CAP Session IX

March 9 2015

I am at that time of the semester when there is an imminent feeling of danger, chaos and incessant movement. There is a constant motion in me generated by the departure of winter. Spring is yet to settle in my embodied knowing. There is a sense of rupture as I enter my opening today. I am torn into a few selves today,

  1.  My efficient self that is ready to perform, generate words, experiential from the coming into knowing of the CAP
  2. My aesthetic self that resists at sensing or resists naming of senses
  3. My appropriate self that relies on deep listening for handling material relating to gender and race with care

So, a lot of things are going on simultaneously, I am reading, animating, improvising and practicing to know more about my Mahari. Now, I have added another facet to it. My Mahari is interacting with neo-Burlesque. My Mahari wants to be alive, potent and embodied outside of the recesses of history to directly comment on issues about race, gender, class, caste, etc.

I am reminded of my technique as a panoptic eye, a coded surveillance that guides my Mahari to behave. Yet, there is a rupture, an opening of the appropriate Mahari into my competent Mahari. She competes with me, an Odissi dancer known to have occupied her body, to come out, to express herself. Moving into a territory of self-introspection, I am willing to consider the space of questioning as wilful surrender to the Jagannatha, the eye, the panopticon.

As I glide, graze, slide on the floor, the mirror stares back at me. It helps me organize my thoughts, provides a reflective palimpsest, a sense of revised codification, codification through embodied liquid knowing. Always at the juncture of performance, choreography and improvisation, my movement moves into a process of the known and the unknown. The weight of my arm drops as I bring it on various levels of Dolahasta, a name for a particular hand gesture, simply a raised / suspended hand. I sense a tingling sensation. I feel numb and resistant to call it anything. The panopticon shifts and I recede into Mayura, a yet another arrangement of fingers.

I play with my fingers and question the associations with the meanings. I feel the palpable flesh. My fleshiness transcends the grace, it borders inappropriateness as it bares the labor, the work behind the particular arrangement of my body.

 

I continue. I resist. I move.

Inspiration:

I needed the break to rejuvenate, recuperate and revive myself into revisiting my history. I got a few readings done. Few scholars, artists and performance works stood out for me in this journey. (Bibliography attached)

Julie Wyman’s article regarding the performance practices of Chicago based performance ensemble BLW’s intervention in technologisation of human state was interesting. My work in creating/discovering/ inventing/ cocreating a cyborg Mahari is almost antithetical to BLW’s respeaking in the voices of historical figures. The last surviving Mahari passes away this week while I enjoy the fruits of her labor even though I wish to preserve her in non-essentializing means. I find congruence in my digitally native methods and BLW’s anti-technology intervention. Both of us are interested to open up gaps discussing questions of impossibility, desirability and the problems of erasing/appropriating identities, in our respective palimpsests of information. While they find interaction with the audience as a research space, I find my embodied interaction with technology as a potent research arena. In Art & D while talking about intermedia art, Richard Braun considers these collaborative ecosystems not as “mere extensions of artistic material as art expanded but rather as specific tools of interfering in cultural mechanisms as platforms for alternative settings of social breaches mythologies and systems of values” (225). In the same vein, Thecla Shiphoerst considers the use of technology as filling the lack of telepathy. I wondered about having a telepathic connection through movement crossing boundaries of time, space and death. In the reader on gender and performance, Susan Kozel makes a hacker out of Medea, the mythical character. While I am not sure what character my Mahari will transpose into, I know that she is juxtaposed within my relationship to Odissi that is beset with questions around classicism, codification, queering modalities and theorizing intermedia.

Broadhurst, Susan, and Josephine Machon. Identity, Performance and Technology: Practices of Empowerment, Embodiment and Technicity. Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.
Brouwer, Joke. Art & D: Research and Development in Art. Rotterdam: V2 ̲NAi Publishers, 2005. Print.

Goodman, Lizbeth, and Gay J. De. The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance. London: Routledge, 2002. Internet resource.

Riley, Shannon R, and Lynette Hunter. Mapping Landscapes for Performance As Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

Susan Kozel: Across Bodies and Technologies