Open round 2: Intergenerational Art Making

Here are two artworks and a poem I made about what it is like for me being pregnant from prompts from a book called "Birthing From Within" by Pam England. The poem is describing the second art piece.

Being Pregnant, 30 weeks

Little curling seedling,

I try to imagine you inside me,

but your tender development eludes me.

As I crane to grasp the very concept of you,

the boundaries of my being expand,

making room for your ever reaching tendrils.

As we ride the turbulent tides together,

we are guided by instinct, intuition,

and my sea creature heart who flips effortlessly through the waves beside us.

I made the paintings in an art making session with my Mom, where she also made art about pregnancy, childbirth and the future baby. 

I am becoming aware that I am on a path of inter-generational healing since my Mother has come to live with me last Oct.  Some of it has manifested in my own poetry, some of it has been in a parenting class with my sweetheart, and now this art making was the first time I was able to include her in the process as well.  Thus I am thinking of the following project...

Project idea:  

My sweetheart, Mom, and I (and maybe other family members), all write a letter/poem to our own childhood self, and then another to the  unborn baby in my belly.  We then excerpt one to three lines from our letter to the baby, and each of us writes the excerpts on my belly (probably with facepaints).  If we do each of these separately, we can also decorate the belly as we wish.  However, we may wish the excerpts to somehow be in conversation with each other.    I imagine documenting this with a series of photographs of each person drawing on my belly (or maybe video which could capture any movement of the fetus as well, but other then that I think photos are enough).  

Feedback:

Any ideas for the prompts or parameters of my project idea to make it clearer or more interesting?  

Any visions of environment?

Any other ideas or thoughts?

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!

NET MicroFest

Here are the latest versions of some of our work-in-progress material, as performed at the NET MicroFest on Dec 5.

I choreographed my live dance in relation to Sandra's video, which originally integrated abhinaya and theory on exoticism.


password "NET"
Here is the latest experiment with expanding Tell Me, Sister.  I post this only for the sake of dialogue, for the footage taken this day stays zoomed out the whole time, which unfortunately means that you can't see any of the video on my back or the nuances of abhinaya, and thus lose the majority of the intent of the work.  However, several things may be useful to watch.  If you watch the end starting at 9:30, you'll get a sense of the transition from the sitting abhinaya to skin. Currently I don't think this works, as it seems to visually distract from my performance rather than undermining the courtesan by inscribing her with societal discourse or making the audience aware of their gaze upon her.  Also under debate is how I transition from widow to courtesan, which not everyone is finding believable.  To see this transition as currently stands, watch from 5:50.


At the moment I feel this solo is no longer holding together as a cohesive whole -- like it's trying to accomplish too much and exploding at the seams.  At this moment I'd like to let it explode, fragment, be blown apart and freed from the narrative structure it's currently encased in to see what might happen.  Incidentally, a friend who's experienced abuse compared the experience to being exploded apart -- fragmented -- and that as you try to put yourself together, you never quite achieve the same "wholeness" as before.  So too the histories of the courtesan are fragmented, incomplete, and irrecoverable.  I wonder if we can reflect this compositionally.


Also, here are notes I took based on the feedback session we had after the Sunday show, with respondents Carole Kim (who focuses on live video performance and performance-based video installation) and Carol McDowell (dancer, improviser, interdisciplinary artist).   

Tawaif, Interrupted, or, Theorizing the Courtesan

Since learning to perform "Tell Me, Sister," the story of the child widow who is abused by her in-laws and empowers herself by becoming a courtesan, I have been thinking about the piece's ending.  I would like to avoid romanticizing the figure of the courtesan as some sort of "proto-feminist."  Rather, I would like to recognize that she exercised her agency and power within the confines of a patriarchal structure.  I also feel that it is ultimately impossible as a contemporary woman and classically trained dancer to understand and grasp the historical courtesan in any sort of "pure" way, unmediated by society's myriad perceptions of her.

Thus I've been toying with the idea of undermining the courtesan at the height of her power by having Chakravarty's theory on how the courtesan is regarded in Indian cultural consciousness typed upon my face as I do sitting abhinaya.  This would occur during what was formerly the ending of Tell Me, Sister.  The image was inspired by one of the images from my artbook, Harassing the Sanskrit Heroine :

Shyamala and I tried this in rehearsal, and at first it seemed potentially interesting:

password "shyamalabai"

In addition, Sangita and I recently collaborated on reworking my dance-for-camera study, "skin," which uses the same theoretical text.  After reshooting it, Sangita did a beautiful job editing the footage into mysterious, organic imagery where Sumita Chakravarty's academic theory slips and melts on the not-quite-recognizable landscape of the female body.

I thought it might be interesting to transition from typing the theory on my face to a projection of "skin" that I would somehow interact with live.  However, we ran into some technical problems -- the two projections interrupt each other when the "skin" projection fills the back wall (which is why they are side by side here, rather than fading from one to another).  In addition, the typing on my face spills over to the back wall in a way I find distracting.  Here is rehearsal footage of this experiment:

password: "discursive"

Feedback Questions:
(1) Based on this footage, I'm thinking I may scrap the typing on my face altogether and instead transition straight from the sitting abhinaya into interacting with the projection on the back wall.  Do you think this is a good idea?
(2) Which movements are most effective with the video projection?  (I was just improvising ad hoc here.)
(3) What do you see as being the relationship between myself and the projection?
(4) How long do you stay interested in myself interacting with the projection?  Would you like to see less or more?
(5) Other thoughts/suggestions?

"skin" - revised version

Here is a new and improved version of skin, which Sangita reshot and edited for me.  It had its first screening at gati's IGNITE contemporary dance festival!



skin (2010)
Concept, Choreography, Performance: Cynthia Lee
Director Photography/Editing: Sangita Shresthova
Text: Sumita Chakravarty's National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987
Music Composition: Loren Nerell
Production Support: Carol McDowell


FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) How does the piece make you feel -- viscerally, emotionally, intellectually?
(2) Any thoughts about how to integrate into the live performance?
(3) Other thoughts?

Cynthia's Response to May 2010 Assignment

Feedback Questions:
(1) What is your response to the video – viscerally, emotionally, intellectually?
(2) Arc: Does your attention ever lag or are there places you would like to see for longer? What do you think of the video cuts?
(3) How does this piece dialogue, if at all, with Bollywood aesthetics and the genre of courtesan films?
(4) Do you see connections to other studies? Thoughts about how this could be used in our collaborative live performance?

This study, “skin,” uses music by Loren Nerell and text by Sumita Chakravarty. It integrates two techniques that have been used in other studies: the zooming into a woman’s body parts and the use of projection on the moving body.  While my study did not end up being as closely linked to a particular Bollywood dance sequence as Sandra's assignment may have intended, it does draw on theory about Indian courtesan films.  Several years ago I read Sumita Chakravarty’s book, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987, which has an entire chapter dedicated to courtesan films. I found her description of the courtesan’s place in Indian cultural memory particularly apt in its complex contradictions:

The courtesan, as historical character and cinematic spectacle, is one of the most enigmatic figures to haunt the margins of Indian cultural consciousness. Variously described as dancing girl, nautsch-girl, prostitute, or harlot, she appears again and again in Indian cultural texts, at once celebrated and shunned, used and abused, praised and condemned. Socially decentered, she is yet the object of respect and admiration because of her artistic training and musical accomplishments. The embodiment of a charged sexuality, she is as often associated in popular culture with the Madonna. A bazaar entertainer, she is paradoxically the repository of the traditions of a vanished age and a lost way of life. Economically independent, she is portrayed as yearning for the affections and protection of a man…Skirting the boundaries of the legitimate and the illegitimate, an intricate blend of Hindu and Muslim social graces, this ambiguous icon of Indian womanhood and female power-
cum-vulnerability serves as the analog of a national palimpsest inscribed with contradictory social meanings. (Chakravarty, 270)

At first, I had a performance art fantasy of having someone write Chakravarty’s words on an overhead projector. As they were being written, the words would be projected on my body. I would be initially dressed in the style of a tawaif from a courtesan film and would slowly remove my clothes while the words would appear on me -- the images and perceptions of the courtesan written on my body. But I had no overhead projector, no one to run the camera, and no one to write the text. So instead I went for a more stark, minimalist visual statement, projecting the text directly onto my neck, collar-bones, and shoulders. I found the image hard to control choreographically, as I could only vaguely see what was in the frame and had no idea that the text was even legible, let alone what words were appearing at what time, and so had to edit heavily later.