Dance to Data

For the capture process, I strip down my jewelry and my head décor. Wearing black overalls, I stick optical markers all over my body to reflect light onto a twelve camera Vicon system. The cameras capture my moves while I move with considerable difficulty because the markers in my toes or on my ankles keep coming into the way of my movements. The capture process is almost surreal and reminds me of the dark inner chambers of the Jagannath temple. Unlike the Rajguru, the head-priest who used to be the liaison between the temple and the royal household, I have the technicians behind a camera console in a dark room. They call the shots asking me to rehearse, start, stop, raise my arms in the T-pose, break out into movement, and eventually stop. They demarcate my movements and I am restricted to move within the delineated space. Going to the other side of the markers will cause the system to stop recognizing me and might crash. This injunction almost sounds familiar to the closely monitored movements of the Mahari. They were not allowed to enter the Garba-Griha (inner sanctum) and although only the Bhitara Gaunis (the singers for the evening ritual) could reach the threshold of the Garba-Griha and the Natamandira (dancing hall), most Maharis could not step outside their allotted space within the Natamandira. My moving space seems bigger than that of the Mahari but I still have supervised access to the motion capture space that has most sections off-limits to my mobility. Why technology? Asks many as they feel I use the technologically maneuvered optical system of capturing movement to further distance dance from the living, breathing, cultural, and devotional body of the Mahari.

Generally, I do not dance in tights and tank tops. I dance in Salwar Kameez or Saris. I want the feel of fabric around me. I need to feel the touch of cloth between my fingers, on my shoulders or near my thighs. I search for the extra volume of textile as I hold my right hand in Katakamukha (tips of forefinger, tall finger, and thumb join while the ringfinger and the little finger stay upright) placing near the thigh hoping to grab onto a piece of cloth. I have nothing to hold. The pants hug tight on my thighs making the action seem as if I am pulling my pants with my pinch of Katakamukha. It is forbidden! Because it disorients the placement of the remaining markers on the right leg, for example the one above and below the knee and the one on my hamstrings.

The capturing process needs me to modify the dance significantly such that I cater to the technologies of capture. I twist and twirl and nudge and grudge, but finally give in its dictates. However, I find these moments of disruption during the capturing process as generative of a movement impulse. Instead of giving in passively to these technologies of disruption, I believe that the Mahari punctuates my Odissi practice through these interruptions. She finds ways to sever my linear progression through choreographed material in Odissi by appearing in these sartorial glitches. Movement in Odissi requires a loss of self in the transcendental Jagannath. The Mahari breaks that transcendence by grounding me in the now, making her presence felt, and aborts my attempt to distance her in my ‘well-practised’ Odissi curves.

I give myself a task of penetrating my movement with the sculptural Alasa-Kanyas at every instant where I face resistance with the capturing process. The markers come in my way as I try to grip one of my wrists with the other hand or as I move to place my hand on my waist. Vita, my motion capture adviser in ACCAD, asks me to rehearse because that is the norm where dancers get used to the costuming conventions of the capture process and modify accordingly. I refuse to rehearse because I do not want to eliminate the spontaneity in encountering trouble, a glitch due to this new technological manipulation of movement. I start moving my body to a routine that has become second nature. I am on the verge of losing myself when I lock the front of my left leg to the back of the right knee. I feel a sharp pinch due to the marker sticking out on my toes. My posture cannot perform my oft-repeated tried and tested locked Bandhani (the name of the foot bind) as the Mahari finds her way to pinch into my skin.

The marker on my ankle pierces my hips as I try to balance my hips on my toes in the seated position. She is laughing at my futile attempts to transcend myself bringing me back into the moment. I remember my score and push my torso to the left taking a moment of sculptural respite in the Alasa-Kanyas. Movement in Odissi going in and out of the Alasa-Kanyas modulate the excessive bends to accommodate the movement while maintaining balance. But the Mahari refuses to stick to this disciplinary dictum and gently nudges my torso to the side opposite to the standing leg almost on the verge of my loss of stability. While in this example, I do not recreate one of the sixteen specific Alasa-Kanyas by simply adhering to her main postural logic of excessive Tri Bhanga, in another instance of the Bandhani, this time on the left side with the right leg binding behind the left knee, I find myself taking on the Sukasarika, Alasa-Kanya who is talking to a bird. Creating a score for the Mahari to intervene in my choice-making, I make space for her to punctuate the technology of motion capture abstraction through the technology of sculpture.

One can argue that I am overreading my spontaneous choices as the voice of the Mahari. To them, I shall humbly say that there is nothing spontaneous about choice since it is orchestrated by one’s cultural upbringing. The humanist tradition following Descartes apparently frees the human spirit to create, expand, and break barriers. Well, these are all the qualities that eventually led to the western colonial legacy bestowed upon Odissi that in turn erases the Mahari voice. It is payback time by the Mahari who returns in unexpected venues and through unexpected forms.

Although the skeletal body manages to limit the influence of written language on the dancing body, I feel dissatisfied with the complete erasure of the face. I start this process in the Fall of 2014 when I take my first Motion Capture class to learn the software to create 3D animation using human movement. As mentioned before, I continued my association with motion capture technology beyond the scheduled courses through independent studies with Vita and constant guidance in understanding motion from my adviser through the Fall of 2016. It was only in the Summer of 2016 that Vita mentioned that ACCAD had prototyped facial capture, a process I secretly yearned in my heart. I believe it is the sleight of the Mahari to refuse the absence of her strong point. The Mahari expresses, communicates, emotes, and mimes through her facial muscles linking the mimetic to the devotional while creating an aura of sincere connection. It is grossly absent in the skeletal version of the Odissi body, a situation that causes a great deal of discomfort in me while disregarding the most important contribution of the Mahari. I would like to remind my audience that I strongly oppose the narrative expressivity by Odissi dancers performing as the Mahari since they make the her relevant only through their translation, a violence that I hope to forego. However, not engaging with her expression is simply to deny her artistic lineage. Facial capture of my Abhinaya or expressive faculty presents one solution that the Mahari herself makes possible as one fine morning in the Fall of 2016, Vita tells me the availability of facial capture thus fulfilling my unstated wish to her.

The default model of a bald male guy  in the Motionbuilder software recreates my expression that is captured in full motion by a heavy and bulky head gear.

The bulky instrument was so heavy in the front that they had to improvise and attach a paper weight tied in a plastic bag behind my head to stop the slipping of my headset. I think of my Tahia, a fragile headset that I wear during an Odissi recital. Made out of wood-pulp, it has to be worn with care and precision because applying the incorrect amount of force to slide it around the hair bun will simply break it. In stark contrast to the fragile Tahia, the helmet I wear for the facial capture weighs enough to make me claustrophobic after about a minute of expressional dancing. In any case, as the picture denotes, I look like a sci-fi character straight out of the dystopian future although with the cultural traces of curvilinear eastern Indian aesthetics.

A thorough analysis of the facial capture shows a controlled set of subtle codified facial expressions of the animated figure. The face is never in stasis. The smile, the eyebrow raise, the wrinkling eyebrow, the constant eye-motion, the smile, and the moving lips are some of the features of the face. Like the rest of the body, the facial data holds the ability to morph, repeat, multiply, and break the linearity of the narrative.

The digital capture of Odissi movement using 3D motion capture technology visualizes as well as analyzes embodied movement. I see myself moving in the 3D environment without my flesh. I see myself in the habitual quirks and ticks, a deflected neck here and a tucked tail bone there. I see my hips isolate from the torso or not. My torso moves in opposition to my neck, a phenomenon that vouches for my technical precision in executing Odissi. The digital representation of my movement hence gives an opportunity to locate exact anatomical positions enabling a clear sense of spatial and axial motion. Yet, the motion in the animation world seems as ephemeral as in the real world, except that here there remains only the skeletal body tracing motion in a 3D space. The markers flicker on and off constantly solving algorithmic problems to determine the best possible approximation of my moves. If the Mahari lurks as a flickering trace within the live Odissi dancing body that strips her away while simultaneously appropriating her emotional persona and ritual aura, I wonder about her whereabouts in the computational domain.

Movement converts to 3D data that pushes the modality of understanding movement. My abstract movement animates a skeletal framework that obscures the skin in its totality leaving only the bony structure bearing traces of my Odissi spirals and twists (unidentified in indigenous language and used as the English word). I can also see my gaits (Bishamasanchara) and sling-shot slips (Chhapaka). Visualization of the Odissi body through this pared down version forefronts the relationships between the hips and the shoulders, the wrist and the base of the neck, the knee and the ankle, and the toe and the spine. In the preceding chapter, while analyzing the skeletal body and extensively evidencing examples, I argue that the Mahari emerges in the bellowing of the sternum as well as in the subtle indirect undulations of the neck. Losing the narrative continuity of its corresponding choreography, the skeletal body pushes the glass-ceiling of meaning-making processes in Odissi by losing the narrative, expressive, and literary context that eventually evolves through the linearity of musical, percussive, and mimetic logic. In standard Pallavis or elaborations of a particular Raga or melodious cycle, the dance follows the linear logic of the corresponding musical progression. Sometimes  the rhythmic logic as composed by the percussionist for the piece determines its sequencing alongside setting the time signature of the piece. Lastly, the narrative content expresses the lyrics of a particular text or even branches off from the text to provide contextual information. All three modes are repurposed and refeatured in this new medium since the movement is digitized and has the potential to be viewed backwards or can be fast forwarded or can be broken up into little chunks or repeated in an infinite loop. Linearity is also questioned by the 360 degree view in the 3D space. The skeletal capture thus reorients the focus of the Odissi body from a linear to a non-linear understanding of movement.

Cleaning F-curves

Cleaning the F-curves that hold the information of the animated frames at the rate of one hundred and twenty frames per second presents one of the most grueling tasks in this entire process of capturing motion. The computational translation of the moving body results in a considerable amount of noise causing unwanted jitters in the movement. Sometimes due to occluding, that is misrecognition or nonrecognition of marker information by the cameras, certain parts of the body fail to maintain resilience and continuity in the capture. This results in movements that animate the apparition in a ghostly manner, the neck turns 180 degrees or the wrist twists in an awkward fashion, or the ankle bends in ways that hurt even while seeing. I clean all this noise using inbuilt filters or by manual interpolation. The interpolation process is a way of manually smoothing out any jerks in the movement. After cleaning the data, I start working on the 3D animation process. Choreographic visualization requires the conversion of movement to data and then to objects. As a beginner in animation, I find it hard to find solutions to the facial capture in animation. I do not attempt to work with it in my own experiments with 3D animation. In fact, I find an European animator interested in my 3D data for his own experiments with digital animation. I lend him my data and he comes up with a few interesting solutions to both my facial as well as my movement data, which informs my understanding of the translated moving body on screen. In the following paragraphs, I explain my process of working with the 3D data right after I clean the data.

After cleaning, I prepare a two minute sequence for further animation.

The digital capture of Odissi movement using 3D motion capture technology visualizes as well as analyzes embodied movement. I see myself moving in the 3D environment without my flesh. I see myself in the habitual quirks and ticks, a deflected neck here and a tucked tail bone there. I see my hips isolate from the torso or not. My torso moves in opposition to my neck, a phenomenon that vouches for my technical precision in executing Odissi. The digital representation of my movement hence gives an opportunity to locate exact anatomical positions enabling a clear sense of spatial and axial motion. Yet, the motion in the animation world seems as ephemeral as in the real world, except that here there remains only the skeletal body tracing motion in a 3D space. The markers flicker on and off constantly solving algorithmic problems to determine the best possible approximation of my moves. If the Mahari lurks as a flickering trace within the live Odissi dancing body that strips her away while simultaneously appropriating her emotional persona and ritual aura, I wonder about her whereabouts in the computational domain.

Movement converts to 3D data that pushes the modality of understanding movement. My abstract movement animates a skeletal framework that obscures the skin in its totality leaving only the bony structure bearing traces of my Odissi spirals and twists (unidentified in indigenous language and used as the English word). I can also see my gaits (Bishamasanchara) and sling-shot slips (Chhapaka). Visualization of the Odissi body through this pared down version forefronts the relationships between the hips and the shoulders, the wrist and the base of the neck, the knee and the ankle, and the toe and the spine. In the preceding chapter, while analyzing the skeletal body and extensively evidencing examples, I argue that the Mahari emerges in the bellowing of the sternum as well as in the subtle indirect undulations of the neck. Losing the narrative continuity of its corresponding choreography, the skeletal body pushes the glass-ceiling of meaning-making processes in Odissi by losing the narrative, expressive, and literary context that eventually evolves through the linearity of musical, percussive, and mimetic logic. In standard Pallavis or elaborations of a particular Raga or melodious cycle, the dance follows the linear logic of the corresponding musical progression. Sometimes  the rhythmic logic as composed by the percussionist for the piece determines its sequencing alongside setting the time signature of the piece. Lastly, the narrative content expresses the lyrics of a particular text or even branches off from the text to provide contextual information. All three modes are repurposed and refeatured in this new medium since the movement is digitized and has the potential to be viewed backwards or can be fast forwarded or can be broken up into little chunks or repeated in an infinite loop. Linearity is also questioned by the 360 degree view in the 3D space. The skeletal capture thus reorients the focus of the Odissi body from a linear to a non-linear understanding of movement.