Open Round: Shy intergenerational poetry

Continuing the pregnancy poems, here are two new ones.  I've written more, but these are the ones I'm moved to share at this moment. 

Feedback questions
I'd love to hear if anything interests you about them, any ideas for strengthening them, and if you imagine them being incorporated into performance in any way.  Right now I just see them as written, but am open to other possibilities.

Quickening at 12.5 weeks

What is that I feel? 

A flicker, a twitch, a bubble?

Butterfly wings flapping against the breeze?

The tap tapping of a clandestine message meant just for me?

Try as they might, no one else can feel you.

You’re my little secret!

Our First Duet, 16 weeks

We performed our first duet today. 

The first that you may have been aware of, that is.

But, I wonder when did your consciousness begin? 

Was it the moment your cells first divided, or in the accumulation of your senses?

Is it in your sensitivity to the pressure of my twists and bends?

Or in your new found ability to make out the bright stage lights penetrating through layers of me to you?

Outside, I tumbled and danced, for 200 laughing and cheering children;

Inside there was a private rollercoaster ride for one. 

Now, hours later, I feel you flutter and flit

And wonder: “are you reliving the memory of our first duet?”

Betrayal, 24 weeks

I pass a forlorn child waiting on steps,

scuffing his feet in the dirt.

Suddenly I am 8 again,

waiting for her:

Long after the other children have gone,

I sit unwanted on a wall, swinging my legs. 

 I hum to soothe the feeling of unimportance,

my entire unsure existence on pause.

Walking on, I glance back at this child who reminds me of me,

Caressing my belly to feel the being who will be you.

Is it always the person closest to you that is

doomed to be the first to betray you? 

As my mother hurt me,

Will I do the same you? 

Queering Abhinaya Assignment 7: Yearning to Bloom

For this assignment I was paired with Cynthia who helped me think the through choreographic ideas and the trajectory of a new piece that I was collaborating on with visual artist, Sayon Syprasoeth, and dancer, Jack Nguoun, for a closing reception of "Roots and Branches," an exhibit featuring contemporary Cambodian visual artists at the Greenly Art Space in Long Beach, CA.

Here is a video of our performance at the closing.
Password:  bloom

Yearning to Bloom from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.

1.  What drew you in?  Or what did you enjoy about the performance?

2.  What would you like to see developed more? 

3.  How did you interpret our use of the masks?  You may not be able to tell, but they had gold on them to mimick the sculpture's texture.  Did it bother you that they are primarily white?  Any ideas about how we might use them more effectively (or not at all).

4.  How did you feel about the interaction of Bharatanatyam, Khmer Classical dance, pedestrian movement, and poetry?  Did anything seem too mime like?

5.  How did you feel about the use of the various music styles, especially the padam "Velavare" (which is the second music). 

6.  What aspects, if any, do you feel might read as "Queering Abhinaya" ?

7.  Do you have any other ideas to offer for growing future performances?  In particular, are there any ways that we could have interacted with the sculpture that you would have been interested to see and that might add to the meaning of the piece?  And did the trajectory feel complete, or do you think something more is needed?

Queering Abhinaya Assignment 7: Colonial Mapping

For this cycle of queering abhinaya, I was paired with Shyamala.  She helped me brainstorm ways to bring performative life to the Chinese colonial travel accounts of Taiwan from "triple-weave."


colonial mapping I (in-progress study) from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password "confucian"

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
1) What draws you in; what do you find compelling?  Are there parts where you're bored, confused, or otherwise not engaged?
2) I'm thinking of giving the Chinese language a greater presence in the piece.  I can do this by adding Chinese to the labels and/or possibly finding the original travelogue texts and getting a native Mandarin speaker to read them before the English translations (this will be much more work).  Are you interested in this possibility, and if so, how much Chinese would you like to be present?
3) How might you imagine this being translated into live performance?
4) What relationship do you see with "blood-run"?
5) Other thoughts?

BACKGROUND/CONTEXT:
I've been continuing to read Emma Jinhua Teng's Taiwan's Imagined Geography, which has shed some light on the nuances of the particular colonial writings excerpted in triple-weave.  According to Teng, there are two main colonial perspectives on Taiwan during this era of Qing expansionism: (a) a "rhetoric of privation" that constructs the Taiwanese aborigine as a brutish savage and (b) a "rhetoric of primitivism" that romanticizes the aborigine as a sort of "noble savage" (62).  The rhetoric of privation is deeply informed by classical Confucian texts, while the rhetoric of primitivism is very much the product of Taoist philosophy and imagery.  This study draws more on the texts written from the "rhetoric of privation" perspective.

Teng also describes the changing cartography in the Ming (the Han Chinese dynasty preceding the Qing dynasty) and Qing dynasties.  Whereas Ming maps portray China as a naturally bounded territory (Taiwan being a terra incognita far away beyond the seas), Qing maps include Taiwan as a peripheral part of China at the very edge of the world/map.  I was particularly fascinated that some maps were not drawn from a bird's eye view, but instead as if standing on the south-eastern coast of China in the Fujian province looking across the roiling waves at Taiwan.  This perspective positions Taiwan as separate from the Qing empire and informs the camera angle that I used in my study.  Many of the labels on the rocks (country of women, dogs, two-bodied people, hairy people, etc.) are from actual maps from the late Ming period (40).

I was planning to create two more approaches to mapping: one reflecting the Taoist-primitivist-bird's eye view map, and one highlighting Taiwan as part of Austronesia, but did not manage for this round.

REFERENCES
Teng, Emma Jinhua.  2004.  Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895.  Harvard East Asian Monographs: Cambridge.

Queering Abhinaya Assignment 6: Shyamala's intergenerational explorations

I was paired with Sandra and we discussed her interest in framing connections between some of our assignments in the German context through writing and perhaps even a video installation of the work.  I believe she was interested in the idea or action of problematizing exoticisms as a common theme for some of the solos, and thus creating a transnational alliance between us. 

I was interested in deepening some of my work.  A few months ago, my mother moved in with me and I found out that I am pregnant, thus, I have been strongly aware of my position between generations.  Thus, the inter-generational nature of the study I did for assignment 4, "alternative translations" seems the most interesting to me to continue at this moment.  For my study, each Post Natyam member interpreted some the words describing how to do the dance movement from a padam that I had learned from my first Bharata Natyam guru, Medha Yodh.  Our interpretations were unusual, quirky, and at at times subversive.   I had planned to thread my favorites of each of our interpretations together into a new version of the padam...  thinking about how a new generation might re-interpret and re-purpose this dance that was passed on to me through Medha, from her guru, Balasaraswati.

Additionally I'm creating a new piece in collaboration with a Cambodian American visual artist,

Sayon Syprasoeuth and a Cambodian American dancer, Jack Nguon.  In relation to the "alternate translations." I'm thinking it would be interesting to see how Jack might interpret the text in his classical Cambodian dance influenced body.  I also have been doing some inter-generational writings that I feel will help inform the piece, either with sound or images.  

Themes exploring: pleasure and discomfort of waiting, transformation, life cycle of seed to flower blossoming/birthing, inter-generational (dis)connections

Below is an image of a sculpture we'll be working with: 

Sculpture by Sayon Syprasoeuth (our costumes hopefully will be similar variations of this)

Texts to draw from:  

Velavare (Padam I learned from Medha Yodh), the gist is about a maiden waiting for her lord.  Perhaps the music itself would be interesting to use.

 Two poems I've written recently:

-->

love letter at week 6

My first signs of you were my queasy belly and your beating heart-

Fast, erratic, a pulsing white light, a beacon of your existence. 

My emotions ran wild.

Your heart in my belly, making it flutter.

My gasping breath making you falter.

The realization that you were all heart was so immense…

This tiny light leading you into the world, before all thought, before all reason, guided only by your inner rhythm.

And as I cradled you in my womb,

Your love, so vast, encompassed me.  

-->

Free-fall at 11 weeks

S/he is tumbling, free-falling except for the pulsing bungee cord of flesh that connects her to me.  Neither of us holding on with our limbs, connected instead from our insides out.

There is no light here to see, all is intuited from behind thinly shut lids.   

He does not feel my singular pain, oblivious to the sacrifices of one, 

but instead is tuned into the rhythms of my breath, the pulsing of my blood, 

and the pull of gravity within an ever changing rotating sphere of existence. 

A packed, but organized, freeway flows between us, 

where ancestors riding water buffalo intermix with sturdy caballeros, 

and still others traverse in dusty covered wagons. 

None are surprised by each others existence, nor by the occasional sighting 

of never before seen modes of transportation passing at lightening speed. 

Testing her strength and agility, 

each movement is magnified in tight quarters. 

Falling, twisting, turning until he bounces 

against the soft womb walls in a soft reverberating, rebound. 

Our bodies, united together, 

share unfathomable mysteries, 

that despite our interconnection, 

will lead to unavoidable separation.

 Feedback:

1.  What ideas/images stand out to you, especially ones that might inspire movement or visual images/actions, from...

a. the sculpture

b the week 6 poem

c. the week 11 poem 

2.  Do you have any thoughts about ways to tie or layer the sculpture, poems and Padam together?  

3.  Any other thoughts?

Queering Abhinaya Assignment 6: blood-run

For this cycle of queering abhinaya, I was paired with Meena.  We identified common theoretical-artistic interests in further investigating the queer desiring female gaze in a way that positions the camera as performer and the person on camera as a viewer.  We also talked about simultaneously occupying the position of colonized and colonizer.  She expressed interest in continuing to work on her blueberry piece, while I was interested in bringing some performative aspect to the ideas in my writing, "triple-weave."

I did a little more reading from Taiwan's Imagined Geography, and I ended up making a video called "blood-run," which Meena shot for me.  Below are two versions of the video: one with text and one without.  The password for both is "aborigine".


blood-run (no text) from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.


blood-run (with text) from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

After Shy's feedback, I did a quick re-edit with slightly less text -- most of it cut from the end.

blood-run (less text) from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

 FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) How does the two different videos affect you differently?  Do you prefer one or the other, and why?  Would you prefer less text?  If so, what would you recommend cutting, and what would you like to keep?  Other thoughts about sound?
(2) Any imagery that you find particularly striking?  Any parts where you are less interested?
(3) How might you imagine any aspect of this video and/or the original text being brought into live performance?

I'm also sharing the abstract for the paper that I'm writing about Queering Abhinaya.  I wrote it while thinking about the blueberry piece, the Maud Allan video, the Sher-Gil writings, and triple-weave when reading it.  I welcome any feedback or theory/reading recommendations that you might have.

Rerouting the Gaze: the Post Natyam Collective’s

Choreographies of Queer Affect

Cynthia Ling Lee

This performative paper looks at emergent choreographies of queer affect by analyzing selected aspects of Queering Abhinaya, an ongoing collaboration of the Post Natyam Collective.  The Post Natyam Collective is a transnational, web-based coalition of women dance artists critically and creatively interrogating South Asian dance.  Queering Abhinaya engages in praxis-based research on queering, queerness, and abhinaya through an open-ended, dialogical, and collective process mediated by internet technologies.  We examine notions of queering beyond the borders of North American identity politics to include German notions of quer (“oblique,” or going against the grain) and South Asian embodiments of gender fluidity and erotic possibility that are distinct from performing western LGBT identities.  As our primary aesthetic technique, we draw on an expanded notion of abhinaya, usually associated with Indian classical dancers interpreting love poetry through gesture and facial expression.  

The raw, in-progress studies emerging from the Queering Abhinaya process reimagine classical Indian affective techniques of embodied performance while rerouting dominant colonial, male, and heterosexual mechanisms of the gaze through dance, video, and poetic text.  They ask: how can racialized, hybrid, (post)colonial female subjects gaze back at the masculinist and Orientalizing gaze of the colonizer?  How do the colonizer and colonized live together inside one body?  How might we choreograph an emergent queer female gaze that overturns the western camera’s male gaze and the hetero-patriarchal narratives of love and desire that inform Indian abhinaya viewing conventions?  How might we perform from the position of a postcolonial, queer, desiring female viewer of color?

PNC Assignment 5 Queering Abhinaya Shy and Meena Response

PW WUTST with king Dramaturgy by Shyamala Moorty. Continuing to develop Raja/ni role, and 20 minute solo-super-minimalist-no video we used to see this version for low budget touring option. This is developing into the version for Erasing Borders next week on Sept 5 2014. Any feedback by Post Natyam Collective is most welcome and desired before Wed Sept 3, 12 noon pacific standard time! This is not the final music but I adding music trax + colonial archive text the best I could to give you a better idea of what I'm thinking for the NYC version. Feedback Questions: 1) What do you get from the Raja/ni role? Do you associate them as male, female, fluid, etc? 2) What do you get as a viewer with the Raja/ni happening at the beginning, with the text? Any suggestions? 3) Who is Raja/ni looking at, admiring, attracted to? 4) Where would you like to see Raja/ni go? Anything specific that you would like us to try? 5) Any feedback, suggestions, questions, advice, unclear aspects for the rest of the piece? 6) Is there anything potentially PROBLEMATIC in terms of political statements viewers might take from this piece? Particularly anything anti-progressive/conservative?

Queering Abhinaya, assignment 5, response by Babli and Cyn

For this round of assignments, Babli and Cyn started collaborating on writing text for UNFINISHED, ITERATION III, Babli’s recent project inspired by painter Amrita Sher-Gil.

For this assignment, Cyn and Babli looked at two different portraits painted by Sher-Gil (at this point we won’t say which ones-sorry)

We created 2 rounds of freewrites for each portrait, i.e. looking at each portrait from 2 different perspectives.

We ask for feedback on the freewrites, and there is a video pasted below that plays with putting some of the text over movement (from Iteration II)- HOWEVER; we ask that you watch the video AFTER having responded to the text.

Our feedback questions are:

1) What do you get from the writings?  Are there any imagery, ideas, and/or phrases that stand out to you as compelling?

2) How do these writings relate to the performance, UNFINISHED?  How might you imagine them being integrated into the performance?

3) How do these writings relate to some of our explorations regarding the queer female desiring gaze?

4) Would you imagine combining these writings into one or two pieces, or do you like them as multiple perspectives on the same thing?

5) We pasted below an experiment of overlaying the text with movement (please only watch it after responding to the above questions)

a) How does watching the text with movement change the text- AND the movement for you?

b) What do you get from the combination?

c) How would you like the text to be delivered (i.e. voice over, Sandra speaking, text projection, another person speaking live - e.g. an audience member)

6) Any other thoughts?

Painting 1

Freewrites round  1

Your eyes, they look sultry, almond shaped

your gaze stern and self conscious,

indirect, since you are facing the diagonal

your prominent eyebrows appear close together

your lips deep red serious, no smile

they give your look a strictness and determination that exudes confidence

your hair is thick and very very long

I imagine it is very heavy

tied deep in the neck

Not open

Your face and hair look very Indian to me

Your shoulders stoop forward ever so slightly

On your diagonal the side of your upper body that is closer to me- it is your left side-

is light more brightly

Around your waist you are wearing a light blue pareo of which I can only  see the top part

Your hands are clasped in front of your hips

Your indirect facing

Your closed posture

your serious, confident, self conscious  face

seem to contradict the openness and lusciousness of your bare upper body

The shadow of a man in a hat towers behind you

All in front of the backdrop of a - is it a Japanese- scene where there are three figures

two female- they seem to be talking to each other

and one male

---

You are vulnerable, brown, thoughtful, hands folded protectively over your crotch.  My eyes skate between your face and your bare torso.  You face the corner with fathomless black black eyes, brows drawn together slightly, large sloping nose contrasting with your narrow jaw and round heart-shaped lips, slightly pursed, unavailable.  look don't look.  Your breasts and nipples, full with a slight sag, delicately modeled.  Your

arms browner than the rest of you -- a shirt sleeve tan?  Your chest relaxed, despite it all.  The strangest thing is the figures in the background, faint, a Japanese imperial painting, a male official with a long moustache, ladies in waiting.  An ominous shadow between you and this underpainting, a shadow which could not have been cast by you, ominous and frontal and male.

______

freewrites round 2

Your eyes- my gaze is drawn to your eyes most of all-- they are almond shaped. You are looking out into the distance, but not with your eyes wide open -- your look/your gaze into the distance- may I call it sultry?

your hair lusciously cascades down your back.

Your lips are full

deep red

serious, sensuous, earnest

contemplative

Your torso is shaped by curves-

the slight droop of your shoulders close your body

just like the protective clasp of your hands

your full breasts are marked by what looks like a tanline- leaving your arms darker than the fullness of your breast

your hips are covered snugly by a light blue, thin pareo

it is tied very low below your bellybutton

just like we were told to wear it for dance class

_______

in van gogh, whom you loved as well, brilliance and movement and color and hope.  you drew yourself against his hope, his romance-faded vision of a japanese monastic artistic community, his dark shadow looming behind you.  Amrita, how did you occupy this legacy, luxuriating in and rejecting these western eyes, so exotic, so different!  black crows of eyebrows furrowed, thick cascading hair, you paint yourself into the primitive colonial object, using the tools of your colonizers your teachers.  what a peculiar gesture, the self-portrait, to treat oneself as visual object, to be inside and outside.  as you paint your body you paint truth and flaw and desire, lushness and discomfort.  a celebration, yes, of lush brown openness and femininity, gauguin, but where you keep yourself, your secrets, is in your eyes, black, unavailable, aware of being seen.  you feel my gaze upon you, you feel the entire history of western viewers gazing upon you.

Painting 2

freewrites round 1

You are sitting

relaxed

Your left elbow supported on something (dark)

Your right hand placed on your knee

You are putting weight on your hand, it seems

Your right shoulder gets pushed up

Your posture turns out slightly skewed

But in a relaxed, provocative way

Your eyes are piercing

Your red lips match the pattern on your blouse

I ask myself if you are- or maybe want to- lift your eyebrow

to enhance the challenging, is it playful, look you are returning to the person painting you

You are playing back the gaze

Your right hand

the one on your knee

appears huge

____

You summon me to look at you, quizzical and confrontational, your shoulder jutting askew all bones and lips, hand gripping your knee like a man, the foreshortening making your hand even larger.  Your clothes scrubbed with rough strokes, black on black, energetically worked from the background, the strokes fat, undelicate, moving.  all elbows and jawline.  your face, though, is lit, cream and ivory glowing translucent in incandescent light, striking your left cheekbone, forehead.  a glint in your gray green eyes, so clear and far-seeing, your strong dark eyebrows arched expressive, your huge orange red pouty grim stubborn lips, so kissable.  your hair, bobbed, curves into your jaw and disappears into the background.  you are manly and womanly, confrontational all boney angles and yet unreadable, waiting and looking back at the one who paints you.

___________________

Freewrites round 2:

your shoulders and hair cut, your fingers and joints - their angularity exudes strength

your eyes are piercing

so striking

your gaze direct

your lips so curved

so full so striking

The folds of your dress trace the shape of your body

your left hand tucked in as if prodded on your hips

makes your right hand even larger

- protruding out

grasping your own knee

instead of reaching out

_____

Brazen and full-lipped, you thrust your elbow, shoulder, hips at me, looking at me through me beyond me.  Unreadable.  I model your face, delicate porcelain translucent eggshell, tinged with cream and shell and yolk.  The rest is the constant mystery of mixing blacks grays browns, purple shadows enriching the mahogany gleam of your hair, your clothing emerging in blacks and olives and yellow gray greens.  After all this time sharing space, I still cannot read you, a puzzle how you thrust yourself against me and retract, one key two keys, how you found us in the sheets, your green eyes and mannish hands, surveying us with amusement.  I work that drama into the drip and swirl and fold of cloth and brush, energetically moving cloth against your skin, so delicate, your stubborn lips, so kissable.

VIDEO:
UNFINISHED ITERATION III, Text, PNC Assigment Aug 2014 from Unfinished on Vimeo.

PW: iteration 3 exploration

Queering Abhinaya Assignment #5: working in pairs

We are continuing our Queering Abhinaya long-distance process this month (August 2014) using a slightly different approach.  Rather than having one person give a central assignment, this month we are working in pairs with weekly check-ins.  Following up on choreographic interests and material produced during the residency and beforehand, each person will work with her partner to brainstorm what she would like to work on and what kind of support would be useful from the other person.

Our working pairs are: 

Sandra, Cynthia

Meena, Shy

For reference, here are notes from our conversation (only accessible to PN members): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ovEdGa2PffXSB-zTE-fd25HKG8AzMrEatKgW90DAvl8/edit

Please post your studies with feedback questions by August 25 and give feedback by August 31.  Each individual pair is responsible scheduling your weekly meetings.

Subverting Orientalism: Translating Maud Allan's "Vision of Salome"

BACKGROUND INFO

For my "alternative translations" assignment, I chose to focus on Maud Allan's Vision of Salome.  I initially ran across references to Maud Allan during our Cabaret Travels research (see my written assignment #2) on German kabarett, where the phenomenon of naked dancing was supposedly inspired by Allan's infamous Salome piece.  In that context, I was originally interested in how Orientalist embodiments of the Other by white western women gave rise to alternative possibilities for performing gender and sexuality.  Maud Allan was a white female Canadian-born, California-raised dancer whose dance career took off in Germany.  She was all the rage for a couple of years around 1908 in London, where she gave 250 performances of the Vision of Salome at the Palace Theatre.  She was the major figure in a complicated court case, in which she charged Noel Pemberton-Billings, a right-wing MP and publisher of The Vigilante newspaper, of libel for associating her name with an article titled, "The Cult of the Clitoris."  This article claimed that there was a black book containing the names of 47,000 British homosexuals who were being blackmailed by the Germans to undermine the British government.  (Pemberton-Billings was found not guilty, using a defense strategy that essentially flipped the case to put Allan and her choreography on trial.)  Allan was a complex figure: anti-suffrage despite being an unmarried, financially independent woman; whose longest romantic relationship was with her female secretary and lover, Verna Aldrich despite suing Pemberton-Billings for accusing her of being a lesbian; who performed sexuality through the guise of Orientalist spirituality.

In her article, "Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan's 'The Vision of Salome,'" Amy Koritz describes how the work toed a tricky line between titillating audiences with images of the erotic, exotic Eastern femme fatale and performing Victorian propriety for critics (Koritz 1994).  Koritz includes several excerpts of reviews, which, while varied in their assessment of the work's aesthetic quality, comment on her "lady-like performance" (74) "[that] is absolutely without the slightest suggestion of the vulgarities familiar to the tourists in Cairo and Tangier" (Koritz 1994: 70).  Allan's own choreographic intention, as documented in her 1908 publication, My Life and Dancing, portrays Salome as a relatively innocent girl, subject to obedience to her vengeful mother; her experience pushes her over the cusp of womanhood as she becomes drunk on power and enamored of John the Baptist, whose beheading she has caused (Allan 1908: 120-8).  As such, audience (vs. critical) reception of the work as overtly sexually titillating seems to go against Allan's choreographic intentions.

CREATIVE ASSIGNMENT
For my dance-text, I was drawn to a piece of publicity circulated by Alfred Butt, the manager of the Palace Theatre (Koritz 1994: 69).  I asked us to find a way to subvert the writing's intention; this subversion could be informed by the complicated history and politics surrounding Maud Allan and The Vision of Salome, or simply by the choreographer's own predilections and/or lived experience.

"The pink pearls slip amorously about her bosom and throat as she moves, while the long strand of pearls that floats from the belt about her waist floats languorously apart from her smooth hips.  The desire that flames from her eyes and bursts in hot flames from her scarlet mouth infects the very air with the madness of passion.  Swaying like a white witch with yearning hands and arms that plead, Miss Allan is such a delicious embodiment of lust that she might win forgiveness with the sins of such wonderful flesh.  As Herod catches the fire, so Salome dances even as a Bacchante, twisting her body like a silver snake eager for its prey, panting hot with passion, the fires of her eyes scorching like a living furnace"(cited by Buonaventura 2004: 34).

Here are our responses (password for all is "allan"):

Cyn translates Maud Allan from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Shyamala translates Maud Allan from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Sandra translates Maud Allan from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Meena translates Maud Allan from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
I was struck by the different strategies used to subvert the eroticized, feminized Orientalism in the studies.  Shyamala converted the sensual into the grotesque; Sandra queered the text by positioning herself as a female desiring spectator; Meena "neutralized" the words through dryness and objectivity (literally working with objects); while I performed an aggressive, fighting masculinity inspired by Koritz's description of the English Morris dance, the polar opposite of the feminized East:

"It is, in spirit, the organized, traditional expression of virility, sound health and animal spirits.  It smacks of cudgel-play, of quarterstaff, of wrestling, of honest fisticuffs.  There is nothing sinuous in it, nothing dreamy; nothing whatever is left to the imagination....It is the dance of folk who are slow to anger, but of great obstinacy -- forthright of act and speech: to watch it in its thumping sturdiness is to hold such things as poniards and stilettos, the swordsman with the domino, the man who stabs in the back -- as unimaginable things.  The Morris Dance, in short, is a perfect expression in rhythm and movement of the English character."  (Cecil Sharp, in Flitch's Modern Dancing and Dancers, quoted by Koritz 1994: 72).

WRITTEN REFERENCES
Allan, Maud.  1908.  My Life and Dancing.  London: Everett and Company.  https://archive.org/details/mylifedancing00allaiala

Bland, Lucy.  1998.  "Trial by Sexology?: Maud Allan, Salome and the 'Cult of the Clitoris' Case."  In Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, eds. Lucy Bland, Laura Doan.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 183-97.

Buonaventura, Wendy.  2003.  Something in the Way She Moves: Dancing Women from Salome to Madonna.  Cambridge: Da Capo Press.

Koritz, Amy.  1994.  "Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan's 'The Vision of Salome.'"  Theatre Journal 46 (1): 63-78.

IMAGE
http://reflectionsinverse.blogspot.com/2013/07/maude-allan-salome-dancer-who-caused.html

Queering Abhinaya Assignment 4: Translations of Teachings (Shyamala and All)

I chose some text from a padam called Velavare, that I had learned from Medha Yodh.  However, the English versions of the poem were not translated poetically, but rather in a literal word for word fashion that was useful for learning the dance, but somehow did not inspire me to make interesting interpretations of it.  It seemed more fruitful to translate my written dance notes of what Medha had taught me.  So it became more similar to Lionel Popkin's translations of Ruth St. Denis' instructions on how to do her dances then just a re-choreographing of the text.  Each of us did our own interpretation of the same words/descriptions as seen below. 

passwords for all are: medha

Shy translates Medha from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Meena translates Medha from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Sandra translates Medha from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

Cynthia translates Medha from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.