February 25 2015
Creative Knot: Words, Senses, Affects
For my creative knot exercise, I shared with my colleagues certain elements that I would normally associate with my Odissi practice, bells, belt, hair dress, flowers, and anklet, in order to see how they interact with my treasured possessions. I asked them to attach movement, text and an affective response to the objects they were encountering. It was such a poststructuralist moment that speaks of floating signification, that is the absolute disconnect between objects and their signifiers. Everyone had a very different response to the objects that clearly was unimaginable for me in the first place. The movement responses were equally diverse. Joseph kept on tapping his foot and banging his head as he agrees to Jessica’s embodied response of undulation with a point. Norah has a White lady moment. The anklet made her enter into a quivering motion, shaking constantly without jerks or breaks. Todd was extremely ornate with the material. He started accessing shapes that looked like Cambodian to me but I intend to ask him.I feel like categorizing the responses into the following simple setions before trying to interpret. I would describe the various interactions as visual, playful, curious, sensory, reminiscent, and material. I will preface by saying that each of us had more than one way of access with the object.
Visual: Not everyone was drawn to how the object felt although some was completely attracted to how it looked.
Playful: Sometimes people were playful with the objects and enjoyed having creative explorations with the artifact.
Curious: Some of us started to engage with the object through a series of questions.
Sensory: One of us felt the sheer joy of feeling the object. It was interesting to simply access the thing with direct bodily responses.
Reminiscent: The objects triggered certain memories for some of us.
Material: Finally, the materiality drove some of us into exploring the codes embedded in it.
In general, the materials and the objects were alien to anything my colleagues encountered before in such an intimate setting. One felt the heavy of the material by wearing the bells on the feet similar to its original purpose, the other decided to go pedestrian, coiling up the bells and the strings to put them inside the coat pocket. Clearly there was a chronological disjuncture and a sense of anachronism, as in most felt disconnected between their reactions and the intended purposes and there was a sense of time lag between individual subjectivities and the objects in general. While one noted blood stains on the Ghunghroos as markers of dance, another found a more playful response to the overall shape. While one saw the missing bells, the other found it snake-like and started feeling the length of the string across the body. One found the material as sequential and laden with weight, while another loved the sense of metal on the skin, reminiscent of childhood memories and snow. I will end by bringing up Jessica’s tension of being able to portray ‘authentic’ response to the object. The ornateness and the cultural Otherness do distance the stuff. Nicole also gets this sense of history and probably is urged to glean its original sense of understanding. Yet, she brings it into perspective as it is after all metal and material for her. Todd plays with the texture of the soft cloth embodying its texture and using it to generate spirals, curves and serpentine movement impulses.
Working with the idea of layering text, movement and technology in the affective space is compelling and disorienting. Nobody shares my reverential attitude to the objects. None had that response. Does it say something about western culture in general. Sure it does. However, my project is not to essetialize Odissi or the West. I want to work within these very layers of affect, memory and multiple associations.
Final Project:- A Performative Presentation
Layering Trangression and Surrender through Burlesque and Odissi
Question: How do notions/experiences of voyeurism and embodying multiple subjectivities affect erotic performances as acts of transgression and/or surrender?
Thoughts :- Mahari is a way to embody the divine and can be seen as empowering. But, it can also be seen as supplicating and surrendering to Hindu Brahmanical patriarchy. Burlesque, in a similar vein can be seen as empowering for the performer as well as the performer’s loss of agency and supplication to patriarchal ideals of female sexuality. We plan to look at these two disparate styles through a performative exploration, juxtaposing text (Theorists such as Bataille and Audre Lorde), technology (live feed, projections), and movement (codified techniques like Odissi, burlesque movement, and pedestrian improvisational movement). We are interested in the multiple layers that can emerge through this intertextual exploration. We want to portray these forms and their effects as always contingent and contested according to existing cultural tropes and socio-political contexts.
Bebe Miller Company