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The Twisting Odissi Body

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The Twisting Odissi Body

 

The Odissi dancer uses codified hand gestures to tell the story of Radha and Krishna, female and male Hindu deities bonded in eternal love outside of marriage. Switching weight between her feet Radha uses Tribhangi, a sculpturesque posture with the torso deflection to one side spiraling along an upright spine. The dancer addresses Krishna, complaining that for him her mother-in-law calls her promiscuous. Despite her mother-in-law’s rebuking, Radha, in the very next sequence, recognizes an opportune moment for her to leave the house with Krishna since her mother-in-law was resting indoors. This is physically shown by Radha picking up her empty earthen pot as her excuse to bring water for the house from the river Yamuna. In this part of the dance, Radha tries to soften the sounds of her ankle-bells by a tip-toing movement urging Krishna to quietly leave the house. Alas! Radha hears someone addressing her as her upper body makes a sharp twist to the back while her lower body faces the front. Here, I introduce the twist in the Odissi body. She retraces her steps back into her house. Her head rests on her hand and she is anxious for not being able to fulfil her desire for Krishna. Radha’s desire for Krishna outside of her social marriage and her playful negotiation of societal transgressions marks the twist as multivalent through a complex nexus of distorted temporalities and twisted mythical, religious, historical, and performative ontologies.

Odissi is an Indian classical dance form that has been historically traced back to its first linguistic mention as Odramagadhi in the Natyasastra, the first Indian performing arts treatise composed around 200 B.C. It was revived in the middle of the twentieth century after India achieved its political independence from British colonization. It is known for its twist, its spiraling movements, curvilinear movement trajectories, indulgent body bending, and subtle facial expressions. The twisting Odissi body becomes a palimpsest of fragmented histories and heterogeneous practices that challenges, distorts, and twists linear time by delineating suppressed and erased histories that have been homogenized in the retrospective construction of Odissi history in the middle of twentieth century. The presiding deity in Odissi is Jagannath, the male Hindu deity also known as another form of Krishna.

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Mahari, Temple-Dancer

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Gotipua, The Young Boy Dancer

The dance-ancestors of Odissi are the Maharis, temple-dancers and the Gotipuas, prepubescent young boys dressed as girls who performed outside the temples. Patronized by Hindu rulers, the Maharis were ritual performers appointed for ritualized sexual gratification of the male Hindu deity, Jagannath, through expressional performance. Often, their ritual sexuality was linked directly to the fertility of the kingdom, such as sustaining crop-growth and adequate rainfall. Maharis ranged from being celibate virgins to having multiple sexual partners from the royalty as well as the clergy. On the other hand, dressed as female dancers, Gotipuas performed Bandhanritya, an acrobatic dance form full of precarious twists, contortions, and balances, outside the temple premises. In the sixteenth century, Gotipuas were instituted by King Prataparudradeva from the Gajapati dynasty for the popularity of the Bhakti movement, especially because king was a disciple of Vaishnava Guru Sri Chaitanya. Gotipua celebrates the Sakhyabhava in which Krishna is considered the sole male while the entire human kind is feminized. Maharis and Gotipua bodies remain illegible and suffer misrepresentation since they represent atypical gender representations and domesticated sexualities.

The bodily twist presents an outside to narrative linearity. It juxtaposes the histories of the Maharis and the Gotipuas that are appropriated and suppressed in order to develop a homogeneous Odissi dancing body. Formulated as a carrier of devotional aesthetics, sexual yearning in Odissi is metaphorically expressed as the excessive desire of the human soul for attaining salvation. Odissi dance provides India the spiritual core, an identity that marks Indian colonial modernity in sync with an antiquated past. Twists of the spine, the joints, the limbs, the eyes, the neck, the torso, the hips, and the chin are quintessential to achieving the particularities within Odissi movement. I find body of the Odissi dancer potent to analyze notions of the collapsing, distorting, and twisting of linear time. In order to show the non-linear stacking of time in the contemporary Odissi body, I pose the embodied twists as potent junctions of orienting and reorienting multiple narratives, such as, historical, social, political, ritual, religious, mythical, and performative. In order to weave in the heterogeneous influences within the reception of the contemporary Odissi dancing body in practice, performance, and mediation, I work with a hybrid methodology encompassing practice-based-research, archival research, and choreographic analysis embedded in a queer theoretical framework. As an Odissi soloist, I wish to surface bodily knowledge using embodied as well as digital practices of deconstruction. My sources are:-

  1. Layered Odissi : The dancing Odissi body
  2. Mediated Odissi : The Motion capture 3D data of the dancing Odissi body
  3. Deconstructed Odissi : Ananya Dance Theater’s deconstruction of Odissi in contemporary Indian Dance

Situating the Twist: The Layered Odissi Body

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Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra prays to Lord Jagannath

Recalling Radha’s telling twist, Radha’s undomesticated desire plays with transgressions of love within and outside of socially approved alliances like marriage. Yet, Dance critic Sunil Kothari reminds us that To Lagi, the piece from which the above excerpt has been adopted, is a Gotipua Abhinaya, an expressional piece performed by Gotipuas. As young boys, Gotipuas could not possibly portray the sexually excessive gesticulation or the underlying deeper spiritual comportment. The play with normative boundaries within Radha’s character and the slips between the playful and the sexually excessive with the history of the formation of To Lagi as a Gotipua Abhinaya opens up multiple reworkings of normative sexualities and historical timelines. The twist presents the site of Radha’s volitional sexual restraint since she needs to cater to the Gotipua aesthetic. The dancer’s gaze to the front stage-left over and above her shoulder reorients the transgressive Radha to the celibate Mahari since the left front stage is the designated spot for the actual or the imagined Jagannath idol. Frederique Apfell-Marglin’s ethnographic account of Maharis as auspicious ritual specialists concludes that the iconic body of the dancing and praying female body transcend linear historical time into cyclical transcendental time. I believe the twist distorts Marglin’s analysis of the Mahari’s temporal transcendence. The layered Odissi body does not transcend time but distorts time through its precarious unfolding of nonnormative sexualities and by stacking of nonlinear historical timelines, such as that of the Maharis and the Gotipuas. Unlike Marglin’s unhindered cycle of transcendental time, the dancing Odissi body ruptures linear temporal narratives by intermingling asexual, presexual, and excessively sexual histories, twisting the layered Odissi body into a site of queer temporality.

Deepening the Twist: The Mediated Odissi Body

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Motion Captured Skeletal Rig

The stacking of heterogeneous histories with varying historical timelines within the twisted temporalities of the Odissi twist becomes particularly compelling in the mediated renditions of Odissi movement. The anthropokinetic skeletal rig defamiliarizes the Odissi body by obscuring hand gestures, finger movement, facial expressions, and toe and heel articulations. The anatomical presentation of the Odissi dancing body presents a set of joints loosely connected in a skeletal structure that very well retains somatic traces of the dancer complicating binary dichotomies of embodiment and mediation. While artist-scholars, Susan Kozel and Susan Broadhurst use motion capture as a defamiliarizing device, I want to question the excesses of the twist through the non-linguistic communicative potential of digital practices, such as the gravitational, the proximal, the kinetic, the aural, and the networked.

The motion capture rig presents information about space, weight, flow, and time of Odissi movement. One can pay particular attention to the isolation and stability of the hips from fluid and twisted torso movements, the hips and the head providing the two stable ends of the spiraling spine. Regulation of hips is central in the training of Odissi as an aesthetic of refinement, which differentiates it from apparently the crude rural performance practices of the Mahari and the Gotipua.

Along with referencing the regulation of the Odissi anatomy, motion capture Odissi twist becomes excessive with the twisting of joints owing due to technical glitches. A close examination of the movement portrays how the movement constantly slips into weird twists and turns the skeletal rig, often which is anatomically impossible. The constant flickering of marker information and the precarious erasure of gestural data for the fingers, given motion capture’s lack of technical competency to exactly depict the moving body, also twists the incessant circular and semi-circular trajectories of Odissi movement. The twisting slippages of wrist, knee, ankle, and elbow joints provide perfect intertextual references to the precarious athleticism of Gotipua bodies suspended aerially, or in arched backs and handstands, or in acrobatically proficient presentations of cartwheels and somersaults. Intermodal conversation between the corporeal and the mediated renditions of Odissi stacks presexual identities with sexually transgressive identities from different historical time periods with varying levels of liveability.

The death of Sashimoni Devi, the last surviving Mahari, contrasted to the thriving Gotipua body in its indigenous context, performs this gendered negotiation of acceptable indigeneity. The death of the actual ritual specialist marks an impossibility of the deepened twist by exposing the slippages of the narrative of cultural continuity. As architectural and ontological fragments in Odissi performance, the twist provides the temporal crack through which Mahari slips away to her death while the Gotipua continues its contortions, only for the Odissi body to subsume both their movements in its vocabulary.

Deconstructing the Twist: The Deconstructed Odissi Body

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Female Solidarity in Roktim: Nurture Incarnadine By Ananya Dance Theater

 

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            Ananya Chatterjea, choreographer of Roktim, draws upon from her training in Odissi along with borrowing from Yoga and Chhau, a performative martial dance from eastern India, in the choreography of her company, Ananya Dance Theater’s latest production, Roktim-Nurture Incarnadine. Chatterjea self-proclaims her technique, Yodchha (Yoga + Odissi + Chhau), to belong to the genre of contemporary Indian dance. Interested in social justice issues related to women of color, Chatterjea choreographs movement for concert dance presentations along with participatory workshops in which the audience is required to participate actively in the dance and not remain a passive spectator. She is interested in the embodied transformative potential of participatory performance while deploying deconstructed Odissi aesthetics in Daak, or call to action. The Odissi twist maintains an upright spine always reverential to the God or the king. Roktim bends, twists, shakes, contorts, gyrates, serpentines, winds, and coils the upright Odissi twist. Breaking it apart, Roktim uses the twist to forge solidarities among women of color from diverse backgrounds and celebrates the age old work of women to “cultivate and protect land, and agriculture” against corporatization of natural resources. Roktim resonates with the spiraling torso movements, facial expressions, and hand gestures that are all reminiscent of the Mahari, the quintessential temple dancer who bore Odissi movement for over a millennium. Yet, it is setting up a structure of female homosociality where the twisting Odissi body in collectivity is routed as a site of precarious departures from the celebratory linear narrative of the Mahari body. The Mahari always exists in seclusion and secrecy performing alluring gestures for her stone deity. However, Roktim’s stacking of bodies in multiple instances deploying multiple aesthetic configurations, undercuts the twist from the exclusive clutches of linear timelines. It is also an intertextual reference to the tableau of Gotipua bodies. The collectivity points to a temporality that exceeds fixed framings of Mahari and Gotipua histories, which undergird the twisting Odissi aesthetic. As moments in Roktim suggest, given the complete subsumption of Mahari and Gotipua performance practices in the linear temporality of Odissi, it is more useful to draw on the excesses, slippages, and reorientations of the heteronormative twist of Odissi as deployed in movement, in order to allow for the distortions of historical time.

Conclusion

            Odissi Movement, layered, mediated, or deconstructed, is a site of distorted timelines. It provides space for manifesting historical fragments and heterogeneous beginnings. The fractured terrain of the apparently homogeneous dancing body is potent with historical ruptures found within the incessant twistings of the dancing Odissi body.