SUNOH! Tell Me, Sister Tour: U. Illinois

"Your explorations are rich and deeply excavated - There were so many layers in the work - the visual imagery felt like layers of an onion, each one transparent and opaque, the stories were compelling."
-Jan Erkert, Director of Dance at U. Illinois at Champaign-Urbana

Shyamala, our tech director Kedar Lawrence, and I set off for our 3 week university tour of "SUNOH!  Tell Me, Sister."  Our first stop was U. Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, a dance department tucked away in the midwest that is known for its experimentation, improvisation, and choreography.  Its faculty includes postmodern luminaries such as Kirstie Simon, Tere O'Connor, Jennifer Monson, and Jan Erkert.

TEACHING
Shyamala and I had the opportunity to teach two master classes on contemporary Indian dance to different levels of modern dance.  We combined a yoga/release warm-up with basics of classical kathak and culminated with performing a small section of "Mixed Bag."  While the background of the dance majors was dominantly western, they were very engaged and seemed to be familiar with some of the basic components of Indian dance: facial expression, gesture, rhythm.  I was interested to find out that performing Mixed Bag in this intimate setting allowed me to make direct eye contact with the audience and play with invading their personal space, thus making the performer-audience relationship edgier than than in a proscenium setting. 

MAKING CONNECTIONS
Shy and I were also supposed to give a lecture for a Dance History class, but unfortunately this was cancelled due to scheduling conflicts.  However, we unexpectedly found other opportunities to connect with other artists whose work resonated with the concerns of "SUNOH!  Tell Me, Sister."

community work with survivors
Shyamala and I stumbled upon an exhibit in the UI Student Union of a visual artist, Elzbieta Kazmierczak, who works with survivors of domestic violence.  Her exhibit, entitled "The Emotional Body: The Journey of a Woman" combines linoleum prints on quilted cloth to create imagery that is both delicate and handmade, yet visceral and powerful.  We met with Elka and learned about her work creating an art therapy on campus and working with survivors in the community.  Shyamala and Elka had a wonderful time swapping art exercises with each other, as both of them have worked with Window Between the Worlds: Art for Healing. 

"Run Rabbit Run" by Elka Kazmierczak

dance telematics
After teaching a master class, I started chatting with one of the accompanists, Jeff Zahos, and discovered that he was taking a graduate course on telematic dance, in which dancers perform together in real time and virtual space using broadband technologies.  We later met with John Toenjes, the instructor for the class (and music director at UI's dance dept), and were intrigued to hear about the aesthetic possibilities when the full potential of internet technologies are used.  It made me think about the difference between grassroots art that comes out of a lack of resources (ie, Post Natyam's use of free internet technologies to allow us to stay connected creatively due to lack of funding) vs. art that comes out of a plethora of resources (ie, the internet bandwidth and technological resources that being part of a large university allows). 

Later, we enjoyed hanging out with some of John's students, Jeff Zahos and Garrison Frick (both musicians), during which we had a free-wheeling adda about collaborating across disciplines and with internet technologies.

 IN THE THEATER
Meanwhile, back in the theater, we had our job cut out for us!  While used often for showings, the performance space was essentially a large classroom with some lighting instruments and no grid.  

Luckily we were blessed to work with a very sweet and helpful tech director, Claudio Ribeiro.  With his help, Kedar was able to totally transform the space.  We discovered that the one advantage of the wooden floor, while generally making lighting more challenging, was that the words in "Marks" became more legible, thereby opening up movement and imagistic possiblities.  For more on the technical aspects of adapting the show to the space, see Kedar's theater blog.

"I very much enjoyed your performance; not only was it a feast for the eyes, it was an intriguing mix for the mind and heart."
-John Toenjes, composer and media artist

Next steps for "SUNOH! Tell me, Sister" is the College Tour in April!


And in June check us out at the National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival in Los Angeles: http://2011.caata.net/festival/

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!

Cyber Chat 2.0 example

Here's an example of Shy doing everyone's parts to Vimeo and the blog.  For the parts where you are speaking at the same time as someone else, please do the gestures shown there (especially for the last sentence).  Otherwise you can do whatever you like, as long as you follow the intention.


password: "the same problem"

And here is the script.  What we actually say is in bold, and what we imagined the intention is below (in some cases where it’s obvious we put some movement notes for ourselves). 

Shy: tat            tat             ta             tuka

I see you, namaste

All: tuka   dun             dun

Namaste/salaam

Shy: jiji kita

how are you?                       

Cyn: to

not so good                                               

Babli: tu run ga

what’s wrong?                                    

Cyn: taka tun tak            tigdha            digadiga thai

me and my guru had a fight

Babli:            taka             tun            tak

you and your guru

Babli/anj: tigdha            digadiga            thai

had a fight?!

Cyn: taka  tun tak            tigdha digadiga thai

Yes I don’t know what to do, it’s driving me crazy            

Anj: tat  tat

you should talk to her!                        

Babli: no, really?

no, you really think that’s a good idea?

Shy: tuka that one…           

that one got written off

Cyn/anj: ji ji kita

oh no            

Babli: to--the   same problem?

see, she had the same problem                        

Anj: taka tun tak            tigdha digadiga thai, What a

If you lock your mouth, what if she sees? what a mess

locks mouth, parts curtain and point, hands up

Shy:            suck teeth            Hm tigdha digadiga thai

oh my gosh fists, hmm, its going to be so overwhelming head in hands

Babli: If you

 R succi

All: (sigh)                       

Babli: wait           

L pataka           

Cyn: tigdha

no!

shake succi                       

Babli:  it’ll get  better....

double pataka

Shy: What, wait?                          No,                         really?           

slap, think, shake hand, face

Anj: You know  that                         one?           

anj remembers another student tells us secretly

Shy: I think                        I do...

tap head x2           

Babli: No!           

incredulous what happened to the other student                       

All: the     same                         problem?

musti into pataka hand           

Cyn: What a (click teeth)            God                        will it                        ever get           

better?

pataka hit head, alapadma

Shy: What a             (suck teeth)                        Hm,  can it                        ever get            better?

(hands to face) hmm, face question, pataka hands up

All: If you  tell                        me                        sister                        it’ll be  better!

 sum dum sum from mouth, R pataka to chest, L sakhi, 2 hands up

--

Response to Uma

I was moved by Uma's story and chose to translate Uma’s story through my own personal experience. I think of how the young boisterous me used to be so free spirited and loud, but over time, being silenced by my superiors affected my ability to speak up. Growing up, Bharata Natyam allowed me to express myself more fully than I could with my voice. Embodying bhava through dance still continues to be my fondest way to let out my feelings.
Password "tonsils"

Tonsils_02 from Anjali Tata on Vimeo.

Tonsils_01 from Anjali Tata on Vimeo.

Interlude from Babli

Here is a mock-up of a possible video interlude. I decided to go with our screenshot aesthetic for now- very low key and casual-
for this version I tried to focus on content- communicate the ideas and be brief at the same time-
questions:
1. is the content understandable?
2. does it add to the context of the piece?
3. is it too dry and straightforward?
4. does it make sense?
5. does the aesthetic need to be more "refined"?

password: interlude

Sunoh Interlude from Sandra Chatterjee on Vimeo.

The Thorn, the Leaf, and the Butterfly (Bootleg)

Footage from The Thorn, the Leaf, and the Butterfly as performed at Bootleg Dance Festival on Mar 5, 2011.

password "Uma"

Marks (Bootleg)

Here is footage from Marks as performed at Bootleg.  We had some technical problems with the projector, so it is not quite as it should have been, but will give an idea:

password "skin"

Mixed Bag (Bootleg)

Here is footage of Mixed Bag as performed at the Bootleg Dance Festival:

password: "cliche"

QUESTIONS:
(1) How might you see Anj in here as a 3rd live performer?
(2) Any feedback on the music?
(3) Feedback on the visuals?
(4) How do you feel about the length - should it be shorter, longer, or is it just right?
(5) How does this relate to the rest of the show material? Where might you put this in the overall show?
(6) What techniques do you notice for dealing with the cliches? Do you feel the piece subverts or enforces the cliches?
(7) What relationships do you observe between the performers?

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.

Tigress

Tigeress from Anjali Tata on Vimeo.

Password: Tigress
This is a rough structure that begins with a Flashback (and voiceover of Carlos saying"and she was just like a Tigres...(echo effect on Tigress). We then enter the demo cut with the Padam verse by verse. I was supposed to confide in the sakhi (friend) in the first verse, but I performed it in the second by mistake.
Also, the ending need lots of work. I was just improvising the ending drawing from gestures I had used throughout the piece but I need to set it more specifically. I will probably spin from demo to padam but other transition ideas are welcomed

Questions:
1) Is it effective to begin with the Flashback?

2) Should the gestures be more abstracted or are they working. I wanted to lead the audience in with a more traditional demo so it unfolds more or less as a surprise.

3) Where do you see the chorus happening? I envision it after I start the first verse of demo...i.e What? after 1st verse Really? after second vs. and NO in 3rd verse and then perhaps it builds/layers --goes to the rap we had done at end of residency...

Camp, Parody, Stereotype: Research Notes and References

Working with the cliches in Mixed Bag with Shy has been fun and provoked a lot of discussion between the two of us regarding the pleasure involved in embodying cliches on our own terms, the complicity of women in imposing stereotypes on other women, etc. Neither of us usually work in this over-the-top mode, yet camp is a huge performance genre, often associated with queer culture, with an accompanying body of scholarly texts. So I've been wanting to read texts and look at the work of artists who use camp and parody further. Here's a start at some references and notes (with Carol McDowell's help):

ARTIST WORK SAMPLES:

Carmelita Tropicana:

Reel (Samples)

Pingalito

Kristina Wong:

Shelarious audition reel

http://bigbadchinesemama.com/

La Pocha Nostra (Guillermo Gomez Pena):

Photo Portfolios (some great costume ideas here)

Museum of Fetishized Identities

Kate Rigg/Slanty-Eyed Mama (music): http://www.slantyeyedmama.com/

TEXTUAL RESEARCH REFERENCES:

http://www.jrank.org/cultures/pages/3719/Choteo.html

Gomez Pena:

Performing Against the Cultural Backdrop of the Mainstream Bizarre

Imagining a New Way of Presenting Art
Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here:

• "In a war in which you have no weapons, you must take those of your enemy and use them for something better -- like throwing them back at him" - Elia Suleiman (33)
• "reversal, recycling and subversive montage" 20th c. avant-gardes, also syncretism as a way for disempowered groups to maintain outlawed traditions
• "resistance within a colonial context is rarely direct, overt, or literal; rather, it articulates itself through semantic reversals, and through the process of infusing icons, objects, and symbols with different meanings" (35) (ie signifyin')
• "Parody, satire, and carnivalesque unsettling of established orders continue to thrive as creative strategies for temporarily subverting authority...those who identify with the established order of things respond in a literal-minded way to the playfulness and double entendres of subaltern creative expression by reading only at face value. They insist that art should not 'offend,' that sophisticated appreciation must be distanced and reverent, and that serious criticism be dispassionate and 'objective.' What these dismissive attitudes cannot understand is that the irreverence and exuberant energy of these aesthetic strategies are evidence of the survival of subaltern practices that have created the conditions for spiritual and cultural renewal, as well as critical reinterpretations of the world in which we live" (36)

Tina Landau, from Anne Bogart's Viewpoints
"The first things that came up were often the most obvious, but Anne encouraged the actors to lean into the cliches and stereotypes rather than try to ignore them. By going through them, she explained, they would come out on the other side with something that used, but transformed them" (19)

David Gere on Joe Goode: "29 Effeminate Gestures," in Dancing Desire

strategy: lec-dem choreography making audience aware of how bodies are gender-policed through gestural sanction, based on his own autobiographical experience

· Susan Sontag: camp’s “ability to subvert standard notions of gender and amplify elements of the individual personality, as opposed to facilitating quiet acquiescence to gender roles...Beauty lies in going against the grain” (360)

· gender as performance: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp,’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’” (360)

· “The task of camp, then, is to take the measure of societal limitations on gender and sexuality, to shine a light on the space beyond the horizon line of acceptability” (361)

· “Who, me?” – hands on chest. “This is a classic gesture of the femme fatale, the dark and dangerous woman who appears, on the surface, to be weak and insipid but who in fact packs enormous backstage power. This is weakness standing in for manipulative control. In Gay parlance the exercise of power from a place of supposed weakness has a special name: it is called ‘topping from the bottom’” (371)

· “Seduction, a power that oppressed women have long harnessed for their own means (371)

· “to perform against the grain is to exist in a state of radical self-consciousness” (371)

· “the gestures were laden with inordinate potential, with untapped strength...he counseled against interpreting any of them as the mere reaffirmation of a cliche or stereotype. ‘I think there is an element of comment – which is the power of camp – that exists in all of the gestures’” (373)

· Butler in “Critically Queer” – the embodying of gender norms is compulsory, a forced production. Yet these norms aren’t fully determining because the addressee never completely inhabits the ideal (|| Bhabha’s colonial mimicry)

· “effeminacy is primarily corporeal...whereas drag is determined by a choreography of fashion. The effeminate man does not ‘cross-dress’ but rather ‘cross-gestures’”

o In Mixed Bag, how are our costumes, bodily movements/gestures, and voice related? How might they be further scrambled (eg, dressing femme but acting butch) and/or clarified? The last call-and-response could be clarified vocally in gendered character terms, for instance.

· “an insult absorbed and reconfigured as a badge of honor” (376)

· Butler – “it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses” – Gere – “an act of resistance, a reversal of conventions, a refusal to obey the law” (376)

· the need to embody the cliches FULLY: David performing this paper at a job talk -“A test session with scholar friends...proved a dismal failure...I found myself too shy to perform the gestures full force. My limp wrist was halfhearted, my eyes more furtive than coy. I was sweating. Somehow the academic situation seemed to intensify the citational force of masculinist gestural injunctions, and I was supremely aware of their gender normative weight bearing down upon me. But then, on the day of the talk, anger rose in me like a clean-burning flame...My limp wrist became unpredictably tricky, an icon of flamboyance, a disorienting beacon. A swivel turn became a whirl of energetic subversion, devilishly unapologetic. While enumerating a list of basic bodily injunctions, I began to interpolate impromptu commentary on the manner in which members of the audience were sitting in their chairs. With particular relish I teased a prominent member of the selection committee about the way he was crossing his legs...I spared no one” (376)

Jose Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications (choreographic comments in italics)

• "Camp and choteo are both styles of performance and reception that rely on humor to examine social and cultural forms...Comedic disidentification accomplishes important cultural critique while at the same time providing cover from, and enabling the avoidance itself of, scenarios of direct confrontation with phobic and reactionary ideologies." (119)
• camp generally tied to queer (white male gay upper/middle class) culture - Sontag
• For Munoz "'camp' is understood not only as a strategy of representation, but also as a mode of enacting self against the pressures of the dominant culture's identity-denying protocols" (120)
• on Olalquiaga: 3 degrees of kitsch re: Latino religious objects - (1) fascination with spirituality of the other (2) empty icon - gaudy bauble (3) "postmodern hybrid, the recycling of a past cultural construct for a present tense" (120)
• camp as the way "a minority culture reappropriates the dominant culture" (121)
• Robertson: camp's affinity with feminist ideas of gender as constructed, performed, and enacted.
• On a scene where a bodega clerk mistakes a character as being Afr-Am: "Latinas come in all colors, nena." "humorously challenges racist depictions of Latinas within and outside of the Latino/a community" (125)
• spoof on women-in-prison B movies: "What is also relevant about the recycling of this site is the juxtaposition of seeing these particular Latinas, characters who are quirkier and more complicated than any image that Hollywood has been able to invent when trying to represent Latinas within this standardized backdrop" (125)
• overdubbing text from Audre Lorde and Monique Wittig (lesbian theorists) over actual women's prison movie (125)
• overdubbing to attach new meaning could be a musical/sound technique
• drag: "register both outside of and inside of the erotics of butch/femme" (127)
• Eve Sedgwick: Cross-identification as a standard procedure for queers. "queer is a moment of perpetual flux, a movement that is eddying and turbulent." Queer derived from "across" (hey, like abhinaya!) - "understood as a mode of identifications that is as relational as it is oblique"
• Carol McD - have the stereotypes talk to each other (as in Round 3, transitions)
• If identity is relational - what is our relationship to the audience? How might we rope them in, make them understand their complicity with perpetuating or exploding certain stereotypes? What of the diss-embodied soundtrack with the lascivious audience members?
• a historical condition (pre-cuban revolution) - "'always the same story...violencia y amor' that unites the four women across their differences"
• same exact words as in the SUNOH chakradar! What unites the four of us across our differences? What unites the different characters in the show across their differences? How do we pull this out in the show?
• musical genre: "The choice of a Mexican ranchera [for a Hollywood musical number] is indicative of Latina camp's ability to index and reclaim cliched and sentimental moments and tropes across latinidad."
• "Troyano's strategic use of camp allows her film and its characters to reinhabit these stereotypes, both calling attention to the inaccuracy of these representations and 'fixing' such representation from the inside by filling in these representational husks with complicated, antiessentialist, emotionally compelling characters" (127)
• "Camp is a form of artificial respiration; it breathes new life into old situations. Camp, then, is more than a worldview; it is a strategic response to the breakdown of representation that occurs when a queer, ethnically marked, or other subject encounters his or her inability to fit within the majoritarian representational regime...Camp is a practice of suturing different lives, of reanimating, through repetition with a difference, a lost country or moment that is relished and loved. Although not innately politically valenced, it is a strategy that can do positive identity- and community-affirming work" (128)
• repetition (butler), reclaiming (jack smith), recycling (olalquiaga)
• ref: Sue Ellen Case, "Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic"
• Camp strategies include "artifice, wit, irony, and exaggeration" "parody and pastiche" (130)
• Kate Davy, paraphrasing Wayne Dynes: "Camp is always represented with an invisible wink. But instead of realizing the promise and threat of its subversive potential for imagining and inscribing an 'elsewhere' for alternative social and sexual realities, the wink of Camp (re)assures its audiences of the ultimate harmlessness of its play, its palatability for bourgeois sensibilities...Camp is neither good nor bad, it is just more or less effectively deployed." (130)
• on Carmelita Tropicana's Milk of Amnesia: "Carmelita's drag performance...is calibrated also to represent and parody identities across class, national, and generational lines" (131)
• "No one is let off the hook; the ironic and sharp attacks on Cuban and Cuban-American racism, sexism, and general hypocrisy are not retracted" (133)
• "When Pingalito warns the audience not to believe everything they read, he signifies upon the condition of second-generation Cuban Americans who have to juggle, decipher, and translate propaganda and anecdotal evidence in order to 'know' their native land" (133)
• || our relationship to the courtesans
• Homi Bhabha: "colonial mimicry as a form of imitation that resembles, but never quite succeeds in reproducing, the colonizer's image." Can be used strategically: "a fascimile that misses because it is 'not quite/not white'" and thus menaces the dominant paradigm (133)
• choteo: as "tearing, talking, throwing, maligning, spying, and playing" (135)
• Performance artist adopts the mantra, 'Your Kunst is your Waffen' (Art is your Weapon), then does "a trilingual medley that weaves German and Cuban songs together. Her repertoire includes the folk classic 'Guantanamera,' 'Que sera, sera,' and 'Oh, Tannenbaum.' This musical number is a choteo of multiculturalism, internationalism, and hybridity" (138)
• Choteo revels in the chaotic, the ambivalent, the 'untidy.' (138)
• Carmelita's "mode of hybridity" is "a survivalist strain of self-production...not a celebration of a fixed identity...not a style of internationalism or cosmopolitanism" (139)
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam: "The Hybrid diasporic subject is confronted with the 'theatrical' challenge of moving, as it were, among the diverse performative modes of sharply contrasting cultural and ideological worlds" (139)
• undoing the "traditional political notion of identity politics grounded in a totalized, stable, fixed subject" (139)
• the fragmented shifting of character in Mixed Bag undermines authenticity, fixed identity
• our onstage costume changes also show the constructedness and performativity of identity, the process of fabricating the self
• "dominant culture is mimicked, mocked, and finally worked until its raw material can be recycled to ends that are female, Latina, and queer-affirmative. Popular forms are disidentified with, which means parodied with campy extravagance or heckled by this mode of dissidence for majoritarian culture" (141)

CREATIVE IDEAS/APPLYING THEORY:

Rewriting coaching helpless victim scene to complicate the stereotype, bringing in race and class: Reveal that the plastic mannikin is from Costco. "Do you like it? It looks designer, but I got it from Costco! China makes such good imitations these days" (I'll be in my Chinese shirt as I say this.)

What if in addition to asking her to be sexy I tell her to be more ethnic (put on a big snakey bindi made of cardboard?), play up the exotic helpless flower thing ("But don't talk with an Indian accent! People find that threatening or weird. You have to look ethnic and American at the same time.")
Also, maybe I speak in Chinese instead of English during the judgmental valley girl part.

Ways to implicate the audience:

Scream in the audience's face/ears as little girl so that they become complicit with Shy's silencing of me. Use gross audience comments during the end of Shy's helpless victim section, when she sticks out her chest? Weave audience commentary (the Indian classical traditionalist, the exoticizing white gaze, the sexualizing gaze, the skeptical feminist, the gender conservative) throughout the soundscore? Do so in rhythm?

Music/soundscore:

Weave in more musical cliches in a more obvious way? (For example, make the surmandal obnoxiously repeat 5 times instead of 2.) Reference more musical styles (Bollywood, hip hop, pop/bad fusion, children's songs) to reflect the hybridity of identity being performed.

Identity: who performs what (and why?)

Does Shy ever perform butch? Does Cyn ever perform female-sexualized? Does each of us portray the characters that we will later do in the show, or are we more fluid in how we occupy identity? Can we put in the widow character from Ranri?

pre-show

Before the show, the audience were encouraged to fill out cards with the following prompt:

"Please write one or more stereotype or cliche that you may have had to personally confront, engage with, turn upside down, negate, reinforce, groan about, put up with, laugh about..."

Here are a few of the responses:

On the back of the cards Carole designed a "wallpaper" of cliches that we are dealing with in the show.

The audience stereotypes were fed under a live-feed by Carole, underneath the silhouette of Sandra "getting dressed" and next to a larger scrim behind which Cynthia and I were getting dressed and warming up for the show. There was a pre-show announcement, a blackout, and then Mixed Bag started.

Questions for feedback:

1. how does the audience investigating their own cliches and stereotypes connect to the show?

2. what do you feel about the question? is there another question that gets to the root of what we are doing, or another way to phrase the same question that is clearer?

3. If we can, are you interested in having a pre-show?

4. Any questions, ideas or opinions not included 1-3?

Music for The Thorn the Leaf and the Butterfly, part 1

The Thorn the Leaf And the Butterfly, Part 1 from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

Loren and I have been working on this. The music has been superimposed here on old video, so it doesn't always synch where I planned it to, but it's pretty close!

Questions:

1. how does the sound lead you to experience the piece?

2. Can you understand the text? do you want to understand the text?

3. any ideas/suggestions for enhancing the sound in general?

4. what kind of sound can follow this for Anj's face dance?

5. any other thoughts?

Shy

Saiyaan Moraa Preet Bataao (Ravi's thumri)

Ravi composed a thumri, about 1-2 min of which are used for Shyamala's helpless victim character in Mixed Bag. The full song, which is sung by a male in falsetto (a practice Peter Manuel notes as indicative of courtesan's influence in his scholarship on thumri), may be useful elsewhere in the show. Please take a listen:

 
Music and lyrics: Ravindra Deo
Voice: Neal Bharati


Lyrics (loosely based on Ksettraya's "I didn't say a word" as rewritten by Cyn):

Saiyaan moraa , preet bataao
Oh my darling, tell me that you love me/ Oh Darling, tell me (why), Love.

nit rahat soutan ke jaarii/ jai kii pudiyaa bhar bhar mari
always with other woman/He showers me with this magic again and again

Bolo, hamse na bolo/ pirai mori nain saari
talk, don’t talk to me/my eyes are sore with weeping

aasamaan se bundariyaa kaari/ girataa hai baadara /aangan laaj daarii
from the sky are dark droplets, falling down are the clouds, and shame/honor my body

badaraa girataa kaari/bundariya laaj daari
The clouds are falling down/honor/shame/shyness from droplets

tan badan mat ( )jaarii/moraa mayura kahat bhaarii
And as I lay there, body unmoving, the peacocks shrieking wildly

main ghabaraauun, dar dar jaauun
I fear, i get very afraid

bhor bhaii aur, saanjh dhalii
The sun has risen and it is evening's dawn,

jab bhii koii, aahat hoii,
whenever from anything, the sound of a foot step

manavaa moraa bhaage
my heart races like a peacock

QUESTIONS:
(1) How, if at all, might you imagine this song being used elsewhere in the show? One idea was to have Loren process it for Marks (formerly skin remix).

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."

Mixed Bag rehearsal run with music

Here is a raw rehearsal run of Mixed Bag with Ravi's music. Not very clean, and you can't see Shyamala's victim in the audience material, but it'll give an idea.

Password is "cliche"


And here's the music:
Mixed Bag draft by cynthialinglee

QUESTIONS:
(1) How might you see Anj in here as a 3rd live performer?
(2) Any feedback on the music?
(3) How does this relate to the rest of the show material? Where might you put this in the overall show?
(4) What techniques do you notice for dealing with the cliches? Do you feel the piece subverts or enforces the cliches?
(5) What relationships do you observe between the performers?

WTF?!?/Disciple

I worked more on developing the character of the self-flagellating, swearing disciple in the expanded cliches section of Mixed Bag.

Here are two versions, back to back. The password is "WTF?!?" In the first, I would be dancing without speaking, but am reciting bols here to keep time. In the second, I am speaking text.



I thought this character needed more choreographic detail, particularly because she is potentially so offensive. The movement is now in relation to the underlying rhythmic composition. For the text, I was playing with scrambling the relationship between word and movement, starting with the two being aligned, but then later mixing them up, ie, having swearing vocally while physically apologizing. Shyamala would be sitting at my left as the good disciple with her hands in namaskar reciting the bols the entire time I am doing this, except for the very end where she turns into her helpless victim character.

QUESTIONS:
(1) Do you like this choreography better than the earlier, loosely improvised version?
(2) Do you think the vocalized text adds, or would it be better in silence with only Shyamala speaking the bols? Or should I speak the bols with Shyamala?