CAP Session: IV

February 16 2015

Traced Trace: Integrating, Reflecting, Redirecting Process

CAP with a colleague, Nicole Garlando

 

As I complete my evaluations and look into my earlier posts, I realize that they are all translations of me and my work in various media and modalities. Sometimes the translations are interpretive such as my reading of Hayles’ definition of the posthuman. Often, they are metaphoric as I have the pictures and audio recordings of my process. Some have been a little more structured as in seeking appropriate words and arranging them neatly into categories. So, if I have to trace my traces, I will recommit to being loud and clear in an interdisciplinary medium and reassert my conviction in my work. The exciting trajectory in this class has been to really delve into process as an intersection of elements—words, visuals, senses, cognition, affect and texture. Rethinking of history to posit its transgressive potential is the abstract rendering of my work. In a concrete sense, I am questioning my embodied knowledge of Odissi dance as a segway into understanding the figure of Mahari, the temple-dancer who’s dancing has been subsumed into Odissi. In order to sift through the intersecting layers of embodied improvisation, linguistic readings and onscreen manifestations of my Odissi body, I think of myself as a holistic entity outside of the inside/outside binary. What if my kinesphere constitutes of the computer screen, the books and the studio space? What if the boundaries of my body are porous and are not really demarcating an inside/outside dichotomy? A holistic self does not have to worry much about translation. The different media interact with one another inspite of their differences and specificities. They enjoy a certain sense of coherence and integration. This week I commit to further my process of finding the whatness, the thatness, and the howness of THE coherence.

Rethinking my Project/Process?

My question is :-

What is Mahari movement? How do I access it or engage with it?

 

Mahari is the figure of a female temple-dancer who historically was appointed as a ritual specialist in Hindu temples in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. The term Mahari is an Oriya term, the indigenous language of Odisha. Mahari was hailed as the virgin celibate figure that lived a spiritual life dedicated to the religious service of the male Hindu deity even though the system of appointing her for temple service was discontinued. On the eve of Indian independence after two hundred years of British colonialism, the Mahari helped to create the narrative of a two thousand year old unbroken lineage of Indian classical music and dance tradition. So her dance has been subsumed in the reconstruction of Odissi, the Indian classical dance form that I am using to investigate her historicity. According to the reconstructed history of Indian classical arts, the tradition of Mahari apparently degraded when she started prostituting herself, thus changing her status form a devotional persona to sexual promiscuity. Yet, her embodied tradition continues to labor through Odissi as Odissi is a highly popular dance form in the transnational concert dance circuit today. Also, there has been a recent trend of presenting Mahari dance itself and not its Odissi-ized version in dance festivals. Thus, my project in discovering my notion of Mahari movement is to highlight her in all her sexual, sensual, embodied, ritual as well as devotionally paradigmatic potential, as a revision to her current portrayal within the virgin-prostitute spectrum.

As a trained Odissi dancer, I have always heard of the Mahari  as this divine temple-dancer who performed this art form as a spiritual practice. There was an underlying current of her degradation but that history never surfaced in my rendition of the art form until I started my graduate studies in dance. Here, I started thinking of her role in the reconstruction of Odissi. As I see the evolution of Odissi over time from the middle of the twentieth century until now, I see a constant policing of the sexual, which I think to be the invisibilization of the Mahari (for example, the erasure of hip movement as being potentially “crude” or “lassivious” and focusing on the isolation of the torso from the hip as being signs of virtuosity). I have dealt with her in theory trying to reconstrust her from historical evidences and having her converse with queer, postcolonial and critical cultural theory. In order to engage with her movement in particular, I have determined three parallel tracks for my investigation.

1.     I analyze Mahari movement as it co-exists with Odissi in contemporary concert dance space and media documentations, videos of the Mahari dance.

2.   I participate in an open-ended research methodology of practice-as-research called Critical Articulations Process by Vida Midgelow to relect on my embodied understanding of the Mahari as she exists within my Odissi dancing body.

3.  I capture both the versions of the Mahari through motion capture technology to generate data. Subsequent analysis of this data will give me further insight into this figure as

• modes of comparison and contrast
• reduced form of certain other revelations that are impossible in their human fleshy rendering
• a posthuman/ cyborg figure having precarious connections with tradition and contemporaneity
• an infinite iterable citation that always exists in partiality and thus can push back on conventional notions of coming into knowing, such as duality, objectivity and subjectivity.

Inspiration:

Nelson, Robin. Practice As Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

A second reading of Robin Nelson’s Practice As Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances  and Midgelow’s article on Critical Articulations Process generate more questions on PaR methodologies. His didactic approach in positing a model of how to articulate a form of PaR brings forth the following questions:-

• Does all practice constitute research?
• What are the research implications of openness?
• What other ways can practice be part of your research if you are not specifically engaging/ doing PaR?
• What kind of practice counts as research?
• What are the parameters that make practice as research?

 

So as I engage with movement description of dance performances in which I perform thick description and add contextual information, I feel my Critical Articulations Process is functioning on those lines. I write during doing and try to give words to my doingness. Although I like to be in Midgelow’s realm of liquid knowledge, somatic markers, and dance in its nascent embodiment, I appreciate Nelson’s push to critically reflect on practice. In forwarding the process, I bring myself to be open by overcoming by biases of privileging a particular type of knowing—the verbal-linguistic over the sensory-embodied. I acknowledge the doingness of knowledge, reflect on its retrospective acquisition, always conscious of knowing the happennings with simultaneous reflections on practice.

 

The experiential and interdisciplinary PaR compromises the long established binary between academic research and creative activity. The circulation of the PaR product in the form of a creative output, complementary writing and longitudinal documentation of process becomes pertinent in order to engage in academic discourse since academia is established on the grounds of tangible knowledge. The words as well as the practice then complement each other in a feedback loop to trace the process and the novel production of epistemological, technological, performative or conceptual knowledge. There is a pushback against scientific empiricism and positivism to produce replicable, generalizable and reproducible knowledge.
Based on the idea of openness, CAP for the past ten years has provided a methodology based on a series of questions approached sincerely in order to come into new understanding. The interesting aspect in CAP remains the fact that practice is foregrounded and is used as a modality to frame language. Midgelow problematized the linguistic representation.  This particular phenomenon is interesting for dance studies probably because there is always a desire to bring practice into research, either for its linguistic, ethnographic, archival, phenomenological, epistemological or creative manifestations.

I Have No Face