On May 15, 2010, Cynthia and Shyamala presented Post Natyam Unveiled at the Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach, California as part of the Khmer Arts Salon series curated by Prumsodun Ok. This performance and lecture-demonstration allowed us to articulate and share our long-distance collaborative process with a group of warm and engaged artistic colleagues, friends, and supporters. The discussion of our long-distance process was bracketed by live performances of finished choreographic works reflective of our individual choreography and smaller scale local collaborations.
The following is a condensed, online version of Post Natyam Unveiled that allows our audiences further afield to experience some of the richness of the evening.
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Cynthia: We’ll begin the evening with “dreaming in taal,” a duet that draws on the North Indian classical traditions of kathak and tabla in a contemporary framework. This sinuous, meditative piece takes an unconventional approach to taal (time) by exploring cross-rhythms that allow dancer and musician to be in rhythmic relationships other than unison.
choreography: Cynthia Lee
original music: Lenny Seidman, adapted by Ravindra Deo
performance: Cynthia Lee and Ravindra Deo
Material for dreaming in taal was developed at The Swarthmore Project, a residency program for choreographers and dancers sponsored by Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.
Shyamala: The Post Natyam Collective creates contemporary approaches to South Asian dance. While each of us is trained differently, we all have training in at least one South Asian dance form, including Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Kathak, and Charya Nritya. These forms share a focus on rhythm, facial expression, hand gestures, and story-telling. We make these forms relevant to our contemporary realities by investigating them through scholarship, activism, and artistic innovation. As a collective, we rotate our roles as directors, choreographers, and performers. We also workshop each other’s individual works and engage in small-scale local collaborations with each other.
One unusual aspect of the Post Natyam Collective is that we are multinational, with members are based in Kansas, Munich/New Delhi, and Los Angeles. We’d like to introduce you to our other two members through “Cyber Chat, Cyber Spat.” This work-in-progress video is an artistic version of our long distance administrative meetings via SKYPE and our first attempt to make something together online from our separate geographic locations.
password: Post Natyam
video editorial arrangement: Sangita Shresthova
music composition: Cynthia Lee, drawing on kathak rhythmic compositions from Bandana Sen and a ghazal by Begum Akhtar
sound manipulation: Loren Nerell
Cynthia: Because we are physically scattered across continents and are not often able to gather in a studio, the Post Natyam Collective decided to experiment with using the internet to collaborate artistically towards the end of 2008. This online collaborative process, which has included giving each other assignments, posting videos, and providing each other feedback, is centralized on this blog in the hopes of inviting a larger public dialogue into our process.
Our online collaboration has become geared towards a central project that contains three major threads: (1) our use of internet age technologies (2) the figure of the courtesan in the Indian subcontinent and (3) our community work with survivors of domestic violence. For the time being we are defining "courtesan" as broadly as possible to include the devadasis, South Indian temple dancers who were involved in systems of sexual and economic patronage, the high class tawaifs and baijis of North India and Pakistan, and even modern-day sex workers. Our interest in the courtesans stems in part from the fact that historically they contributed deeply to Indian classical dance, particularly in abhinaya, a form of acting in which the performer interprets love poetry with gesture and facial expression. But aside from their aesthetic legacy, we are interested in the stories of the courtesans' lived realities and how those stories might explode the poetic surface of what we’ve learned as classical dancers.
As we started investigating the figure of the courtesan together, we found that the online medium encouraged a technique of “translating” each other's material, so that choreography became an ongoing series of transformations instead of the co-creation of a single product. I’ll illustrate this for you now by walking you through one such a series of transformations.
thumri
why[ ]beloved
quarreling[
riverbank don’t[
]wrist[
please[
bindadin says
grab[ ]shame
i will[ ]i will go[
This poem is part of a larger artbook, Harassing the Sanskrit Heroine, that incorporates poetry and photographic image to interrogate the light classical North Indian song form of thumri. Thumri was widely performed by North Indian courtesans and continues to be danced by modern-day kathak dancers. My poem is a translation by erasure. I took a rough English translation of “Kahe Rukata,” the first thumri I ever learned from my guru Bandana Sen in Kolkata, and removed many of the phrases to create a different poem, using empty spaces and brackets to suggest that something had been erased. This compositional method was inspired by Anne Carson’s translations of the Greek poet Sappho, whose work only exists in fragments today. When writing the poem, I was thinking about how evocative a fragment can be, but also about how much is lost to history, particularly in an oral tradition, and about the incompleteness of our knowledge when situated in the diaspora, for we are often not fully fluent in the language of the songs we perform.
On the flip side, fragmented knowledge also allows room for us to move in the empty spaces, to fill in the blanks with our imaginations. So next, I wrote a translation through expansion, taking a single word in this poem, wrist, and riffing off it. The style of this poem was influenced by American experimental language poets Gertrude Stein (Tender Buttons) and Harryette Mullen (Trimmings). Written through a female-centered lens, their writings refract an object in a multi-faceted, nonlinear fashion that has been compared to Cubism.
Click on the player below to hear Cynthia read ]wrist[:
]wrist[ by cynthialingleeClick on the player below to hear Cynthia read ]wrist[:
This poem later inspired our Kansas-based member, Anjali, to translate the text into a dance-for-camera piece. Much like my poem zoomed in on a particular word, Anjali’s piece used the camera to zoom in on her hands.
After Anjali made her video, Shyamala transformed the material further by making a live performance in which Anjali’s video is projected on her body. This work-in-progress is a response to an assignment that asked us to depict the real-life story of a child widow who escaped the familial abuse of her in-laws by becoming a courtesan and also includes an excerpt from my video, “bitter salt.”
Projection solo in progress from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.
choreography and performance: Shyamala Moorty
direction: Cynthia Lee
recorded music: Zakir Hussain and Loren Nerell
live music: Ravindra Deo
video: Cynthia Lee and Anjali Tata
story taken from Veena Talwar Oldenberg’s “Lifestyle as Resistance: the case of the courtesans of Lucknow, India” Shyamala: I asked the audience for their impressions of my performance, and they had many fascinating interpretations:
“After she lost her husband, she is showing her inner feeling....It’s in silence, not with words; she is not speaking with anything other than her actions. She is feeling that she lost her husband, that she needs that passion, that love, that breath that she felt, that love that she shared with him that she doesn’t have anymore.”
“I didn’t see any love but more being trapped by the institution of marriage and the woman’s or the wife’s dependency on a male to define her role. You know, with having to hoe the field and then being trapped and marked by her status as a widow. Seeing that text [a widow in white] repeated twice reiterated her identity as a widow. But then at the end she releases that white and she’s sort like, “Hey, I’m a sexy woman, I’m not just this widow in white.” She leaves us like...where are you going? Come back, I want to see more. In a provocative way.”
“I was thinking about the color of white and how to some people that’s the color of mourning and to some people it is a bride....I remember the words...“one child bride,” and when it said that it connected a whole other series of correlations for me because I was remembering how in many cultures the young child is exploited and sent into marriage without the child having any idea what is happening. So then my mind went into that whole scenario, and the combination of the video with the hands and the movements of the body were like trying to release that bondage that had been created. And then it was beautiful the manner in which you ended because when you went so coyly away I wanted to say, “Wait a minute, I want to see more of that!”
“I just loved how dynamic it was to see, first of all, this projection, which is something coming from outside onto your body, but then that the hands – looking at one’s hands is a perspective that we only get of ourselves or someone that you’d be so intimate with, to see hands close up like that. So there was this interesting thing of standing outside and you becoming a screen and yet the image being so intimate, and so there was this bouncing back and forth. And to have seen the video first of Anjali’s hands and to see that undulation which is so bodily and then where you brought it...it felt like you really took the energy of her film and brought it into your body.”
Shyamala: While we're interested in the courtesans of the past, we're also interested in the stories of real women today, especially stories of resistance and healing. Cynthia and I have been honored to be a part of such women's experiences through the South Asian Network (SAN). I have been facilitating workshops for their support group for women who have faced emotional and physical violence or sexual abuse. In these workshops I have concentrated on stress relief through yoga and self-expression through writing.
In one exercise, I asked the participants to visualize being reborn as a male as a way to explore gender roles and expectations. One of the women realized that if she had been born as a male, she would have fallen in love with herself. The following poem was the result of that beautiful realization:
password: gender
Once we realized how charged and powerful the writing of this group was, we realized that we could incorporate it into Post Natyam's creative process. I'd like to share an in-progress study, “Mesmerized,” that Anjali created to the poem I read. Inspired by a single line of this poem, “Mesmerized” explores the masculine that resides within the feminine as a strength attempting to emerge from the cocoon self. The pregnant belly reflects these dual genders that reside within one body.
Cynthia: We're very excited that TeAda Productions has agreed to support us in physically bringing together the material generated through our online collaboration process as an evening-length performance including all four collective members in early 2011 in Los Angeles.
We're going to conclude with another live performance that reflects the smaller scale local collaborations in which Post Natyam members also engage. This duet, called "not two not one," collides two very different dance-forms, kathak and contact improvisation, to depict a relationship so intimate that it's not always clear where one person starts and the other ends.
original music: Paul Livingstone
The evening culminated with an energetic and engaged question and answer session with the audience, facilitated by Prumsodun Ok.
