Community Collaboration

I recently started working with the South Asian Network’s (SAN’s) survivor support group for women who have experienced domestic violence, sexual assault, or harassment. It is a part of their AWAZ -voices against violence, program http://www.southasiannetwork.org/Programs.htm

After facilitating 3 workshops incorporating yoga and writing, I am excited to announce that the Post Natyam Collective will be partnering with SAN as a part of our long distance process that will include and extend out from ‘Trace’.

Here are examples of writing prompts I’ve used so far:

1. Free write or wild mind write: Start with “I am ________”
Do not stop, do not edit, keep the pen moving. Whenever you’re stuck go back to
I am, or repeat the last thing you wrote until something new comes. 5 min.

2. Write a letter to your childhood self, 10 min.

The responses were deep, beautiful and self affirming. Sometimes the childhood self was a reminder of qualities we wish we could attain now, and sometimes she was needing special care, or hope of a better future. Either way, we all learned something about ourselves through it.


Searching for a way that everyone in the Post Natyam Collective can be a part of the experience despite the distance, we decided our next choreography assignment will be to create something that incorporates some of the writing from the workshops (with permission from the writers, of course). This will also create an avenue to relate our work to real contemporary women who are in various stages of self discovery, healing, and growth.

Remembering "Trace"

In "Trace," Los Angeles met South Asian courtesan poetry met Skype in a combination of art installation, live performance, and audience participation structures.  We were blessed to have a warm, curious, and diverse cross-section of the visual/performance art, dance, theater, and music communities, along with loved ones attend.

First, these were the artworks:

Make Your Own Padam - The love poetry performed by courtesans and by Indian classical dancers is part of a living oral tradition that changes and adapts to new contexts and historical circumstances.  We invite you to create your own poem out of the fragments of courtesan poetry scattered on the floor, which includes works by Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Bindadin Maharaj, Ksetrayya, and Annamaya.  Mixed among the fragments are blank pieces of paper that may be filled in with your own word(s).  Please tape your poem to the wall when finished! 

Cyber Chat, Cyber Spat - This dance-for-camera work, which sprang out of our long-distance collaboration process, is an artistic version of the Post Natyam Collective’s administrative meetings, which are held via webcam conference calls on Skype - complete with dropped calls, baby cries and kathak rhythms.  The work was filmed in four separate geographic locales -  Munich, Kansas City, Long Beach and Santa Monica - with video editorial arrangement by Sangita Shresthova and additional sound engineering by Loren Nerell.

]wrist[ - Cynthia Lee’s poem imaginatively expands upon a single word, “wrist,” from the thumri, “Kahe Rukata,” in a writing style inspired by experimental language poets Harryette Mullen and Gertrude Stein.   Anjali Tata’s video translates the poem into a dance composed of close-ups on the wrist (caressing animal-like choking wrist/neck suddenly wild, clean us off, dirty girl) and is a product of the Post Natyam Collective’s long distance collaborations, where members translate each other’s work into their own artistic products.

Harassing the Sanskrit Heroine - This artbook, written and designed by Cynthia Lee with photography by Shyamala Moorty, combines poetic text and photographic image to explode the North Indian light classical song form of thumri.  Thumri was performed by high-class North Indian courtesans and is danced by modern-day kathak dancers.  These imaginative contemporary translations reveal the historical layers, erasures, and troubled eroticism embedded in the thumri form.

And then, of course, there was the live performance, which unfolded as follows.  

The audience started outside on the sidewalk, where they watched me (Cynthia) perform hidden tamarind, an abhinaya piece inspired by a fragment from an Annamaya padam, while sitting in the storefront window.  

I then invited the audience inside, where they took their seats to see Shyamala perform When We're Alone, a poignant and powerful solo incorporating inverted Bharata Natyam, rhythm, and voice to express the emotional crisis of a young South Asian woman struggling to untangle herself from cultural and familial webs.  

Shyamala and I then performed Adda with the Ancestors, an improvisational score created by Carol McDowell.  The score enacts an “adda” or conversation between two dancers with hybrid histories, the real and imagined ancestors of their dance memories, a guardian, and a curious friend.  The audience was encouraged to ask us questions during the performance, and it was wonderful to have some of the actual ancestors of our dance memories in the audience itself.

Then we gave the audience a short break to make more poems (Make Your Own Padam), which provided the material for the next performance piece.  The above poem was actually used in performance on the second day.  

(Sara Kumar and Gayle Fekete in Rasa Re-routed)

(Sara Kumar and Prumsodum Ok in Rasa Re-routed)

A remarkable group of guest artists hailing from theater, performance art, post/modern dance, and Cambodian dance backgrounds made the final piece, Rasa Re-routed, come alive.  The performers (four on each day) were Rebekah Davidson, Latrice Dixon, Gayle Fekete, Carmela Hermann, Carol McDowell, Prumsodun Ok, Sara Kumar, and Lailye Weidman.   Working together in duets of one reader and one mover, the same poem, selected from the poetry created by the audience that day, was interpreted nine times through the nine rasas (emotions) of Indian classical aesthetic theory: sringara (love), hasya (laughter), raudra (anger), karuna (compassion), bibhatsa (disgust), bhayanaka (fear), vira (courage), adbhuta (wonder), and shanta (peace).  It was a gift to see the tradition of abhinaya reinterpreted boldly, rigorously, and in such radically diverse ways according to the individual sensibilities and training of the performers.

We had our show "Trace" at Sea and Space last weekend. Some lovely surprises happened when things came together in the space!

We had already planned Cynthia's poem to go with Anjali's projection in ]wrist[.  I must say it came out gorgeous! Cynthia cut out a stencil of the words and used graphite for some and spray paint for some to make the different shades on the wall.


We then discovered an interesting relationship could be developed with my solo "When We're Alone" and the ]wrist[ installation. Here's a tiny excerpt:


When We're Alone with Installation from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

Sneak Peek for "Trace" on Nov 7-8: SKYPE music

Here is the final soundscore that I created with the assistance of Loren Nerell to accompany our Skype call video installation.  It'll be shown as part of "Trace" at Sea and Space Explorations on Nov 7-8.

The soundscore includes kathak rhythmic compositions by Bandana Sen and a ghazal by Begum Akhtar.  Parhant (rhythmic recitation) by Cynthia Lee and Shyamala Moorty.

"Trace" Performance/Installation on Nov 7-8 in LA

The first artistic products of our long-distance creative process will be shown in just a few weeks in Los Angeles! 

Here's the information on the show:

“Trace”
Sea and Space Explorations Gallery
4755 York Blvd Los Angeles CA 90042

Saturday, November 7: gallery open 7-10 PM, performance at 8:30 PM
Sunday, November 8: gallery open 1-5 PM, performance at 2:30 PM followed by reception
FREE Admission

a courtesan beckons from a storefront window...cross-rhythmic voices interrupt and lose each other on a SKYPE call... fragments of precolonial Indian erotic poetry are scattered on the floor, waiting to be reframed by a los angeleno audience in the here and now...

How do our bodies remember, dismember, and reshape the traces of the past?  In "Trace," Cynthia Lee and Shyamala Moorty grapple with a fragmented South Asian aesthetic legacy through a contemporary lens, combining live performance, interactive installation, video, and poetic documentation.   With long-distance contributions from Sandra Chatterjee and Anjali Tata, the work includes traces from the Post Natyam Collective's ongoing transnational creative project (www.postnatyam.blogspot.com), which re-routes the erotic artistic legacy of (pre)colonial South Asian courtesans through internet technologies, translating them into the specifics of our contemporary geographic locales.  The evening also features an improvisational score created by Carol McDowell especially for the performers.

“Trace” is part of INSTRUMENTS OF RISK, a performance series curated by Asher Hartman and Carol McDowell at Sea and Space Explorations (www.seaandspace.org).  The curators state: “Performance is up and out of the margins again, lately as a hybrid of practices that highlight the collective exchange between performer, gesture, spectator, and space, whose lineage can be traced back to performance constructions of the 1970s....This is physical conceptual performance with an unabashed theatricality and rigorous abstraction, steering through the unresolved complexities of our world.  Focusing on the body as a compass, the artists in this series grapple with multiple means through which we understand history, speech, location, culture, force, and self in relation to the world around them and within.”

And a sneak peek from Cynthia's Skype call:

Adda with the Ancestors: an improvisational score

Interdisciplinary artist and contemporary dancer Carol McDowell has been creating an improvisational score on Shyamala and myself for our upcoming performance and installation, "Trace," at Sea and Space Explorations.  We've been working with our personal dance memories, which are quite varied and hybrid for both of us, though differently so.  Having a conversation -- a dialogue -- about our dance memories is central to the score.  It is a gift to discover so many new things about Shyamala (she once did a Hungarian bottle dance?) when I thought I knew her so well as a mover and person.

What is your first dance memory?  What is your most vivid dance memory?  What is your favorite dance right now?  Where in your body do you remember the dance?  Can you do you a finger dance of it?  Does this dance have a name?

Among other sources, we've been drawing on the somatic practice of Authentic Movement, with a witness or spirit guardian who protects the body-who-moves-in-remembering.  I had never heard of the witness referred to as a spirit guardian before (though I have posited the witness as the rasika in past explorations of mine).  Since my family is Taiwanese, and ours is largely a culture of ancestral worship, a spirit guardian made me think of an ancestral spirit.  And in our rehearsal last Monday, Carol introduced the idea of an ancestor to our score.  We went through our memories and wrote down whom we thought would be the ancestor of each particular dance memory.  They included: the wind, Medha Yodh, Mama Kariamu, mud, Eiko Otake, a Taiwanese aborigine.  

What would it be like to have an honest conversation with the ancestors of your dance memories?  How might this structure enable imagined dialogues with our teachers and historical predecessors that might be impossible in real life?  

The score was as follows: (1) do a small dance of your memory (2) take a step back, name your  ancestor, and respond to the first dance as the ancestor (3) take a step back, respond as the protector.  The audience can ask questions throughout.

The results were sometimes poetic, sometimes argumentative, at times downright hilarious.  

Sandra's Response to August 2009 Assignment

The study focused on the following parts of two different stanzas of the poem: A Woman to Her Lover : Annamaya: maruninagari danda:

"Don’t you know the house?
The love gods marketplace of passions,...
Its gates are signed by the love god ..."

The main image I created the movement on was an abstract description of the gates- tracing the details, feeling its texture, following the height and width, etc. It was overlaid with the emotional content of a woman reflecting the "marketplace of passions" from the threshold of the gate.

Cynthia's Response to August Assignment: hidden tamarind

I created a sitting abhinaya piece, called "hidden tamarind," in response to the first two stanzas of the Annamaya padam.

password "cynthiabai"

Here are notes on my internal dialogue while performing the study:

Shyamala's response to August Assignment

For this poem, I thought I'd try not to start at a point of meaning (which would be my normal habit) and instead I used a technique I learned in a workshop with Janis Brenner: I sounded out each word, stretching it and breaking it apart. Then I made movements to each word or syllable, or sound.

Cynthia and I thought the resulting character seemed "desperate," but Anj thought she was more sensual/passionate!

Anjali's Response to August Assignment

I translated the first stanza of the following poem using the heroine's body as a metaphor for "house."

Woman to Her Lover : Annamaya: maruninagari danda

Don’t you know my house,

Garland in the palace of the Love God,

Where flowers cast their fragrance everywhere?

Don’t you know the house hidden by tamarind trees,

In that narrow space marked by two golden hills?

That’s where you lose your senses,

Where the love god hunts without fear.

Don’t you know my house?

Creative Assignment for August 2009

by Anjali Tata 

Translate through movement one or two stanzas from the following poem and find a symbolic meaning as well as recurring movement motif (can be a gesture or one movement) for "house."

Be aware of space and boundaries in space that might differentiate this symbolic "home" from elsewhere.

A Woman to Her Lover :  Annamaya: maruninagari danda

Don’t you know my house,

Garland in the palace of the Love God,

Where flowers cast their fragrance everywhere?

 

Don’t you know the house hidden by tamarind trees,

In that narrow space marked by two golden hills?

 

That’s where you lose your senses,

Where the love god hunts without fear.

 

Don’t you know my house?

 

Don’t you know the house?

The love gods marketplace of passions,

The dusk where the dark clears, and yet it is not clear?

 

Don’t you know the house where you live in your own heart?

That’s where all affections hold court.

 

Don’t you know my house?

 

Don’t you know the house where the garden of daturas make you go mad with love?

You should know:  you’re the lord of Venkata hill

 

Its gates are signed by the love god

And you should know that’s where

 You heap all your wealth

 

---Annamaya 262, Telugu courtesan song from When God is a Customer:  Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others, edited and translated by A. K. Ramanujan, Velcheru Narayana Rao, and David Shulman.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 

Sandra's Response to the July 2009 Creative Assignment

Localized Translations

For the July creative assignments, I built on two different ideas, which were responses to previous assignments. Using the sound score that Cynthia had created as part of the Cyber-Padam assignment, Shyamala choreographed a skype call using an in-built web-cam for the June 09 assignment "Translating Each Other, Translating the Past."

Combining those two ideas with the requirements of the July 2009 Creative Assignment, which asked to "localize" a translation, I translated Cynthia's sound score, which I repeated and layered, into movement, specifically addressing my web cam.  I filmed this in various locations, such as on the train, and in my temporary home during a creative residency.

Here is an excerpt:

Sandra's Response to the July 2009 Creative Assignment from Sandra Chatterjee on Vimeo.

Anjali's Response to July Assignment

I translated the following section entitled "wrist" of Cynthia's artbook. I was particularly drawn to how the metaphors came alive to me both on a visual and visceral level....thus followed my study of "wrist" shot close. I will be re-shooting and choreographically refining this study so we can show it at the upcoming Sea and Space performance.

]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.

(by Cynthia Lee)

Cynthia's Response to July Assignment: Remembering Homes in the Moment

For my "Localized Translations" study, I first spent some time learning the movement from Anjali's June assignment off the video. Then, I did a text-movement improvisation in which I told stories about "home" while drawing on Anjali's movement material. Here is a transcription of what I said:

Remembering Homes in the Moment

The little yellow table in a Mexican restaurant called Tacos Por Favor. The paint’s a little bit, the paint’s a little bit uneven, and they use chicken breast instead of dark meat. I used to go there, I, I used to go there, I used to go there, I would bring my book, my journal, and I would...I would write. And sometimes I would drink an horchata. That’s home number one – Home number two...is the sweep of freeway, the sweep of freeway. The mighty elevated concrete and the way it twists and it turns across each other. The 5, the 10, the 60, the, the, the driving. The perpetual driving. The bluetooth. The talking and driving and working. The perpetual the – the car accidents. The, the the the stop, the stop and go. The waiting. The NPR. The still not. The rush hour. The traffic. The planning one’s life around the sweep...the sweep of time and the sweep of concrete, that’s home number two. Pfwuh! Home number three. Home number three I remember, my pores remember, they remember the...sweat and grime and coming home and sneezing black snot out of my nose. And rickshaws and BEEP! and little trucks and camels and cows and...humidity. And a pair of feet, soft, of my teacher.

Shyamala's response to July assignment

I chose to translate Anjali's contemporized Anandabhairavi Varnam longing for her lover from last month's studies:
"My Lord, please come quickly so that we can be united once again. Love in separation.

In order to make it my own (and because I didn't know the song she sang in hers) I used the Beatles Song "Don't Let Me Down" which I thought could also portray the same sense of longing but also with other emotions...rapture, loss, anger, desperation, cajoling.

Because it was supposed to be a "localized" translation, I did it on the front stairwell of my apartment, like I really was waiting for my lover to return. It turned out to be quite narrow, which was a challenge. I did enjoy using the hand rail to lean into and bounce off of.


Don't Let Me Down (study) from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


PASSWORD TO WATCH: Stairs

July 2009 Creative Assignment: Localized Translations

Creative Assignment: Localized Translations
by Sandra Chatterjee

From the June 2009 assignments, choose one aspect of one of the studies by another collective members. Choreograph a study that translates this one aspect into the place you call home. In order words, interpret another member’s previous translation according to your specific geographic locale. Localize the interpretation by drawing on and evoking specific imagery that distinguishes your geographic locale and home.

As Cynthia mentioned in the last assignment, the root of translation is “to carry across.” In this particular assignment, please think of it as carrying a translation into your specific home and have it be colored, re-interpreted by this process.

-July 2009

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