CAP Session: VI

February 20 2015

In the initial rendition of this session, where I try to find my motivation, I feel an attraction towards the snow outside. The powdery nature and ungraspability of the snow remained a thread throughout. I felt drawn to the floor, the curtains, and towards my hands through the sensation of weight. Woh!! Finally, the word sensation came up. So here is where I need to be if I want to use to CAP as a mode of investigating direct bodily expression. Moving on to noticing, I see myself attached to the ground, practice goes out of technique into the intuitive, the liminal. Certain questions come up about class, privilege, and dis-ability. What are my hands were my legs? What if I had only two limbs? Is a post human Mahari a privileged ornate being? I remained curious to the idea of flicker as opposed to the constant. The unstable and unsustained motion and blinking of the green light intrigued me into thinking about my more technical preoccupations this semester. I wanted to know what attributes in my practice need alteration in order to capture the motion quality and choreographic approximation of the flickering Mahari body.

I come back to the body-mind continuum. Sometimes I get too abstract. I want to be able to embody my mahari. Only the direct experience of my body knowing, information inside of me will result in me accessing my Mahari. The idea of sensation was interesting but the sensation of idea is what I am exploring here in CAP. So I let it be. Like my meditation practice hinges on breath as a fulcrum, I will continue using my breath as a mode of response in this as well. The breath is the recentering, the refocusing, and the repurposing of my body delving into the sensation of CAP.

Struggles:  –

  1. 1.     How do I access my body beyond the hypercodified technique in Odissi and not get into the Western paradigm that measures sensation through sensing muscles and proprioception?
  2. 2.     What is the nature of my kinesphere as I encounter this in various iterations? Does it slowly grow in size or is it an animating kinesphere as I encountered in my motion capture animation?

I want to thank all of you for your brilliant textual, movement, emotional, sensory and creative responses with the so-called Odissi objects. Since there is so much information in that, I have decided to write a reflection paper on it. For now see if you can find your voice:-

Six..Fifteen..Leg…Which way is up….Cold….Leg….It’s a snake…..Aa glide jingle gentle …..Gentle….Hook ….tells me its jewelry….Roll…Sequential….Wear ….6 15  32 35…..Lots of moving dangling….Makes me feel pretty…Laden carrying a lot ….Laden object….Three parts…..curves and rounds and edges….Descending….Tremor….Fragment….Dance marked on here….Is this make up or glue….Weight….Metal

This was one of the most exciting weeks for me this semester as I started excavating the three media, my body, my mediated body and text, which I am working with a little more deeply than I could before. The session with Norah helped me find Nelson’s cues or simply threads to access more information and deeper insight in a specific phenomenon, be it a movement, or a coming into awareness of my body. The value of liquid knowing remained so very potent this process. It was interesting to hear about my project as being “fundamentally innovative” as Todd puts it. Yet, there was a sense of the unknown in the room. I find it fascinating to see the differences in responses in academia to scientific enquiries and historical/cultural enquiries. I wonder what the pointe shoe will evoke in such a setting and whether the impulses of oversensitivity arise in that case.

As I glance through Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, I recognize her project of claiming objects and their associations in all their complexities arising out of the development of cybernetics in the late twentieth century. Being a socialist feminist, Harraway claims that a cyborg is a matter that changes what counts as women’s experiences in late twentieth century (291). Against essentializing women through their shared oppression or their natural reproductive capacities, Harraway wishes to establish cyborgian affinities that confuses boundaries between human and machine, human and animal and physical and non-physical. Claiming for a utopian, post-gender and partial ontology, Harraway’s cyborg participates in the era of information. I might be going in that direction reimagining my Mahari as techno-human hybrid where myth (folklore) and tool (software) come hand in hand with each other.

Also, an independent CAP session deepening my practice into its first three facets, Opening, Situating and Delving, articulates my intention. I am committed to discovering/ inventing/ creating a cyborg Mahari—a cybernetic reality that to me is non-essentialiing, non-totalizing and non-exclusionary.

 Noble Motion Dance