CAP Session VIII

March 2 2015

Another CAP session opens up a few more questions. The neutral spine comes up organically as an issue of concern. What is the neutral, anyway? The non-flexed scientific linearity of the spine may suffice one definition of neutrality that bases itself on anatomical safety. Yet, there is a value judgment associated to being erect, upright, accessing the ethereal as apparent in the context of western concert dance space. For an Odissi dancer, the torso needed to be ever erect and parallel to Jagannath, or the King historically. For now, the viewers are given an elevated status requiring a frontal presentation all the time.

I start playing with this neutrality. Serpentine motions of the spine sometimes give itchy, tingling and when pushed to the extremes, become painful. Known for its serpentine spirals, Odissi stands strong on a well lubricated spine. Its presumed neutrality is central to its symmetrical rendering of curvilinear motions. When do I stop being in Odissi? When I go beyond that curve and stretch it beyond the strictures posed by the Odissi gurus, am I in a different idiom? As I continue with questions of idiomatic language as it relates tomy  embodied questioning, questions about the medium come up again and again today. I am engaging with the studio, the text and the screen on a daily basis. I am working with my body and its mediated selves in mocap data and in CAP improvisations. I just finished reading the chapter on Intermedia by Dick Higgins. I also read Thecla Shiphoerst’s play with somatics in an integrated system with art and technology. Shiphoerst claims that technology enables a richer and holistic articulation of senses that decouples the authority of vision in accessing information. Higgins is interested in specifying the congruence of languages and idioms in an intermedia piece, in which the individual elements of a particular medium cannot be recognized anymore. In this practice session, overindulgent in feeling weight and figuring out spirals within my spine, I question my faithfulness or faithlessness to the medium of Odissi. What does my intermedia performance of Odissientail? Can I retain the nomenclature of Odissi in that case? More questions. Fewer answers this week. Certain words come up as I finish up:-

Piercing, Cool, Nauseating, Dreary, Buoyant, Hopeless, Melancholic, Satisfied, Serene, Vexed, Vacant and Wretched!! I prefer not to make a garland out of this particular string of words. I let them breathe and rest in solitude.

Reflection

Sweat to Sweat-Free Practice

I remember my Gurus mandating four hours of Odissi dance practice on a daily basis from me since the time I was a teenager. I was reprimanded and told that only practice would perfect my Angashudhi, purity in Odissi movement vocabulary, and build stamina required to present an entire repertoire that lasts for a couple of hours. As I completed my Manchapravesh, the graduation ceremony marking my first debut performance as a solo Odissi dancer, the practice stayed with me. It became a second nature. I used to be guilty on days I was unable to put in that kind of practice. Dance practice has been the one constant factor in my non-linear career path of navigating between a full-time and/or part-time performance careers to doing desk jobs. I engage with practice on a whole new level, now, as I am pursuing a graduate degree in dance. In my current work, I acknowledge practice as a mode of knowing and means of accessing information, such as direct bodily sensations.

A specific type of knowing has been privileged in academia that functions on a binary understanding of theory and practice. Theorizing has been an activity of the mind while practice is relegated to the body. As shown by scholars like Robin Nelson and Vida Midgelow, Practice-as-Research (PaR) is an accepted methodology of conducting academic investigations that foreground the actual practice over the writing about it. I want to understand the role of my embodied practice in the field of Odissi by reflecting on my practice along the arc of a longitudinal study. In particular, I use the first three facets, Opening, Situating and Delving of Midgelow’s Critical Articulations Process (CAP) to use my practice as a source for interpretive research that uses the evidence in a constant feedback loop, as I navigate between the corporeality of my body and its mediated selves in technology through motion capture data or in text through movement analysis. I am particularly drawn to the idea of praxis since the originary roots of my dance comes from an ancient Indian text called the Natyasastra , a philosophical, spiritual and performative treatise on the praxis of Indian performing arts. At a later point in my work, I might have a conversation between my experiential praxis and that as delineated in this particular text.

I recognize that my body has an affective relationship to practice. Practice is loaded with power implications for me. I always had a reverential relationship to my practice, as if it was something bigger than me, one that I could achieve through years of dedication and sincerity. While it was the only modality of me achieving my dream of being a dancer, it also meant more than material returns. It was and still is Sadhana, devotion to the form in a complex nexus of spiritual, material and performative relationality. My practice makes me think of my sweat. I was notorious for creating pools of sweat in the studio. The equation to my laboring body and its physicality changes as I convert the studio space into a laboratory for research and investigation. I deconstruct established hierarchies to be invasive to my practice. Sometimes, the process feels artificial, imposed and intrusive. The lab becomes a space of dissociating my body from its socially acculturated meanings. The relationship of my body to sweat changes as I might be in the studio for hours together indulgent in CAP without really opening my sweat pores. Yet, there is an opening. It is the opening of the past, the historicity of Odissi, in the present through my embodied practice. Also, it is the situating of contextual, contingent and emergent meaning through a playful interaction between the various media creating a space of confused boundaries. And there is a delving into the shifting focus, the dancing center and the disjunctive media-space, “a space whose boundaries and identities are multiple, permeable, contradictory[i]”.

The CAP methodology gives a sense of infinite openness, which to me sometimes borderlines promiscuity. As in, I enter the studio with so much permission that is antithetical to my conservative training in Odissi technique, and allows me to leave a somatic marker or a slippery liquid understanding in the discipline of Odissi. Such a broad entry point into a particular academic research enquiry definitely deconstructs prior expectations and assumptions. If I, for once, consider the studio as a laboratory, I do not really have a lot of given conditions when I engage myself with CAP although I am aware of the fact that the process comes out of western concert dance scenario with its own conundrum of power relationships and hierarchies given the history of colonization.

There is nothing scientific or controlled about this process, so no empirical evidence is produced. Other evidences are produced; other affects but they invite a different kind of reporting. Nelson insists on overcoming biases of differences in reading theory and practice. He believes in the doingness of knowledge and posits the need for a retrospective acquisition of coming into knowing during the act. However, he seems to have a more structured understanding of PaR as compared to Midgelow. He believes that only particular academic enquiries engage in creating new knowledge through experiential means involving interdisciplinary foci. He insists on tracing the practice over a period of time to leave traces eventually building upon them. It becomes generalizable knowledge when it comes into circulation by being published or enacted or performed. Years of linguistic dominance in the academy challenges the translation and circulation of practice in its doingness and forces its verbal interpretation. Dance in academia, I believe has the potential to intervene by positioning movement at the fore and critiquing, arguing and verbalizing the particular knowledge generated from the doingness of it, which already problematics its linguistic abstraction or representation. Doing this work in terms of a reconstructed historical dance form wrapped up in the politics of nationalism raises a whole set of questions about cultural codes and their disseminations. I am interested to critique CAP for its perceived neutrality and a rhetoric of universality embedded in it even though it has very particular histories inside and outside academia.

Foster claims that PaR has a long history in higher education in dance that goes back to the pioneering attempts of Margaret H’Doubler. Doubler started a degree in dance in the department of physical education with her innovative anatomical approach of looking at the dancing body. Even if one takes Foster’s maneuver of looking at choreographic and compositional strategies as PaR, questions about the standardization of practices are still very potent due to the massive differences in which the field is being viewed by the insider as well as the outsider. As an insider to Odissi, I feel I am an outsider to CAP. I have privileged certain modalities of knowing in my practice. Breaking down such cultural codes is disorienting but also complicated since I do not want to exoticize or self-orientalize myself or my art form causing further violence. Through PaR, I inculcate a critical mindfulness within my practice. It is personal, yet, not at all different from the migration of personal bias in a theoretical exposition. I find it interesting to read into my practice as a text, as if it was an eisegesis of a tactile palimpsest, a juxtaposition of me and my mediations—my digital double, my studio double and my writer double. I do not want to engage into the Narcissus myth and obsess over selfhood. I find my project fundamentally innovative. I want to locate strands and ways of working through body knowledge, simultaneously contextualizing it, historicizing it, theorizing it as well as improvising it. I feel blessed to be located within the dance studies since it has a shifting center and encourages openness, allowing something to be emergent with multiple points of articulation—something that is open, liquid and slippery.

Bibliography

Bacon, Jane and Vida Midgelow. “Articulating Process: Creative Articulations Process

(CAP).” Choreographic Practices 5, no. 1 (2014):7-31.

Foster, Susan L. “Making a Dance/Researching Through Movement.” In Mapping       

     Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative      

     Cartographies, edited by Shannon R. Riley and Lynette Hunter, 91-98. New York:

Palgrave, 2009.

Kaye, Nick. “Disjunction: Performing Media Space.” In Mapping Landscapes for      

     Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies, edited by

Shannon R. Riley and Lynette Hunter, 128-133. New York: Palgrave, 2009.

Nelson, Robin. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies,      

     Resistances. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.