April 8 2015
My Mahari: A Simultaneous Exploration of Historicity and Contemporaneity
On the eve of the death of the Sashimoni Devi, the last surviving Mahari, the quintessential temple-dancer who embodies the Indian dance form of Odissi for centuries, I explore Mahari movement through dance-scholar Vida Midgelow’s structured improvisation routine called Critical Articulations Process. Sensate elements that I encounter through improvisation provide a visceral context for learning. As I investigate the movement of the Mahari through an exploration of my senses in the studio environment, I get intertwined with memories within overarching narratives of experience. As a practitioner of Odissi, I choose fundamentals within Odissi vocabulary as my starting point. Technique offers a unique entry into the world of improvisation as I combine specificities in Odissi with a subsequent play with the dynamics of movement, rhythm, tempo, meter, sound, feel, and kinesthetics of motion. Breaking down a traditional Odissi routine into elements that I then repeat, refine, play with, and distort create multiple layers of knowledge. In this process, I find body as a site of knowledge as well as a means to knowledge acquisition, juxtaposing complex layers of the known and the unknown, the historical and the contemporary, the live and the mediated, the dead and the alive.
As I circle my wrists in Mayura, a hand gesture, I task myself to access the sensation of this particular arrangement of fingers. I get a sharp tingling feeling in my wrist, a sensation that goes through my fore-arm but gets lost somewhere around the elbow. Instead of moving to another disparate Odissi gesture, I decide to hear my body and follow its directives. I find a native movement utilizing the elbow. The process of finding the movement takes a while since elbow is not often used as an initiation point in Odissi. Bringing a touch of innovation, I push the space in the front of my body with my elbow juxtaposing it with a retreating torso. The layering of a forward and a backward motion with my elbow and my torso respectively, create a hollow space in front of my body. Emptiness strikes me within as the front of my chest presses against my back. I remember the Mahari as destined to dance for the eyes of Jagannath, a male Hindu deity, within the dark and damp temple walls of Odisha. A thought suddenly comes to my mind. Negotiating my body and it’s sensations within the intimacy, darkness, and silence of the studio, I feel akin to my Mahari, a feeling that is not one of celebration, presentation, confidence, and aesthetic appeal, which I relish in the proscenium theater as an Odissi soloist. Being allowed a limited amount of space outside the purview of public eye, the Mahari expresses her devotional aesthetics in the form of performance. I navigate my sensations of Odissi movement as reminiscent of her performance in the sacred precincts of the temple.
Repeating a completely internalized piece of work within the Odissi repertoire requires a complex combination of memory and focus. The aesthetic feeling of Odissi resides in the easy accessibility of a devotional paradigm, one that colors all forms of negotiations within the presentation of Odissi. However, as I access my memory to work through such a combination of pre-choreographed movements, I take time to notice a part of my body to trace its sensations. During a deliberate tracing of shoulders, I realize how inactive they are in Odissi. My teacher repeatedly restrains the movement of the shoulder. He demands complete isolation of my torso from the hips and the shoulders, often a physical impossibility. Such isolation also results in a certain sense of inactivity, which I had not accessed before. Curious to explore shoulder movement, I play with incorporating some within native vocabulary. Fifteen years of inertia of not employing my shoulders in movement provides a tough competition to my resolution of bringing in shoulder activity. After engaging in the duet of shoulder and shoulder-free movement, I realize the role of inertia, how easily it diffuses specific histories. The idea of shoulder-free movement is a construct by a particular section of Odissi dancers who wish to polish up Odissi from its associations with the Mahari and her dangerous sexuality. The Mahari is known to dance to sexually explicit lyrics of the Gitagovinda, a twelfth century text that is used until today, where sexual union stands as a metaphor of the ultimate surrender of the human to the divine. In order to obscure the sexual origins of Odissi movement, the progenitors of Odissi try hard to police any sort of excessive unrestrained motion, restraining shoulders being one such phenomenon. In my excavation, I find it potent to resurface the Mahari through an explicit juxtaposition of jerking shoulders through shoulder-free movements.
In a partnered exploration of the Critical Articulations Process with my advisor, she prompts me to think of repetition as a tool of accessing sensation. The idea of repetition opens up a world of possibilities. Traditionally, I repeat Tribhangi number one, Ta Tathi Naka Thini, Ta Tathi Naka Thini, in three speeds to gain precision and strength in Tribhangi, the defining posture of Odissi movement. However, repetition in CAP belies the earlier process of accessing the exact muscles and body shape. As I now repeat the Tribhangi, I play with levels, isolations, hands, neck, eyes, head, and my breath. This mode of accessing new information with every single repetition directs my attention to a plethora of other information that remains hidden to me in the garb of attaining precise movement. I feel a sense of excruciating pain since I have been focusing my body weight on one leg for over a quarter of an hour without shifting weight to the other leg. My bodily pain creates a break in the smooth transition of my Odissi movement. The splayed shin ruptures the illusion of ease and contorts the smile on the face into a grimace. I wonder about the price the Mahari pays with her death as she tries to achieve exactness in rhythm, shape, size, and weight. Yet, my Mahari is rebellious. She refuses to adhere to her subservient past. Through a rigorous exploration of physicality within Odissi, my Mahari emerges as resilient, playful, rebellious, and vociferous, refusing any sense of dominance and erasure.
Digitizing Odissi movement through motion capture technology and its subsequent visualization in Motionbuilder software, I continue a parallel investigation of Mahari movement in digital mediation. Over the past three years, I have devoted my energy in archival and theoretical explorations of the figure of the Mahari. The physical and virtual exploration continues in that vein of surfacing the body of the Mahari, appropriated time and again by contemporary Odissi dancers. Ease of experimentation of two-dimensional and three dimensional visualizations in the digital medium adds another layer to my embodied exploration. On another note, motion capture data of my Odissi movement, disembodies the liveness of Odissi movement and abstracts it to certain values approximating the actual motion. Without the animated face, the ornaments, the elaborate costume, and the exaggerated facial make-up inviting the audience to journey through the piece, mocap Odissi seems almost parallel to losing the ornamentations of Odissi movement as to achieve the pared down Mahari movement. There is a persistence of errors in the solving of the human skeleton by the Motionbuilder software as I see the anomalous twist of my elbow or the backward flip of my knee. Perception of movement also differs as the trace of an arm movement that appears to me like an arc looks like a straight line onscreen. Such perceptive or technical discrepancies when feed into the studio practice provide opportunity for further experimentation and innovation alongside my training in Odissi. Comparison of my tutelage in Odissi and Improvisation routines emerging from a western concert dance scenario has very different historical, methodological, and pedagogical limitations. However, committed to surface my Mahari who I embody, appropriate, erase, and historicize, I conduct a cross-cultural and intermodal investigation sieved through my embodied practice in a cyclical feedback loop.