March 30 2015
CAP-ing with Kelly Klein
I need to capture the first iteration of my Mahari this week. I am in the process of finalizing my routine that emerged through a semester long engagement with CAP. As I wrap up my CAP practice for this semester, I am left with the same question as I started out. What do I think of as Mahari movement? At the very beginning of my movement exploration, I started out with gestural imitation, invoking a symmetrical response. For example, I started looking at Mahari videos, documentaries, and photographs in order to investigate her movement. Eventually, I got uninterested in that activity. I started the CAP process accessing my bodily sensation as providing relevant insight towards my investigation. The endowment of Odissi movement that I borrow from implicitly bring forth the Mahari. I share the same text with her and many of my movements including hand gestures and facial expressions are the same as hers. In this quest of accessing my experiential sensations for realizing a pseudo-historical figure, my gesture started becoming complementary to Mahari movement, as opposed to being representative of Mahari movement.
If I look into my history, Mahari holds the role of a pedagogue as she apparently continued the divine movement over the ages. Yet, in my studio time, her haunting presence has always led to near-miss pedagogies. By deploying CAP to investigate Mahari movement, I clearly do not want to distort cultural specificity and erase indigeneity through an imposition of top-down Western base. CAP is a methodological tool to access my embodied knowledge in a structured manner and not wishful thinking that introduces biases centered around a western paradigm. The idea of respect was huge for me. I did not want to appropriate the Mahari body on the eve of the death of the last surviving Mahari. Yet, I want to explore through her or I want her to explore herself.
In order to justify my beingness with the Mahari, I take refuge in the work of queer theorist Eve Sedgewick as she deals with an unrestrictive grasp on the queering process. I find Sedgewick’s ontological gap between the living and the dead a useful trope of accessing my Mahari. There is a persistent moment, a continuing moment, an infinite temporality, and an indefinite force that exists within my sensate self as I encounter the question of finding Mahari movement. Sedgewick considers relationship as a pedagogical exercise, which is “transindividual.” I think of my relationship with the Mahari in Sedgewick’s vein. I think of my Mahari as my pedagogue with whom I can develop a relationship with a shifting center. I can encounter her through my sensation. I find my engagement with the Mahari in a pedagogical relationality through the Opening of the CAP parallel to Sedgewick’s engagement with Buddhism that teaches how to unbe a self through a sort of an opening.
Continuing in the vein of a relational understanding I bring my understanding of the Mahari into conversation with a Burlesque dancer. The original intention of this particular cross cultural comparative exercise is to navigate through notions of transgression and/ or surrender by adopting multiple subjectivities. There is a sort of precarity to the Mahari body. Being a ritual specialist for symbolic sexual pacification of a male Hindu deity, she is clearly transgressing social mores in the Hindu society that thrives upon domesticated femininity. The explicit sexuality of her character render her unrecognizeable in the social hierarchy. The society disposes her as her art form gets appropriated by upper/ middle class dancers disposing her body while simultaneously idealizing her as the divine consort to Jagannath. Burlesque has a similar marginal status in the society. Although, it is always in the secular context without religious affiliations, it continues to play with fringes of sexuality and thus is considered too risque for the mainstream.
Partnering with Kelly in this joint exploration has been productive so far. We have played with clothes, coming in and out of them as a mode of shedding esentialized identities. We have explored with the notion of historical specificity, which then we would deconstruct in order to decenter repressive rigidity of definitions. We have played with unison movements, although in a playful vein of distorting movement from its originary context simply to reemphasize the constantly moving center of a historical exercise. We have recorded the goings on of the green room, whether it be undressing and/ or taking off make-up. The whole exercise is interesting in the sense that it decenters the normative centers of these two dance forms on a micro level. On a macro level, the process questions levels of acceptance in case of erotic performance.
Inspiration:
Salter, Chris, and Andrew Pickering. Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making. , 2015. Internet resource.
I browsed through Chris Alter’s Alien Agency over this weekend. He makes some interesting claims, some of which inform my investigation towards sensation through a culturally coded lens. He makes distinctions between the just noticeable, the barely felt and the hardly perceived. I can relate to his idea as I investigate the slipperiness of Mahari movement in my Odissi body, a body that is constructed to erase the Mahari. So there are certain techniques of my senses that surface more than the other. For example, I feel the intimacy of space creating a hollow feeling in my stomach, something that I can relate to as I remember walking through the giant corridors of ancient Hindu temples, places where the Mahari body performed. Nearing a completion to this fascinating semester, I am ready to articulate my sensory exploration. I find my senses analogous to Alter’s definition, of senses “as artistic medium, material, socio-cultural premises” (171). By artistic medium I mean that CAP allows me to access my senses and follow its instincts to present my Mahari, who is my artistic construction. Alter investigates the materiality of sensation. He creates experiments to enhance vibration or resonance of the body. For my project, materiality of my sensation, I think is ephemeral because of the actual death and erasure of the Mahari body. The death of the Mahari body makes it impossible for me to ever realize a material Mahari. Yet, it is material. My Mahari is visible in her shifting traces in my dancing body, in her digitized mediation in my mocap animation, and in a transgressive play of sexuality through call-and-response score with a Burlesque dancer. I am curious about Maria’s question on iteration. How can iteration be potent to my interdisciplinary process? Need your comments!!