Anjali's Response to April 2010 Assignment: Window to a Widow

Untitled from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

password: widow

This is "Window into a widow" ---the April assignment reflecting upon a woman's journey from downtrodden widowhood to being rescued and empowered by a group of courtesans. Very abstract and only a nugget of an idea....
what does the white scarf symbolize?

how do you read the shedding of this scarf and focus on her hair?

what more could happen with this hair and how the hair is shot?

Could the hair scarf initially be projected upon during a live performance?

Would a wig of long black hair be an interesting option under the veil and might it be cut on stage?

Sandra's Response to April 2010 Assignment

Sandra's Response to April 2010 Assignment from Sandra Chatterjee on Vimeo.


password: going

This is an abstract study, still quite raw, that reflects my response to the story and the instructions to Anjali's assignment. I worked with a sense of journey, which, if it communicates, would be interesting to develop.

Feedback questions:

1) Do you feel that the study fulfills the assignment?

2) Having read the assignment and the story, is a connection recognizable?

3) What do the cuts/edits in the video communicate to you?

4) Any suggestions for developing the idea?

5) Other thoughts?

Shyamala's Response to April 2010 Assignment

]wrist[ runaway from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.


I recommend watching it first before you read about it below.
Password: wrist
Cynthia and I were talking about Anjali's wrist projection and I was inspired to combine it with some of the ideas in the silks from my last study. This time I just wrapped myself in the silks, sari-like, rather then having them hang from the ceiling as they typically are (because of the chuni part of the assignment).

I imagined doing the piece live and asked Sangita to film it. Once we saw the first take, we realized it could be pretty magical on film, so I adjusted some of the elements to make it more for the film, rather then a document of what the audience would see live. For example, I was using foot stamps for the rhythmic build but they didn't even register on film so I took them out and did quicker distortions in the torso instead. I still hope to explore the live possibilities.

Questions:
1. Describe your experience watching this and how you interpret what happens?

2. What ideas do you have to develop this, either live or on film?

3. Any other comments?

Other thoughts: Although you can't tell, the cloth is white and extremely long and leaves long trails around me. From the front my face is shrouded by the veil, and it reminds me of the work of this artist: http://www.simeen.net/ If you get a chance take a look at her work and see if you might have more ideas for what else we might do with the cloth, with or without the projection.

Cynthia's Response to April 2010 Assignment

video password: "sand"

I was walking along the beach in Santa Monica pondering this story of the Rajput widow-turned-courtesan when the ground collapsed under me and I fell about a foot and a half onto the sand. To my amusement, I noticed that the seawater had carved out miniature “cliffs” that looked oddly similar to the desert in Rajasthan. I decided this meant I should use the beach as a stand-in for the desert where I imagined the courtesan had lived as a child.

Text adapted from and inspired by Veena Talwar Oldenburg's article, "Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow."  Feminist Studies 19 (2): 259-87.  Music by Zakir Hussain.

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:

1.   Do the text and the visuals evoke enough of a sense of the underlying story?  Is any of it confusing?

2.   Do you see any relationship between this video and past studies from our long distance process?  Does that spark any ideas about how the video could be integrated into collaborative live performance or installation?

3.   Other comments?

THOUGHTS FOR FURTHER EXPANSION:

It strikes me that this story from Veena Oldenburg’s article has connections with our work with SAN because both involve domestic violence...I wonder whether this may help us connect our interest in the courtesan with our community work?

I didn’t quite manage to integrate the required chuni into my study, but perhaps it could be brought in like this: I thought of projecting this video on the body of a woman dressed as a courtesan.  (She would have to wear white or something light-colored for the video to be seen.)  Perhaps it could even be projected on my back before I turn around to perform my solo, “hidden tamarind”? 

Anj's Creative Assignment for April

Informed by the following text, create a dance that depicts the transformation of a downtrodden widow in mourning to a woman empowered by taking charge of her life as a dancing courtesan. Incorporate a long veil or chuni as a prop that depicts the woman's hair into the dance as well as some sort of rhythmic element that builds to a climax at some point during the exploration. You do not have to incorporate any of the text but you may choose to.


Shy:
quotes from courtesans in the 70s from Veena Talwar Oldenbrg in her article "Lifestyle as Resistance: The case of the courtesans of Lucknow, India"

1. Story of young widow running away to join the courtesans:
"I was married when I was ten. My natal family was Rajput, my father and uncles owned fifty acres of irrigated land; my mother did not have to work too hard because we had two servants who did most of the household work. I had attended three years of school but I barely knew how to recognize the letters that spell my name. My gauna ceremony occurred just three months after menarche. I remember being taken to my husband's house with my dowry and plenty of gifts for my in-laws. My father sent several sacks of wheat, sugar, lentils, and other produce from the farm because I was married to a young Rajput boy whose father had gambled away most of their wealth. That summer [I960] there was a very big flood, which washed away the mud huts in the village, the livestock, and our food reserves. While my husband was out with his brothers trying to salvage some of the food stored in earthenware jars, he slipped and fell into the water and three days later was dead after a severe bout of cholera. I survived but I often wished I were dead. The local Brahmin said that my ill-starred presence had brought flood and death to the village. My jewels, clothes, and the few silver coins which I had hidden away were all forcibly taken away from me, and I became a widow in white who did all the nasty, heavy chores for the household. I was fed scraps when I cried out in hunger. You talk about the laws that were passed by the British to prevent child marriage, you talk of the rights we won when the Hindu Civil Code [I956] was passed but I sneer at all that. I had no recourse to the laws, or to lawyers, only to my wits sharpened by adversity. I first tried to get back at them with sly acts of sabotage. I did the washing up indifferently, leaving a dull film on the metal platters and the pots. For this my mother-in-law thrashed me. I would sneak into the kitchen when my sister-in-law had finished cooking and add a heavy dose of salt to the lentils and vegetables. I would hide my smile when I heard the yells and abuse heaped on her by the menfolk. She caught me one day and thrashed me soundly until I howled with pain. Her husband came home and gave me another hiding. Life was unbearable but I was trapped; there was nowhere that I could go. My parents, who had come
for the funeral to our village, were distressed but they did not offer to take me back because they still had my younger sisters to marry. Fights, violence erupted all the time. My sister-in-law kept wishing me dead. When it was discovered that I stole money, to buy snacks from the vendor, they threatened
to burn me alive. I wanted to run away but didn't know where I would go, except to the river to drown myself. Finally when an itinerant troupe of entertainers was encamped in our village I saw the performance and thought I would secretly apply to work for them, just do their housework or something. They agreed to shelter me after I told them my troubles and showed them the bruises on my body. They smuggled me out of that hell, gave me bit parts in their dramas, and finally brought me to the lap of Bibi Khanum [another tawa'ifl in Lucknow, and I have never looked back. I had no option but to run away. Tell me, sister, what would you have done in my place?"

Shyamala's Response to March 2010 Assignment

I really wanted to use the silks (aerial cloth) for this, imagining myself floating up in a little pod (sort of like inside the belly of a pregnant woman) but turned out to be sick when I did the assignment and had no strength to go up on them. It turns out I actually had a great time on the floor and realized there are many possibilities to be explored on the floor. Ideally I would have a male body inside the silks, for what I was imagining.

The music is a piece called "Essences" by my friend Loren Nerell, I've been wanting to use his music FOREVER and felt it fit the theme of "he inside her' quite well. I did layer it with my voice saying the text since the assignment was supposed to include the text somehow.

Here's an excerpt: the password is "gender"

He Inside Her from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

Anjali's Response to March 2010 Assignment

"The he inside her is deeply in love with her, so completely mesmerized by her existence". This was the excerpt from a free writing done by a woman in the SAN group which inspired my study. I am intrigued by this notion that within all of us resides both the masculine and the feminine. It just so happens, my study took on a different meaning because I am 5 months pregnant and at the time, was about to find out the gender of the baby. The focus for me became the physical embodiment and transformation/morphing that occurs between the masculine and feminine when a woman is growing a baby in her body. I thought the video could provide some mystery and wanted to play with the zoomed in shots. I sat on a physio ball to create a sense of circularity and soft waves which I feel drives my movement these days. The last shot pans out to reveal the pregnant belly. I'd like to delve further into this study and see where it might go/how it will develop.

Anj study_3_16_2010 from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Sandra's Reponse to March 2010 Assignment

For this assignment, the act of writing seemed more relevant to me than an audible use of text. Hence I decided to make the act of writing directly the central element of my study, playing with the camera angle and hand placement in terms of how the text being written is gradually revealed.The sound of the pen on the paper added a for me important texture. The text being written is based on the text that was assigned in that I read the assigned text a few times and then proceeded to write out, from memory, the words I recalled.

The interspersed hand movements alternate a softer and a more abrupt quality- in the gestures chosen, as well as in the movements the hand draws. I was interested in exploring the (3-dimensional) space above the ground, which is the paper/writing.

Feedback guidance questions:
1) What does the hand movement read to you as?
2) How do you view the spatial relationship between the movement and the writing?
3) Is the act of writing effective or literal?
4) What do you think of the sounds of the pen on paper?

Cynthia's Response to March 2010 Assignment

This study, called s(he), draws primarily on two hastas that refer to "woman" and "man."  I was interested in bringing tactility, tension, and breath to the hastas, so that the movement could have a visceral impact.  s(he) is inspired by specific phrases in the text from the SAN group that evoke the intertwining and occasional struggle between the genders.  Its format, a video of close-ups on the hands, draws on the choreographic strategies of Anjali's ]wrist[ video from July 2009.

The password to view the video is "gender".

Feedback Questions:

1. Please watch the video with the sound and on mute.  Which do you prefer and why?

2. What images resonate the most with you?  Where do you feel your attention lag during the piece?What would you tighten or change dynamically?

3. What narrative, if any, do you see?  Are there moments where the narrative ceases to make sense to you?

4. This study makes clear connections to Anj’s wrist dance and to the end of my solo, “hidden tamarind.”  Is the piece too close to those other works, or are the similarities effective?

March 2010 Assignment: He She Me

Work with the writing below from one of the participants of the South Asian Network's survivor support group during our workshop on gender.

You can use a line or the whole thing, you can use it as a starting point for inspiration, or keep your piece tightly connected to it. Whatever you do, please find some way to use some or all of the actual text (as sound score or visual material).


"The me -male plus female, a combination of both. He is just an extension of the she. She is so complete, so fulfilled, so deep and then is still incomplete and somewhat empty. The he resides inside her, takes food for life from her. Her ambitions, her thoughts, her depth, her thoughtfulness, her care and love is what he desires and longs for. Just lives somewhere within her, impossible to separate from her. The he inside her is deeply in love with her, so completely mesmerized by her existence. He takes his inspirations from her, resents her sometimes for her own perfectly complete existence and then falls in love with her all over again. The he is 'her' - the she 'her' -It's a communion of two different universes with all the entropy there is to it. But 'he' just resides inside her, that's where his safe heaven is - within her. A dance of two beautiful abstract minds where the 'he' just wants to be absorbed and consumed by the 'she.'"

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?