Cabaret Travels: Cyn's Written Response #1

Since cabaret is a pretty different topic than my normal research focus and creative practice, I cast the net pretty wide for this opening round.  I decided to focus on cabaret in the United States, specifically the Harlem cabaret scene, and I did some reading on the female blues tradition.  

Multiple Genealogies of American Cabaret

Associated with performance forms as disparate as sketch comedy, minstrelsy, drag balls, and jazz, cabaret is notoriously difficult to define.  Indeed, one can compellingly argue that cabaret is “a site, rather than a form, of cultural production” (Tenorio, 34) whose combination of late-night dining (usually with alcohol) and performance invokes particular modes of spectatorship and participation. I have found it useful to trace some of the multiple genealogies of cabaret as it developed in the United States in relation to European and African-American influences.  My writing on this is largely indebted to Shane Vogel’s The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance.[1]

            
The official “origin” of modern cabaret performance is the Chat Noir in the Montmartre district of Paris, a bohemian tavern founded by poets and artists in 1881: "Distinguishing themselves as a cabaret artistique, the Chat Noir and subsequent imitators adapted minor forms of entertainment -- popular songs, shadow plays, marionette shows,  pantomimes, dance, and skits -- and endowed them with an oppositional edge in modernist performances of political and social satire, cultural commentary, and aesthetic critique" (Vogel, 45).  Common cabaret conventions included the combination of tavern and performance stage, a collage-like rather than single-narrative approach to performance, physical proximity of audience and performers, and literary wordplay and irony (Vogel, 45).  Cabaret artistiques soon spread to “Barcelona, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich, Munich, and Moscow” and strongly “shaped the institutions and aesthetic principles of the Continental avant-garde in the decades” before the First World War” (45). 

          
In 1911, Jesse Lasky, a vaudeville impresario and Hollywood mogul, created the Folies Bergère in New York, which he claimed to be the first cabaret in the United States.  Named after a famous Parisian music hall, the Folies Bergère was meant to emulate European sophistication for a white, middle-class, mixed-gender American audience.  Lasky’s endeavor points out a key distinction between European and American cabaret: "While European cabaret was distinguished from popular amusements by its association with the modernist avant-garde, its performances of political satire and cultural critique, and its bohemian audience, cabaret in the United States was initially associated with commercialism, spectacle, and popular consumption" (Vogel, 46).  This distinction, however, can easily be over-reified: certainly American cabaret can contain political critique, while European cabaret can have commercial aspects.  Lasky’s Folies Bergère typifies a common historical understanding of American cabaret performance: "a tangential, even strictly nominal, relationship to European cabaret; an image of middle-class sophistication and consumerism; the cultivation of intimacy between performers and spectators; an emphasis on architecture and spatial practices as a way of characterizing the cabaret; performances that borrowed from the styles of vaudeville, music halls, and other popular amusements; and an excited self-consciousness about the new and modern character of the night.  American cabaret was thus imagined as an institution of cosmopolitanism" (Vogel, 40).

            
Despite Lasky’s claims, Vogel notes that European immigrant communities in the United States had formed cabarets in ethnic enclaves throughout New York as early as the late 1800s-early 1900s.  Moreover, many black, working-class traditions from the late 19^th century have deeply shaped American cabaret.  Investigating these predominantly African-American traditions, which include the concert saloon, the jook joint, the professional club, and the black and tan saloon, offer a very different genealogy of cabaret in the United States than a Eurocentric one. 

          
The concert saloon of the 1860s-90s was an urban phenomenon, a male-oriented drinking establishment with “waiter girls” that had musical and at times theatrical performance (Vogel, 50).  Its rural counterpart was the jook joint, “a central institution of secular black dance and music [that] developed during and after Reconstruction by rural sharecroppers and migratory workers in the South” (Vogel, 51).  These two contexts were connected through the “Great Migration” of black southerners to northern cities in the early 20^th century, as well as traveling black performance circuits that moved between urban and rural locations.  The professional club was geared towards performers in the business for their own after-hours entertainment (Vogel, 52), while the black and tan saloons were “working class concert saloons or bars that encouraged black-white social mixing and opportunities for interracial dancing” (Vogel, 53).  This family of African-American pre-cabaret performance practices emerged in the historical moment of post-slavery (made illegal in 1865) where Jim Crow racial segregation was widespead.

Affective and Spatial Practices of the (Harlem) Cabaret

If it is difficult to identify a distinct stylistic genre of cabaret performance, then what makes the cabaret unique?  Vogel argues that “public intimacy” is crucial to the cabaret (41). Spatially, spectators and performers in a cabaret are in close proximity with the audience seated at tables close to and surrounding the stage, which often doubles as dance-floor.  Rather than the frontal view and fourth wall of a theatrical proscenium stage, in the cabaret, spectators’ and performer’s gazes are directed in criss-crossing, scattered sightlines that create multiple foci and a “play of looks” between spectators, between performer and spectator (64).  The “official” performance is always in competition with the “other” performance of sociality between the spectators.  As such, the cabaret is characerized by a spectatorship of distraction and interruption.  According to Vogel, "It is this interplay of closeness and distance, acceptance and refusal, connection and disconnection, concentration and distraction that shapes the cabaret as an intimate formation, the perpetual disorganization and reorganization of sound, bodies, sightlines, and feelings as the performer competes with the audience itself for its attention" (Vogel, 70).

In this context, performers developed strategies of “creating direct, fast connections with the audience” (70) -- think of the strategies that stand-up comics and emcees use to engage audiences.  “Not ordered by the logics of realism or the codes of bourgeois theater, cabaret is a nonrepresentational, nonmatrixed performance,” one in which performers represent themselves and “occup[y] the same time and space as the audience” (Vogel, 29).

But what does Vogel mean by intimacy?  He posits the public intimacy of the cabaret “as a kind of trespass,” intimacy as temporary and provisional, intimacy that enables “social and sexual contacts that were transient, contingent, non-normative, and emergent” (Vogel, 22).  These are “criminal intimacies,” as formulated by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warne, that "‘bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation’" (Vogel, 22).  As such, the queerness of the cabaret’s intimacy-effects lie in its challenge of normative structures: "Intimacy, in other words, threatens (promises?) to undo the routines and routes, the familiar patterns and rote narratives, that organize psychic and social lives.  For those already excluded from dominant narratives and normative systems of kinship, family, and social belonging, the rewards of such risks in forging public intimacies can be nothing less than a vital mode of existence" (Vogel, 42).

Tenorio contends that the cabaret, as a queer counterpublic, enabled race-mixing, class-mixing, and gender play (40).  These convergences, however, were not a straightforward defiance of segregation, but shot through with uneven power relations.  They included the practice of “slumming,” or whites attending “black cabarets” in search of adventurous bohemian experiences, and the “segregated cabarets” (of which the Cotton Club is one famous example), where white audiences watched black performers in performative spectacles that were often scripted and staged by white writers, composers, and directors (Vogel, 82).

The Women-Loving Blues

At this point, I’d like to shift gears and zero in on a specific performance tradition associated with the cabaret, the blues.  In particular, I’m intrigued by the feminist and queer resonances that the songs, performances, and lives of African-American blueswomen such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith seemed to embody. 

             
According to Angela Davis, “the [blues] musical genre is called the ‘blues’ not only because it employs a musical scale containing ‘blue notes’ [flattened or bent notes] but also because it names, in myriad ways, the social and psychic afflictions and aspirations of African Americans” (Davis, 33).  In her eyes, the blues reflected the changed living conditions of black Americans post-slavery, who were still subject to institutional racism, economic impoverishment, and political disenfranchisement, but who could exercise a new freedom in terms of sexual self-determination and individual travel (Davis, 8).  The female blues tradition gave voice to the realities of working-class African-American women, with “[l]yrics often explicitly address[ing] sexual self-determination, extramarital relationships, homosexuality, working-class experience, and women’s social oppression” (Vogel, 170).  Privileging a raw perspective on love and sexuality that was at odds with the middle-class, heteronormative romantic love glorified in popular music, "[t]he blues women openly challenged the gender politics implicit in traditional cultural representations of marriage and heterosexual love relationships.  Refusing, in the blues tradition of raw realism, to romanticize romantic relationships, they instead exposed the stereotypes and explored the contradictions of those relationships.  By doing so, they redefined women’s ‘place.’  They forged and memorialized images of tough, resilient, and independent women who were afraid neither of their own vulnerability nor of defending their right to be respected as autonomous human beings" (Davis, 41).

The women portrayed in the blues were usually portrayed as independent women – rarely as wives and almost never as mothers (Davis, 13).  In addition, certain blues women portrayed nonnormative sexuality and gender in their lyrics, performances, and lives, specifically “women-loving women,” the term used within the community to describe working-class black women who engaged in same-sex sexual relations and the “bulldagger, a term used to describe a masculine women-loving woman” (Tenorio, 34).  It is possible that this portrayal was at least partially strategic, for bisexuality (which was considered more acceptable than lesbianism) was seen as being bold and adventurous by many audiences.  Acccording to Davis,"[s]uch famous blues singers of the time like Bessie Smith, Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Gladys Bentley, and Alberta Hunter purposefully seemed to present the image of themselves as bisexual, or purveyors of same-sex female relationships, in order to spark the interest of their audience’ (37)

          
Perhaps the most famous example of a queer-inflected blues song is Ma Rainey’s “Prove it on Me Blues” (1929), whose original advertisement includes a large, masculine-presenting women flirting with two women on the street while the police surveil the scene from the background.

The lyrics, which Hazel Carby describe as “vacillat[ing] between the subversive hidden activity of women loving women [and] a public declaration of lesbianism” (Carby, 16) are as follows:

Went out last night, had a great big fight
Everything seemed to go on wrong
I looked up, to my surprise
The gal I was with was gone.

Where she went, I don't know
I mean to follow everywhere she goes;
Folks say I'm crooked. I didn't know where she took it
I want the whole world to know.

They say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me;
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.

It's true I wear a collar and a tie,
Makes the wind blow all the while
Don't you say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
You sure got to prove it on me.

Say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me.

I went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
It must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.
Wear my clothes just like a fan
Talk to the gals just like any old man

Cause they say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me.

Another blueswoman, Gladys Bentley, was known for wearing masculine attire, top hat and tails, during her performances: 
 
In addition, “B.D. Women’s Blues” (1935) by Lucille Bogan, aka Bessie Jackson, also gave voice to the bulldagger or bulldyke of the era in the classic AAB blues lyric structure.  Her lyrics envision a time when men will no longer be necessary ("they ain't going to need no men"), where B.D. women embody masculine traits of physicality, roughness, independence, working and earning money.

Comin' a time, B.D. women they ain't going to need no men
Comin' a time, B.D. women they ain't going to need no men
'Cause the way they treat us is a lowdown and dirty sin

B.D. women, you sure can't understand
B.D. women, you sure can't understand
They got a head like a sweet angel and they walk just like a natural man

B.D. women, they all done learned their plan
B.D. women, they all done learned their plan
They can lay their jive just like a natural man

B.D. women, B.D. women, you know they sure is rough
B.D. women, B.D. women, you know they sure is rough
They all drink up plenty whiskey and they sure will strut their stuff

B.D. women, you know they work and make their dough
B.D. women, you know they work and make their dough
And when they get ready to spend it, they know they have to go 

Creative Assignment Ideas:
(1) Figure out a way to formally translate the criss-crossing glances, distracted spectatorship, and public intimacy of the cabaret into a dance-for-camera work.
(2) Create a choreographic study set to a "queer" blues song that combines abhinaya and Indian dance vocabulary with some of the Africanist aesthetic principles as outlined by Brenda Dixon Gottschild:

1. embracing the conflict (contrariety, difference, dissonance)
2. polycentrism/polyrhythm
3. high-affect juxtaposition
4. ephebism (vital aliveness, power, drive, attack, flexibility, ass. with youth)
5. the aesthetic of cool

Bibliography

Carby, Hazel V.  1999.  Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America.  London: Verso.
Davis, Angela Y..  1999.  Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.  New York: Vintage Books.
Dixon Gottschild, Brenda.  2001.  "Stripping the Emperor: The Africanist Presence in American Concert Dance." In moving history/dancing cultures, eds. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 332-341.
Tenorio, Samantha C.  2010.  "Women-Loving Women: Queering Black Urban Space during the Harlem Renaissance."  In The UCI Undergraduate Research Journal.  http://www.urop.uci.edu/journal/journal10/06_tenorio.pdf
Vogel, Shane.  2009.  The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
"Harlem Rennaissance."  Encyclopedia Brittanica.  http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/255397/Harlem-Renaissance

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[1] In his 2009 book, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance, Vogel utilizes performance and literary theory to analyze the performative practices of the 1920s-30s Harlem cabarets in New York and the literary production of the Cabaret School of the Harlem Renaissance.  The Harlem Renaissance, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, was “a blossoming (c. 1918–37) of African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, and the most influential movement in African American literary history” (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/255397/Harlem-Renaissance).  With a distinctly queer lens that is keenly attentive to issues of race and class, Vogel argues that the Cabaret School offered critical alternatives to both the primitivism of the Negro vogue and racial uplift ideology. The 1920s ‘Negro vogue’ reflected “[g]rowing white and corporate interest and engagement with black music and culture” (Vogel 2009: 2) and was associated with “black sensuousness, exhibitionism, primitivism, and sensationalism” (Vogel 2009: 3).  On the other hand, uplift ideology “of the early twentieth century sought to ground the struggle for racial equality and the struggle against white supremacy in the material and moral achievements and possibilities of the black middle class” and was associated with Victorian-inflected notions such as “self-help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth” (Vogel 2009: 4). 

Cabaret Project Babli- written assignment 1

Princess Amina

Princess Amina was a woman who lived in Munich In 1960s. I first found out about her by the name of Lady Moynihan. Her name, where she was from, and what she did was a mystery – filled with sex, drugs, and dance. This much is clear, she was a dancer who performed in nightclubs. A bellydancer?

Searching Lady Moynihan online, I come across an new item in “The Times” from 1965:

“A young Malayan belly dancer became a peeress today with the death of Lord Moynihan, a former chairman of Britain's Liberal party. 
The new Lady Moynihan is the former Shirin Berry, known professionally as Princess Amina, who was married in 1958 to Anthony P.A. Moynihan, the Baron's son, at a secret Moslem ceremony in Tangier, Morocco. 
A year later they were married again in England. Mr Moynihan, a devotee of rock'n'roll, resigned his reserve commission in the Brigade of Guards and played the bongo drums at his wife's worldwide cabaret appearances. [The Times]”

http://webofevil.livejournal.com/717433.html (22.5.2013) (I had seen an archive of the actual THE TIMES, but could not access it anymore)

Her names and origins multiply as I keep searching. She disappears and reappears in multiple contexts, under different names. Yet what is constant- she dances, in nightclubs, cabarets- she is known as a bellydancer.

On the wikipedia page of Baron Anthony Moynihan, for example, she is called Shirin Berry appears. She is said to be a Malaysian dancer who lived and worked in Australia. There she met the son of a British Baron, Tony Moynihan, who played the banjo. They performed together, and got married. She became known as Princess Amina.

Married in Marocco? Danced in Australia? Malaysian?

I continue the search, this time typing in Shirin Berry-- and get some pictures!

http://www.google.at/imgres?imgurl=http://pictures.historicimages.net/pictures/_2/1942/1941066.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.ebay.com/itm/1958-Press-Photo-Tony-Moynihan-and-wife-Shirin-Berry-/251067537807&h=1000&w=783&sz=88&tbnid=3id6GCMLnawbmM:&tbnh=88&tbnw=69&zoom=1&usg=__OX8Mk3k0aUi8ormCvwm_zr06Mmo=&docid=UF9DVUJj3NCMuM&sa=X&ei=D-ucUffOGYqTtQby8YCQBw&ved=0CEgQ9QEwAQ&dur=3512 (22.5.2013)

I find an Italian newspaper article from 1962 about a Pakistani dancer appearing in Rome- accompanied by her husband Anthony Moynihan! Ok, now she is Pakistani!!!

http://www.mediatecaroma.it/mediatecaRoma/ricerca.html?show=14&index=854&jsonVal=&filter=&query=archiveName%3AluceFondoVedo&id=IL0030001619&refId=11 (22.5.2013)

Is this really the same woman in all the pictures?

Ok, now, with the names, Princess Amina, Moynihan, and Berry I search further--- and come across an article about a girl from Karachi! Bobbie Berry, daughter of the Anglo-Indian widow Mrs Berry, and the African American sailor Gunboat Jack!

In a quite beautifully written article in a Pakistani called “POETIC LICENCE: Of Gunboat Jack and Princess Amina” by Kaleem Omar (http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_31-10-2002_pg3_7, 22.5.2013) I finally read what seems like a somewhat reliable version of her story.

She grew up in Karachi, finished school, and then disappeared for some years (to Australia, I ask in my mind??)- only to reappear in Karachi

“in a most dramatic fashion one day in 1963 when Bobbie Berry suddenly (...) to perform at the Le Gourmet nightclub as a belly dancer billed as “Princess Amina”, accompanied on the bongo drums by the Right Honourable Tony Moynihan, if you please.

Tony Moynihan was the eldest son of Lord Moynihan, a member of the British peerage. His younger brother was Colin Moynihan, who went on to become a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Tony Moynihan, however, was a ne’er-do-well and a drifter to boot.

But still didn’t quite explain just what the son of a member of the House of Lords was doing playing the bongo drums with a belly dance act in Karachi. The mystery was solved when it was revealed that Tony Moynihan had married Bobbie Berry a couple of years earlier and — by some mysterious process — had transformed her into the belly dancing sensation, Princess Amina.

Her performances at Le Gourmet electrified Karachi’s nightclub crowd. Princess Amina wasn’t just another belly dancer;; she was the ultimate belly dancer — a performer of dazzling virtuosity and seemingly inexhaustible stamina. Compared to her, even such belly dancing greats as Egypt’s Samia Gamal were nothing. What gave Princess Amina’s dancing its special quality were partly her skill, partly her supreme physical fitness, and partly the sheer aura of sensuousness she radiated.”

They disappeared again, supposedly to the “Far East” and then back to London, where Moynihan, after his father's death took his seat in the House of Lords (see The Times above).

They got divorced, and Lord Moynihan apparently consecutively married two other belly dancers and passed away in 1991, at age 55 in Manila. He is variously described as a “bongo-drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer,” and a key witness for the American Drug Enforcement Agency (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/6604750/Lord-Moynihan.html, 22.5.2013)

By and large, her time in Munich, where she crossed paths with my mom remains a mystery to me. However, I would be interested to pursue the oral history of this nomadic cabaret dancer, who, after disappearing from Munich reappears in Italy... where, at least according to the 2002 article by Kaleem Omar she still lived with her second husband, whose name I could not locate, so I lost her trace for now. (http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_31-10-2002_pg3_7, 22.5.2013)

Princess Amina is the individual artist you interests me, because it opens a space to create a character who is nomadic, a fascinating woman, and allows me to inteface nightclub performance with exoticism, and the attraction of the exotic.

However, her reception and history reflects an image of the cabaret performance being conflated with nightclub settings and the kind of “light” entertainment associated with such establishments. This image is rather narrow, even as the French word cabaret des indeed refer to an establishment serving alcohol (http://www.musicals101.com/cabaret.htm, 23.5.2013). However, in approaching a creative grappling with a persona like Princess Amina I am interested in older and more complicted histories of cabaret, that highligt political subversiveness over its commercial sexappeal as a performance methodology.

I am hence here looking towards the European origins of the cabaret, namely the “ cabaret artistique” which started in 1881 in Paris at the Le Chat noir, and the literary cabarets that have a strong lineage in the Berlin, Vienna and Munich, which starts in 1901 (http://www.kabarettarchiv.at/Ordner/history.htm, 23.5.2013). I am here particularly drawn to the literary-political cabaret of the 1930s.

The cabaret artistique and Le Chat Noir, it is said, attracted well known, avant-garde artists and a regular audience, an a small, interactive space. John Kenrick writes that

Performers got to test new material, audiences enjoyed a stimulating evening for the price of a few drinks, and owners could count on a steady flow of regular customers – a win-win-win proposition. Le Chat Noir attracted such notables as Maupassant, Debussy and Satie. 

(http://www.musicals101.com/cabaret.htm)

While the cabaret as a perormance mode and space spread throughout Europe, it became especially strong in Berlin during the Weimar Time, after censorship was loosened:

The overthrow of the kaiser, the revolutionary tumult that resulted in the establishment of a Social-Democratic republic, and the hardships of the inflation period were the troubled waters in which cabaretists could fish with spectacular success.  Berlin became a maelstrom, sucking in the energies and talents of the rest of Germany. . . What New York in the 1920s was to jazz and speakeasies, Berlin was to cabaret.
“Laurence Senelick, Cabaret Performance, Volume II: Europe 1920-1940 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 25.

Also cited in http://www.musicals101.com/cabaret.htm)

The German Cabaret went through a revival again after WWII, where it expanded into the radio and TV. I remember Cabaret being part of Saturevening TV entertainment we watched at home. However, since the late 1990s Kabarett is struggling to compete with Comedyshows..... (http://www.mediaculture-online.de/fileadmin/bibliothek/hoerburger_nihilisten/hoerburger_nihilisten.pdf, 28.5.2013)

To this day, the German word KABARETT has political and satirical resonances, and to me as a German speaker means something different than the cabaret- even though they have the same roots. At a point of intersection between European, South Asian and Anglo-phone conception of the cabaret, I am hence interested in approaching Princess Amina's story through the performative mode inspired by the German Kabarett tradition or “Kleinkunst” which combines text, perofmance arts and music aiming to comment on a parody the current socio-political condtion of a given country or society, critically, or funny, entertaining or aesthetically- its all possible (http://mephisto976.uni-leipzig.de/themen/beitrag/artikel/cabaret-oder-kabarett.html#share , 28.5.2013). 

Cabaret Project Assignment 1

Part 1

Find a geographical region of your choice, which has a history of cabaret and choose a particular artist/ any other aspect that resonates with you from that region.

Write a response to what excites you about it.

Written response due on May 22.

Part 2

Come up with a creative response based on your research and identified area of interest.

Assignment due on June 12. 

Long-Distance Cabaret Project

We're very excited to be embarking on a new long-distance creative exchange with Delhi-based director, Aditee Biswas.  This project, entitled Cabaret Travels, explores cabaret’s translations across South Asia, Europe, and the US.

REVISED SCHEDULE
ASAP: Written Assignment #3
Oct 7: Feedback on Written Assignment #3 due
Oct 9: Shy gives Creative Assignment #3
Nov 1: Creative Assignment #3 due
Nov 8: Aditee posts dramaturgical connections (perhaps this one takes a look at everything created thus far?)
Nov 10-23: Create ½ way online documentation (sharing tools with the field/public that’s replicable for other people in the ensemble the field) AND distribution plan 
Nov 24-30: disseminate

ORIGINAL SCHEDULE

May 1-June 14: Aditee gives Assignment 1

May 22: Written Assignment Due

May 29: Written Feedback Due

June 12: Creative Assignment Due

June 19: Creative Feedback Due; Aditee posts "Director's Post"

June 26: Babli gives Reading Assignment 2

July 10: Written Assignment 2 Due

July 14: Babli gives Creative Assignment 2

Aug 6: Creative Assignment 2 Due

Aug 13: Feedback Due

Aug 15: Aditee posts "Director's Post" 2

Aug 20: Shy gives Reading Assignment 3

Sept 11: Written Assignment 3 Due

Sept 16: Shy gives Creative Assignment 3

Sept 30: Creative Assignment 3 Due

Oct 7: Feedback Due

Oct 9: Aditee posts "Director's Post"

----------------

Oct 10-Nov 15: create ½ way online documentation, sharing tools with the field/public that’s replicable for other people in the ensemble the field, not just highlights

Nov 15-30: disseminate

Cyber Manifesto: (Almost) Final Cut

Check out Prum's complete cut of "Yes to Each Other: A Cyber Manifesto"!  This will probably be our last round of edits before Prum finalizes the piece, so do weigh in now before May 9, 2013.  (Please note that the image quality suffered slightly in video compression, so while certain parts are somewhat pixellated and grainy, it is not to the extent that we see here.)

password: "multiple"

Yes to Each Other: A Cyber-Manifesto

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) How do you feel about the trajectory of the piece?  Is there anywhere that your attention lags?  If so, do you have ideas for how to fix it?
(2) What is the meaning/content that you get out of the work? What do you understand about PNC from the work?
(3) How might you imagine this video being used?  (For example, as introduction at a lec-dem, promotional material, screening at film festivals, as part of live performance...)
(4) Any other thoughts and/or requests for changes? (Does it aesthetically gel together?  Are there any small tweaks we can do to make it stronger?)

rapture/rupture Performance

Here's the first performance of rapture/rupture.  We're still working on creating music for it.

password: rapture

rapture/rupture from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

rapture/rupture (rehearsal footage)

Here's is the latest version of the padam/ghazal/thumri from the Subversive Gestures Loop process, which is now titled "rapture/rupture."


password: "mirror"

Manifesto beginning: new approach

Password: manifesto
Manifesto beginning from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

Please let Prum and I know if this new direction he is going in is working for you!

29 Subversive Gestures Loop, Padam complete Draft

After discussing the three studies in the last post, we felt the Padam was the most incomplete and needed to be explored before writing about them all. So here is a competed draft of the Padam.
 
The assignment again was to create a critical, gender-subverting padam that uses repeating lines of poetic text and abhinaya.  Incorporate non-Indian, autobiographical material.

Not Enough Padam Complete Draft from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


password:  loop


Feedback Questions:
1.  What parts are the most interesting to you and why?
2.  What parts do you lose attention and why?
3.  What do you feel about the relationship of the text to the movement? 
4.  What music, if any, could you imagine with the piece?  Are there ways the existing text could become more musical?
5. Comment on the relation between autobiography and abhinaya in the work.  How is each mobilized?  How are the boundaries of each tested, expanded, or broken, if at all?  
6. Track the performance of gender throughout the work.  You might look at how the physical movement (angika), the costumes (aharya), the text (vachika) shift and change.  I'm also curious what gender the "beloved" reads as.  Do you assume it is a woman or man?  Does your understanding shift throughout the piece?
7.  Comment particularly on the costuming and costume changes -- sequence, timing, and performance.  Are there any changes you would suggest?  Parts that work particularly well?
8. Title ideas?

29 Subversive Gestures, final loop compilations

We decided to flesh out 3 avenues to complete our theory-choreography loop investigations.  

1. deconstruction, Goode-style.  
Repeat same movement phrase (femme) several times, changing the sound/text each time.
2. gat bhav
Create a pantomimed story to a rhythmic background about an intersex nayika
3. padam/thumri
Create a critical, gender-subverting padam that uses repeating lines of poetic text and abhinaya.  Incorporate non-Indian, autobiographical material.

1. Deconstruction, Goode-style:
We spent the longest time on creating various variations for this.
Below are 3 versions of this with differing orders.

a. includes all 6 of our variations.  Password "loop"
Password "loop"
29 loop 6 variations from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


b. includes only the variations that directly relate to Joe Goode's 5 variations.  Password "loop"
29 loop 5 goode variations from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


c.  Shy remixed the order of almost all of the variations for a different feeling.  Password "loop"

29 loop padam first from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

2.  Gat Bhav, intersex nayika
We felt we had already explored this one sufficiently in our last study.  Here it is again.
note, we realized the this stragy doesn't acknowledge or address Cyn’s body/identity as non-India.

Password: "loop" 
  Gender morphing study take 2 from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

3.  Padam/thumri
Create a critical, gender-subverting padam that uses repeating lines of poetic text and abhinaya.  Incorporate non-Indian, autobiographical material.
Password: loop 
Not Enough Padam from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.



QUESTIONS:  
1.  which elements from any of the three studies stand out to you the most?
2.  what is the main concept and/or feeling you get from each study?
3.  do you imagine any of the three studies intersecting or combinging in any way or do you feel they are three distinct approaches?

29 Subversive gestures, choreography response 3: padam

We did some free writing about a woman to woman love, and love between teacher and student.  Cynthia  turned hers into a Padam.

We each embodied the first and third stanza's of the padam.

Here are the videos and below is the padam.  All of the passwords are "loop"

Stanza 1: Cyn

29 padam stanza 1 Cyn from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

Stanza 3: Cyn

29 padam stanza 3 cyn from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

Stanza 1: Shy
29 padam stanza 1 Shy from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


Stanza 3: Shy
29 padam stanza 3 Shy from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.




PADAM: (Pallavi is "not enough"
We did not perform the greyed out part of stanza 1:


I.
Beloved, I brought you into my body
the ghost of your voice
high tinny reciting bols
your peacock proud chest
your kohl-lined eyes

I lost myself touching your feet
my body soft like a sponge
swimming in unknowing
eyes zero in: your hands moving softly
the breath opening of your chest

my hawk’s eye my vulnerable heart
you were my mirror
the precise tilt of your head
your negotiation of soft and sharp
when you moved i moved
me an imperfect copy
you opening up inside of me
but as much as i tried, i was not enough


II.
i was drawn to you as moth to flame
as a parched traveler to water
but i could not fit in your world
filled with laughing housewives and hilsa and mustard oil
i was not [bengali] enough.


III.
one day you said,
you have become very soft,
cynthia, like a bengali woman.
like you.

but i could not be you
my body would erupt with otherness
the stride too large the eyes too small
the questions unasked

and as much as i loved kathak
its hair-prickling rhythms and mathematical precision
its subtle micromovements and emotional transformation
it was still not enough for me
pishi, kathak was not enough
 
IV.
you did not know how to love me and give me my freedom
how to treasure my devotion without giving into 3rd world greed
you did not know that perhaps I would exceed your imagination
and perhaps, pishi, you were not enough


V.
i imagine us in a room together
just you and i
love an open channel between two hearts
counting bols
dancing like and unlike each other

but there is never just a room
there is always the world outside
and in the end, pishi,
our love was not enough.

29 Subversive Gestures Choreography Assignment 3: Not Enough Padam

This is Cyn's choreographic idea 2:

Judith Butler postulates that hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity can be attributed to a melancholic incorporation by heterosexuals of early childhood homosexual attachments:

“she incorporates them as parts of herself, modes of identification, and this means that they come to survive for her as her own character traits. She incorporates them -- makes them, in a way, into her own body, her own bodily sense and comportment, and this incorporation is precisely the opposite of -- and the consequence of -- unacknowledged loss” (121).

Create a melancholic padam about a lost love, in which the beloved is an Indian woman. Start the padam in hyperfeminine Indian garb and physicality. As the lost love is increasingly acknowledged through poetic mourning, have your body language and physicality shift towards being more androgynous and incorporating the physicality of cultures outside of India.

-----------------

In addition add a Pallavi (repeating phrase) of "not enough"
( based on  earlier assignment idea from the second reading loop)
and maybe play with rhythmic and verbal variations (as in the optional portion of Choreographic Assignment 2)

Theory Assignment 3: Krishnan, Butler, and 29 Subversive Gestures

Here is Theory Assignment 3, due on Jan 6!  

• All read Hari Krishnan's "From Gynemimesis to Hypermasculinity: The Shifting Orientations of Male Performers of South Indian Court Dance," Vasu Reddy's interview of Judith Butler, "Troubling Genders, Subverting Identities," and Butler's writing on drag from Gender Trouble. 
• Write responses.
• Come up with ideas for choreographic assignment based on readings.

Response to Choreographic assignment 2: 29 subversive gestures: sound

1.  Below is our response to the Sound part of the assignment, where we assigned sound consequences to the feminine movement gesture sequence from assignment 1.

password: loop

fem gestures n consequences sounds from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
a) How do these sounds shift your understanding of and feeling about the original phrase?
b) What do you think the consequences are?
c) Which parts do you find compelling; which parts confusing?

2. Below is the gendered script for the morphing sequence from Assignment 1.
We noticed that Babli didn't see the parallel intersecting stories of the masculine and feminine characters previously, and so we investigated this more fully here.  Our intention is to subvert conventional abhinaya practice by having the same character switch genders rather than one performer showing two different gendered characters interacting.   This script more or less follows the previous video, except we imagined some clarified transitions and removed the section with the mirror and lipstick so we could have a clearer narrative.

But first, here is the video of the gender morphing story, hopefully clarified now that we've written the script more clearly with intentions for transitions etc.  Watch before reading. We just added this on 1/12/13 so the first two comments below are referring to part 1 above, not to this. 
 password: loop
  Gender morphing study take 2 from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


S/he
The mature, beautiful and rich courtesan (who is well established in her field) emerges languorously from her bath, her skin still moist as servants wave peacock fans at her.  S(he) braids her luxuriously thick, black, long, wavy tresses.

And then s(he) strokes her well groomed beard. (blurred)
and braids her hair and strokes her beard.
braids and strokes, strokes and braids
and strokes

(s)he puts on his yellow silk dhoti and assuredly wraps his princely turban around his well shaped head.

A melodious ghazal drifts in through the window and fills his body with longing. (S)he melts
and s(he) wonders “is my beloved out there, singing to me?” 

“But wait, my beloved thinks I’m a man.”
transition f to m: “I must be a man, I must be a real man.  There must be no doubt about it.”

(s)he: “I am ready!  I will go forth into the world.  Where is he? Ah! Come here my little baklava.”

transition m to f: “here you are, I forgot how beautiful you are!  I can’t look at you, I feel my whole being dissolve into a river of desire.”

s(he): “What? you would like to play a game of dice?  
(s)he: “This is my specialty!”

“What!  I lost? What will you have? An earring? I will give you a small one.”
 S(he) takes off her earring.

S(he): “Is it my turn? I’ve never played dice before. Do you shake it like this?

Transition f to m: “ooh it feels good! harder, faster!  
(s)he “I won!”

s(he): “So, maybe we should go up to my place now?”

Transition back and forth: “oh shit, he thinks I have a penis! how should I act?  What will I do?  Should I act female or male?  I don’t know what to do! etc...” fade out

Choreographic Assignment 2: Subversive Gestures, Sound and Rhythm

Following Meduri's identification of the 3 important elements involved in the improvisation of a Padam -gesture, sound, and rhythm- I have given and assignment for each. Both Meduri and Burt emphasize how the element of vocal sound is important, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to play with some sound possibilities. The gesture will help clarify the work we did in the last assignment even more. The rhythm aspect is optional.

Sound: Inspired by Burt’s interpretation of the war sounds as consequences for the effeminate transgressions, make a list of “consequences” for being “not enough” Create a sound score that somehow reflects the consequences through sounds instead of words. Superimpose over the feminine Kathak sequence that we made in choreographic study 1.

Gesture: Following Babli's idea of scripting gender, we will script out the morphing sequence from study number 1 to clarify the development as we understood it. We will will then work on exaggerating the genders as well as the transitions since not all the different types of transition were visible previously as reflected in Babli's feedback.

Rhythm: Make rhythmic variations on "not good enough" (I am envisioning foot rhythms, and we may do some vocal explorations too. I am imagining expanding "not good enough" in the way that Cynthia expanded "She's a good girl" while sitting in the chair in the Highways version.

Due Thursday Jan 3