Anjali's Response to June Assigment

Translating one sahityam (verse's) line from Anandabhairavi Varnam. The heroine says, "My Lord, please come quickly so that we can be united once again. Love in separation.

Cynthia's Response to June Assignment: Harassing the Sanskrit Heroine

In response to the June 09 creative assignment, "Translating Each Other, Translating the Past," I created an artbook that interrogates the North Indian light classical song form of thumri, which is traditionally danced by kathak dancers. I was interested in revealing the form's historical layers, erasures, and troubled eroticism by combining poetic text and photographic image. In many ways, the book is a companion piece to an academic article I have written, titled "the erotic trace/erasure of the courtesan in kathak dance and thumri music."

Here is a pair of images from the book, which is currently titled writingthruthumri:

Photo by Shyamala Moorty; text from “Thumri: The Role of Aesthetic Theory in the Interpretation and Performance of a Modern Genre” by Lalita Du Perron. The SOAS Literary Review (2), July 2000. 

And here, from another section of the book, is a poem I wrote as an imaginative expansion on a single word, “wrist,” from the traditional thumri, “Kahe Rukata,” by Bindadin Maharaj.  The writing style emulates that of African-American poet, Harryette Mullen, in her work Trimmings, which is itself an emulation of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. How does a woman come to be signified by and objectified into her body parts? 

]wrist[

a delicate bandage a bone a twiggy little snap.  oh slim white stab of a waist unwrapped.  blackened sweet.  a virgin chocolate bar crinkles her glittery skirt but such a disapproving purse.  disapproving she twists her bittermelon mouth splitting shut.  oh.  oh oh no.  white hot mirchi stops dead in her tracks.  cut red.  a rough and ready grab, a wolf whistling fist, an iron bangle tapping her curved rear.

Shyamala's response to June assignment

Cyber Chat, Cyber Spat (Shyamala's perspective) from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

I was so excited by Cynthia's music from the last assignment. I imagined a group choreography inspired by all of us on a "skype call" to the music. Sometimes one person would be the "speaker" (gesturally), and the rest would listen (stillness) or respond in different ways, sometimes all would speak at once. Once in a while someone would get "dropped" from the call (disappear from the stage) and as the moderator I'd have to "drag" her back.

But, since I couldn't choreograph the whole group, I just made my own end of the skype call....on a particularly frustrating day, since you can hear all the distractions and interruptions in the music and the rhythm felt argumentative to me. I chose to use the song in the background for my "daydream" section in the middle.

June Creative Assignment: Translating Each Other, Translating the Past

by Cynthia Lee

The root of translation is “to carry across.”

Choreograph a study that translates (1) a previous study choreographed by another PN member during our online creative assignment process and/or (2) a “traditional” abhinaya song/courtesan text. The latter may be from your classical repertoire or found through research. Translate this material into your own body, aesthetic sensibility, physical training, geographic locale, contemporary situation, in a way that resonates for you.

Feel free to mistranslate, to steal unapologetically, to treat translation as transformation. You could steal movement vocabulary, poetic phrases, images; you could translate compositional structure or spatial design to a new context; you could translate across disciplines and dance styles and historical period...

-June 2009

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.