Reimagining Citizenship: Meena's Assignment 1

Please listen (and watch depending on how you like to hear) to this talk by Fred Moten at least once. In your written response, please note whatever stands out to you. For example: (1) what stands out to you in his talk? (2) what feels relevant to you? (3) how might this be relevant to your context and research around reimagining citizenship? Or not? (4) please come up with at least 1 possible creative assignment that stems from Fred Moten's presentation

https://vimeo.com/100330139

Please post your written response and at least one creative assignment suggestion by October 5th.

Reimagining Citizenship - Timeline

--> Round 1
Sept 21- Meena assigns reading/viewing
Oct 5 - Written responses with suggestion for creative assignments posted on blog
Oct 19 - Meena decides and assigns on creative assignment (Cyn may post late)
Nov 2 - Creative responses are posted
Nov 9 - Feedback is posted

Round 2
Nov 9 - Sandra assigns reading/viewing
Nov 23 - Written responses with suggestions for creative assignments posted on blog
Nov 30 - Sandra decides and assigns creative assignment
Dec 14 - Creative responses are posted
Dec 21- Feedback is posted. Possible Skype meeting.

Round 3
Dec 28 - Cynthia assigns reading/viewing
Jan 11 - Written responses with suggestions for creative assignments posted on blog
Jan 18 - Cynthia decides and assigns on creative assignment
Feb 1 - Creative responses are posted
Feb 8- Feedback is posted. Skype meeting.

Regroup. Decide on Shy’s integration. Work out details of “Curation/Dramaturgical Round 4."



TBC

Reimagining Citizenship

Starting in July 2015, members of the Post Natyam Collective have been engaged in an online exchange on citizenship and its exclusions.  How does a modern nation-state decide who has the right to be a full citizen, and by extension, to be treated as fully human?  Researching citizenship in multiple geographic and historic contexts, our interests include anti-blackness in South Asia and its diaspora, anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe, and the histories of Han Chinese colonizers and indigenous peoples in Taiwan.  Our activities, which will be archived on our blog (www.postnatyam.blogspot.com), include scholarly research and writings, creative studies, and giving each other assignments and feedback.

blood run: Letters to a Lost Aboriginal Ancestor

These letters are the result of a daily writing practice in which I write a letter to my imagined female indigenous ancestor each morning.

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) What ideas, images, or specific phrases resonate with you?
(2) Are there any parts that you find confusing and would like clarification on?  Anything you find problematic?
(3) How might you imagine these being used in performance, installation, or other public sharing of art?  How might they relate to or be integrated with the other blood run material?
(4) Other thoughts?

21 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Hi.  你好。 I don't know what language to greet you in, phonemes racing trolling lazily in my blood cells, the pulse and undertow of the Pacific.  I speak to you like dolphins, sonar, vibrations of oceanic language in our bones, your bones long disappeared, turned to dust, wreathed with kelp.  I imagine you, brown skin, lined face, joyful wrinkles around your eyes, unbound feet.  Strong capable hands that till the soil, a child on your hip, taro and sweet potato at your feet, ordering the men around. 

But maybe that is wrong.  Maybe you are young, a young woman with deep-set eyes and a long nose and sea-black waves of hair.  Maybe you saw the dark silhouettes of approaching ships, the masses of men who streamed onto your island like long-queued rats storming the fertile western plains, with horror.  With wonder.  With fear.  With love.

So many generations, an ocean and several languages later, your mixed blood daughter writes you in English.  The history books say we are extinct, your language and people are extinct.  The history books were not written by our people.  I doubt my motives but I want to know you, I take bitter rice wine into my mouth, temples clench squeeze from the harsh alcohol, spew and retch in a would-be blessing.  I kneel at the Pacific, half a world and four hundred years later, and touch the water, waiting hoping to hear you.

Love,
Cynthia

22 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Hi again.  It's me, your mixed lost daughter of the future.  Yesterday, I walked along the Pacific, saltwater swirling sand around ankles and calves, and thought about another coast, craggy rocky waves crashing the sailors praying to Mazu for protection as they crossed the black water from Fujian.  What did you think and feel as they crashed headlong into your shores and lives?  What does it mean to think about my origin point as a story of colonization?  What would you think of me?  Would you look at me, scornfully, and tell me I am not one of your own?  Would you look at me as the greatest mistake in the history of your people, to love and trust a foreigner?  Would you regard me with loving abhorrence, the offspring, perhaps, of a forced encounter by the field one night?  Would your heart be sad, betrayed, understanding of the layers of assimilation, of all the lost and imposed cultures and histories that run through my ancestral and dancing body?  What have I inherited, what have I chosen?  Is it possible, dear ancestor, that I inherited my love of border-crossing and cultural difference from you?  Or is that wishful thinking, colonial guilt?  In the end this is the unanswerable question: was your "marriage" to that Han man -- my ancestor, a 李 -- a choice, a survival tactic, an act of violence?

With love and wonder,
Cynthia 李怡欣

June 23, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Like a little girl or an almost illiterate ABC, I have been practicing handwriting.  Writing Pingpu family names over and over -- or rather the Chinese surnames you were forced to take on -- or which you chose to take on as a tactic to avoid discrimination.  It reminds me that my parents took on Anglo names when they first moved here, my dad's name a strange echo of a Confederate general, Robert Lee, the same name on an FBI no-fly list, the routine interrogations at LAX when he returns from Taiwan.  Wooden prow replaced by metal bird: how we have chosen to leave, now and then.  Someone said that immigration is giving up on one's homeland.  We came in the 70s, before martial law was lifted, when Nixon decided, oops, Taiwan isn't China, China is China, and we thought, the Communists are coming!  the Communists are coming! -- a threat which is true even now.  I don't know what prompted that earlier migration, that other moment of complicity with a settler-colonial project that ended up with me as your descendant.  Years of drought, maybe, like this bone-dry California Gabrielino-Tongva land that I love.  Financial incentives by the Dutch, who could not persuade you to till your land for their profit.  Or arriving with the Manchurian Qing, who managed the indigenous people and the Han settlers by pitting us against each other, as even now we are pitted against each other in my heart, ventricles gasping, blood cells fighting each other for oxygen, as even now we are pitted against each other in Taiwan, the DPP wanting to use aboriginal identity for its own political purposes, you call us pai lang in our language, you call us mother-fuckers in yours.

What's in a name?  What's hidden in a name?  Even as your people took on Chinese names, they were still different than ours. 哀, Ai, sorrow.  猴, Hou, monkey.  毒, Du, poison.  Were the names phonetic translations, like those weird Chinese transliterations of foreign names: Mary becomes 瑪麗 (Ma Li).  Or are there traces of meaning -- red, baby chick, poetry  -- that connect to your lost names, our lost names.  Did you agree, in the end, to take the name 李, wood radical Lee, to enter a Han patriarchal lineage, a woman lost in the branches of men, the native roots and brambles of your matrilineal ancestry disappeared from the naming, the graves, the altars, the books, the family genealogy.  I cannot offer incense to you.  I can only speak, haltingly, these names in colonial translation: Yue (月), Hong (紅), Li (力).  Moon.  Red.  Power.

Love,

Cynthia
李怡欣

24 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

I wish I knew your name.  Your face.  I wish I had a picture.  A marking on a gravestone in the tall grass, worn by monsoon and time.  A mention of your laughter in a long-ago diary.  A song.  Something to hold onto and let me know that you are real.  Today the scholars tell me you are not real: the geneticists and anthropologists argue, waving their righteous flags, funded by government institutions. 

I remember going to get my hair cut with my mother in Taipei, and the hairdresser saying, Is she part American?  Her eyes look different.  My mother was angry and said I was a hundred percent Taiwanese, raised in the U.S..  At the time I thought, bemused and a little hurt, that my foreign clothes and way of being in my body must have shifted her perception, made her see me as part white, since of course that's what American means in Taiwan.  Now I wonder whether she was really seeing your eyes in my face: deep-set and round with the epicanthal fold.  Mistaking one set of barbarians for another.

I've been rethinking Confucianism.  Seeing its tightness.  What was once framed as the oh-so-predictable rebellion of the white-washed second generation American now presents itself as a decolonial act, as working to undo hundreds of years of assimilation to Han culture.  Queering Confucianism.  Family is a fist, squeezing tight as water runs and dribbles out, instead of gently cupping the water, holding it.  Family is a set of lungs shared between conjoined twins: we cannot breathe without each other.  Family is tightly woven silk, the strength of warp and weft: if you cut one thread, the whole thing unravels.  But what was family to you?  I read Jolan Hsieh's ethnography of Pingpu people, and it looks a lot like love marriage: noseflutes playing, young men and women dancing at harvest, an easy approach and retreat, following the ebb and flow of one's desire.  Did my Han ancestor slip into one of these dances?  Did you feel him beside you and take his hand in yours, smiling?  The collision course of history in one simple gesture?  Did he move to your family home, working hard as all immigrants do, to make sure his clothes wouldn't be hung outside the front door, to win your family's approval?  Did you know that he could come or go, that you need only stay together as long as you wished, that divorce and remarriage would be easy and without stigma, that you could come together and drift apart like duckweed floating on the pond's surface, that you could take for granted, as I never have, the right to choose who to love?

Love,
Cynthia

June 25, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

I imagine you wild-eyed dancing

I imagine you with millet and daikon and dirt under your nails

I imagine you with your mother and an earthbellied pot

I imagine you pouring sweet rice wine laughing fullbodied

I imagine your hands reaching into a steaming communal pot

            sweet potato and wild boar cooked together underground

I imagine you diving, a flying fish

            silverslipping in and out of waves

...my imagination stumbles, comes up empty. 

How can I imagine you when I know nothing about you?

A handful of dirt, salt, water.

Speak to me, please.

Cynthia

July 23, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Many days, as scholars argue in my head, stroking their long beards and waving their green flags, I wonder if you really exist, if you ever existed.  I feel you frowning, shaking your head at your daughter's doubt, at yet another erasure.  This is how genocide works.  So I continue writing and creating around the possibility of your existence -- hints -- detective work -- signs from a dream world -- delving headlong, shaking, into a bloody history that is far bigger than my own blood lineage.

I've been thinking about rainbows.  Somewhere over the.  Longing.  Pot of gold.  Queer leprechauns.  Oxumare dreams sky, snakes his androgynous spine as raindrops spill and shimmer, the jangle of cowry.  Genderqueer child of Oxum and Oxossi.  Birds fly why oh why can't I cross the rainbow bridge to meet you, to meet my lost ancestors.  It's true, my imagination refracts through a blockbuster film, Warriors of the Rainbow.  And yet what hands calloused torn from weaving.  What blood on my hands gripping machete.  What sacrifice do you require for us to be together?  Must I kill the Han in me?  The Seediq say that across the rainbow bridge in the heavenly hunting grounds, your enemy and you are at peace, the conflict forgiven. Would I have to split my head from my body in one clean stroke, to sacrifice myself to you to mend my warring selves, to heal?  But this is not a Pingpu tradition.  It is a headhunter spirituality from a patriarchal society that allowed the Seediq and the Atayal to violently, valiantly resist their Japanese colonizers.  Seediq Bale.  To kill is to become fully human.  And I doubt this was our way, our matrilocal plains people who married the enemy, loved them, maybe.

Rainbows remind me of Hawai'i, where they appear, spontaneously, in mist and light, my father, bigbellied full of mana, so happy at home there.  The possibility of you around every corner.  Maybe I should've suspected we were Pacific Islanders then.  Rainbows lit up my Facebook feed last month, suddenly everyone was queer, Queer Nation, the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage while my radical queer friends protested.  I know marriage is not liberation, but I am tired of critical queers, of negativity and gatekeeping and exclusion and hopelessness.  I want a world lit up by rainbows, rainbows without blood, pirates without pillaging, where the only blood sacrifice is to cut out the internalized colonizer within.

Love,

Cynthia

Open Round 2: Embodying Ethnography

Here is a movement study that I did for "blood run":


Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password: "ethnographic"

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS
1. What emotions, visceral responses, and/or meaning does the movement evoke for you?
2. What might you like to see as accompanying sound, if anything?*
3. What do you think about the current arc of the study?  Are there sections that you might like to reorder?  Are there moments you would like to see further fleshed out?**
4. Do you see any connections to other "blood run" material?  How might you imagine this movement living with the other material?
5. Other thoughts or suggestions?

CONTEXT
This movement was developed from some of the visual iconography of the Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations (1751), which Emma Jinhua Teng discusses in her chapter on "Picturing Savagery" from her book, Taiwan's Imagined Geography.  According to Teng, this work, which took over a decade to complete, was an ambitious project to catalog various non-Han "barbarians" by the Qing.  Over two thirds of the illustrations were of non-Han ethnic minorities living within the empire, including Taiwanese indigenous peoples, though it also included people from other Asian countries and Europeans (163).  They are depicted in pairs of male and female like representative "specimens."  I attempted to embody the different energies, bodily positions, actions conveyed by the illustrations, and to move into and through the different characters with a somatic awareness.

*Some ideas I had for sound included (a) voicing my internal imagery -- "heavy silk," "floating feather," "daikon offering," "chin forward,", (b) visual projection or voiceover of the characters as listed in the original illustrations -- "Korean gentleman," "raw savage of Zhanghua county," (3) music that references the places these characters are from.

**I just realized that I forgot one pair of characters ("Cooked Savages of Fengshan County"), who appear to be the most "refined" of the Taiwanese indigenes represented, so I can add them in if you think it would be interesting.

Open round 2: Intergenerational Art Making

Here are two artworks and a poem I made about what it is like for me being pregnant from prompts from a book called "Birthing From Within" by Pam England. The poem is describing the second art piece.

Being Pregnant, 30 weeks

Little curling seedling,

I try to imagine you inside me,

but your tender development eludes me.

As I crane to grasp the very concept of you,

the boundaries of my being expand,

making room for your ever reaching tendrils.

As we ride the turbulent tides together,

we are guided by instinct, intuition,

and my sea creature heart who flips effortlessly through the waves beside us.

I made the paintings in an art making session with my Mom, where she also made art about pregnancy, childbirth and the future baby. 

I am becoming aware that I am on a path of inter-generational healing since my Mother has come to live with me last Oct.  Some of it has manifested in my own poetry, some of it has been in a parenting class with my sweetheart, and now this art making was the first time I was able to include her in the process as well.  Thus I am thinking of the following project...

Project idea:  

My sweetheart, Mom, and I (and maybe other family members), all write a letter/poem to our own childhood self, and then another to the  unborn baby in my belly.  We then excerpt one to three lines from our letter to the baby, and each of us writes the excerpts on my belly (probably with facepaints).  If we do each of these separately, we can also decorate the belly as we wish.  However, we may wish the excerpts to somehow be in conversation with each other.    I imagine documenting this with a series of photographs of each person drawing on my belly (or maybe video which could capture any movement of the fetus as well, but other then that I think photos are enough).  

Feedback:

Any ideas for the prompts or parameters of my project idea to make it clearer or more interesting?  

Any visions of environment?

Any other ideas or thoughts?

Open Round 1: To Ask Pardon

This study continues my investigations of my indigenous and Han colonizer heritages, this time using a text written by PingPu (plains indigenous) people, "Declaration of the PingPu Peoples of Taiwan," which I found in Jolan Hsieh's book, Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Identity-Based Movement of Plains Indigenous in Taiwan.  My other studies, "blood run" and "colonial mapping," have used my own writings and travel writings by Qing-era Chinese colonizers, respectively.

Version 1:

To Ask Pardon (Mandarin) from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.
password "pingpu"


Version 2

To Ask Pardon from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password: "pingpu"

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) What intrigues or draws you in about this study politically, emotionally, aesthetically or intellectually?  What does not?
(2) How might you imagine any of this content being used in performance?  Do you want a more embodied approach, and if so, what would you suggest?  (My original vision for this text was to either find original audio of the declaration or to record the original text in Mandarin as a voice-over.  My performance would consist of attempting to translate -- eyes closed and with difficulty -- the voice-over into English, with the same messing of we/you pronouns that I do here.  Since I just got the Chinese text, I haven't had time to do a recording.)
(3) CONTEXT: This declaration was ultimately not successful, and while PingPu (plains aborigine) peoples are recognized by the UN as an indigenous tribe, they are not recognized by the government of Taiwan.  My father informs me that the PingPu search for official recognition by the government of Taiwan is very controversial and opposed by most other Taiwanese indigenous tribes.  This is because (a) the PingPu people were historically coerced into killing other indigenous tribes and (b) indigenous nations in Taiwan are given special privileges and resources (such as a certain quota of Legislative Yuan -- Taiwan's equivalent of Congress -- representation).  Since many PingPu peoples have been deeply assimilated into Han Chinese culture for generations, they (we?) don't necessarily suffer from the same systemic social disadvantages as other indigenous tribes.  Originally, alongside this declaration the PingPu people stated that they sought only recognition in name without any of these special privileges, but this has not proved to be true over time.  My dad also mentioned that a hematologist did a study in which he found that an incredibly high percentage (90%?) of Hoklo Taiwanese, which is the largest ethno-linguistic group in Taiwan and the one that my family belongs to, has aboriginal blood.  How does this information change your reception of the study, if at all?  Do you want more of this information, and if so, how could I share it in performance without being overly didactic?
(4) What do you make of my costume choices?
(5) Any other thoughts, suggestions, or useful connections to my previous studies?

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