?
4. Would you like to see this vignette as the conclusion of Tell Me, Sister (as performed at NET), or in another context?  If the latter, what do you imagine might precede it?

Lots of thanks to Loren for his technical help in executing this experiment!

Cynthia's Response to August Assignment: hidden tamarind

I created a sitting abhinaya piece, called "hidden tamarind," in response to the first two stanzas of the Annamaya padam.

password "cynthiabai"

Here are notes on my internal dialogue while performing the study: