Shyamala's response to Cyber Padam Assignment

I created a padam as a conversation between a young woman and her mother. I never managed to create the cyber part, but the piece itself, with a lot of coaching from Cynthia, actually became a part of my solo show, Carrie's Web. Here's the finished version.

Carrie's Web Excerpt: Artesia to her Mother from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

Cynthia's Response to Cyber-Padam Assignment

For my "cyber-padam," I decided to create a sound-score. I thought about what the usual elements of our internet conference calls are: bad reception, overlapping voices, the sounds of typing, and the occasional interruption by Anjali's little daughter Neva.  In addition to referencing some of these sounds literally, I created a more abstract sense of overlapping voices through the use of kathak bols. I took two different compositions - one an amad and one a chakradar, but both based on the syllables "tat tat ta tuka" - that I had learned from my teacher Bandana Sen, and overlapped them.  This compositional technique reflects my interest in exploring polyrhythms in a North Indian rhythmic context, an interest that was sparked by my collaborations with tabla player Lenny Seidman. Underneath all this, I added an old field recording of Begum Akhtar singing a ghazal to give a sense of a love story.

Creative Assignment: Cyber-Padam

by Shyamala Moorty

Create a padam with yourself as the heroine in conversation with an actual lover, or child, home, parent, self, media parsonality, pet, etc. Communicate the padam as if it is being told during the trials and tribulations of one of our remote conference meetings via the interenet.

On Long Distance Collaboration

We developed the idea of collaborating long distance because of the varied locales we live in: Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Munich. For a long time, we have filed our administrative documents online and held administrative meetings via internet-based conference calls, while relying on in-person artistic collaborations when we could arrange to be in the same city. Recently, however, we have become interested in how we could use these internet technologies to support the creative process itself. Perhaps it flies in the face of established dance-making processes, but hey, it is an increasingly globalizing world, and necessity is the mother of invention.

Each month we take turns giving a choreographic assignment. We have several weeks to complete it, video-tape it, and upload it to the blog along with feedback questions. Once each individual’s interpretation of the assignment is posted, we all have a week to view it and give feedback via comments on the blog.

The following entries document the creative assignments given thus far and give glimpses of the material that has been generated through this process.

Post Natyam's Current Project

As the starting inspiration for our newest creative project, we would like to grapple with the artistic legacy of the courtesans of the Indian subcontinent, creating choreographic translations informed by our positionalities as contemporary women with Indian dance training living in an age of globalization.

The courtesans were interdisciplinary performance artists long before such a term was coined: dancers-actors-singers who performed love songs for both gods and human patrons. Their artistic legacy has deeply informed the Indian classical performing arts, particularly in the realm of abhinaya, a complex and subtle form of acting whereby the dancer interprets poetic texts with gesture and facial expression. At the same time, in modern-day practice, the courtesans' contributions have been masked, and their art has been sanitized, domesticated, and de-eroticized to suit a modern patriarchal and Hindu nationalist agenda.

So how does the courtesans’ rich and troubled artistic legacy inform us today? We are interested in exploring the possibilities of re-routing the poetry of South Asian courtesans through internet age technologies, translating them through the specifics of our geographic locales.