Post Natyam Collective member Cynthia Ling Lee's artistic residency with pianist David Cutler culminated in Part Thief, Part Disciple, a discipline-breaking collaboration that combines music and movement in unconventional ways. Part Thief, Part Disciple premiered on 22-23 October 2010 under the name Inherent Contradictions as part of the Kuandu Arts Festival at the Taipei National University of the Arts. In the program, North Indian rhythms transform into nonsensical English slang, a classical pianist turns into an unruly comic-book super-hero, and the line between dancer and musician becomes increasingly blurred. The diverse works of the program cross cultural as well as disciplinary borders, with unique vocabularies that draw on the traditions of North Indian classical kathak, postmodern dance, jazz music, and western contemporary classical music.
Performed in the round and integrating direct audience engagement, the program included the following works:
ruddha (rude, huh?)
written, choreographed and performed by Cynthia Ling Lee
based on traditional kathak compositions learned from Bandana Sen and Anjani Ambegaokar
ruddha (rude, huh?) is a series of "false translations" of traditional kathak compositions, where North Indian rhythmic syllables transform into nonsensical English gossip, and idiosyncratic postmodern movement suddenly shifts into classical kathak. The work careens between classical and street aesthetics to reveal the friction, dialogue, and humorous misunderstandings inherent to cultural collision.
dreaming in taal
choreographed by Cynthia Ling Lee
performed by David Cutler and Cynthia Ling Lee
music by David Cutler based on a rhythmic composition by Lenny Seidman
A sinuous, dream-like contemporary kathak work driven by unconventional cross-rhythms and haunting melodies. Material for dreaming in taal was developed at The Swarthmore Project, a residency program for choreographers and dancers sponsored by Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.
Super Power
composed and performed by David Cutler
Super Power is an aggressive, rhythmic, virtuosic episode inspired by comic strip characters. It is a battle of epic proportions between a Superhero pianist and an invisible Supervillain. Will our hero be able to save the day? Will our nemesis destroy concerts as we know it? Will the audience be able to survive this trauma? Stay tuned to find out…
You Ain’t Never Gonna Get Me Down
performed by David Cutler and Cynthia Ling Lee
The blues meet contact improvisation in a playful, rough-and-tumble work in which even the rudest interruption can’t keep the pianist from playing the blues.
Nine-Patch
choreographed and performed by Cynthia Ling Lee
composed and performed by David Cutler
based on traditional kathak compositions learned from Bandana Sen and Anjani Ambegaokar
Veering between in-your-face funk, explosive extremes, and poignant gestures, jazz/new music composer Cutler creates wildly new harmonies, melodies, and textures based on traditional kathak rhythms. Lee plays a dancing trickster who gleefully engages in identity theft, shape-shifting between different characters and movement vocabularies while staying impeccably in time.
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.
--------------------------------
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[:
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.”
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.
choreography and performance: Cynthia Lee and Shyamala Moorty
original music: Paul Livingstone
The evening culminated with an energetic and engaged question and answer session with the audience, facilitated by Prumsodun Ok.
A Twist of Taal was performed at the South Theater in Colorado College's Cornerstone Arts Center on January 29, 2010. This concert of artful translations, delicate meldings, and energetic collisions between American and North Indian music and dance traditions featured my collaborations with jazz, world music, and new music composers. Ranging from meditative lyricism to playful, in-your-face funk, the dance-works were intricately choreographed to live original music and combined the complex rhythms and lyrical arm movements of kathak with western dance’s spatial expansiveness, touch-based interaction, and full-throttle physicality.
A Twist of Taal's vibrant cast of three dancers and five musicians included Shyamala Moorty (dance), Sheetal Gandhi (dance), David Cutler (piano), and the Arohi Ensemble, comprised of Paul Livingstone (sitar), Javad Butah (tabla), Dave Lewis (drums), and Pete Jacobson (cello).
The program featured the following works:
Note that due to lack of good footage, the videos are from different performances of the same work and thus sometimes feature different performers or musical ensembles.
ruddha (rude, huh?)
choreography, text, and performance: Cynthia Lee
ruddha (rude, huh?) is a series of "false translations" of traditional kathak compositions, where North Indian rhythmic syllables transform into nonsensical English gossip, and idiosyncratic postmodern movement suddenly shifts into classical kathak. The work careens between classical and street aesthetics to reveal the friction, dialogue, and humorous misunderstandings inherent to cultural collision. Based on traditional kathak compositions learned from Bandana Sen and Anjani Ambegaokar.
Super Power
music composition and performance: David Cutler (piano)
Super Power is an aggressive, rhythmic, virtuosic episode inspired (naturally) by comic strip characters. It is a battle of epic proportions between a Superhero pianist and an invisible Supervillain. Will our hero be able to save the day? Will our nemesis destroy concerts as we know it? Will the audience be able to survive this trauma? Stay tuned to find out…
Nine-Patch
choreography: Cynthia Lee
music composition: David Cutler
performance: Cynthia Lee (dance) and David Cutler (piano)
A dancing trickster shape-shifts between different characters as she negotiates a musical world that veers between in-your-face funk, explosive extremes, and poignant gestures. The idioms of jazz and contemporary kathak intersect in this nine-movement work based on nine traditional kathak compositions learned from Anjani Ambegaokar and Bandana Sen.
I. The Water Mill II. Bachelor’s Puzzle III. The Little Giant IV. Broken Dishes V. Monkey Wrench VI. Turkey Tracks VII. Attic Windows VIII. Flying Bats IX. Railroad Crossing
I longed to go back to the beginning...
choreography: Cynthia Lee in collaboration with the dancers
music composition: Ravindra Deo and Derrick Spiva, Jr.
musicians:Javad Butah (tabla) and Pete Jacobson (cello)
A contemporary kathak investigation of sam in North Indian rhythmic tradition. Sam means "to conjoin or come together," and refers to the moment where the first and last beats of the metrical cycle merge, where musical tension is released and begins again, where union and loss coalesce. Ranging from minimal lyricism to full-throttle physicality, the movement vocabulary integrates kathak's fluid arm movements and intricate rhythms with western dance's spatial expansiveness and touch-based interaction.
Peloraga
music composition: Paul Livingstone
performance: Arohi Ensemble - Paul Livingstone on sitar, Peter Jacobson on cello, David Lewis on drum set and Javad Butah on tabla
Peloragais a 3 movement ragajazz suite inspired by the counterpoint of Indonesian gamelan and western chamber music but expressed through the phraseology of Indian music and jazz. Alaap (Mvt 1) is an intimate introduction reflecting shanti rasa (peaceful mood) in a dialogue between the sitar and cello. Gat (Mvt 2) presents the main themes incorporating multi-layered melodic counterpoint of the ensemble and dynamic rhythmic calculations known as tehai followed by improvised dialogues between the tabla and drum set. Taan (Mvt 3) features solos on the cello and sitar accompanied by ensemble crescendos in a cyclic form.
not two not one
choreography and performance: Cynthia Lee and Shyamala Moorty
music composition: Paul Livingstone
musicians: Arohi Ensemble
not two not one collides classical kathak with contact improvisation to depict a relationship so intimate that it’s not always clear where one person starts and the other ends. Negotiating kathak’s exacting rhythms while shifting between sensual connectedness, weight-sharing, and rough-and-tumble humor, the piece is inspired by French feminist Luce Irigaray’s writings on female subjectivity, in which the boundaries of the self are fluid, in constant relationship to others, and always changing. The piece is accompanied by Paul Livingstone’s original Ragajazz music, which enlivens North Indian classical music with the textures of experimental music and rock.
In "Trace," Los Angeles met South Asian courtesan poetry met Skype in a combination of art installation, live performance, and audience participation structures. We were blessed to have a warm, curious, and diverse cross-section of the visual/performance art, dance, theater, and music communities, along with loved ones attend. The event took place Nov 7 and 8, 2010, at Sea and Space Explorations Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, USA.
First, these were the artworks:
Make Your Own Padam - The love poetry performed by courtesans and by Indian classical dancers is part of a living oral tradition that changes and adapts to new contexts and historical circumstances.We invite you to create your own poem out of the fragments of courtesan poetry scattered on the floor, which includes works by Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Bindadin Maharaj, Ksetrayya, and Annamaya.Mixed among the fragments are blank pieces of paper that may be filled in with your own word(s).Please tape your poem to the wall when finished!
Cyber Chat, Cyber Spat - This dance-for-camera work, which sprang out of our long-distance collaboration process, is an artistic version of the Post Natyam Collective’s administrative meetings, which are held via webcam conference calls on Skype - complete with dropped calls, baby cries and kathak rhythms. The work was filmed in four separate geographic locales - Munich, Kansas City, Long Beach and Santa Monica - with video editorial arrangement by Sangita Shresthova and additional sound engineering by Loren Nerell.
]wrist[ - Cynthia Lee’s poem imaginatively expands upon a single word, “wrist,” from the thumri, “Kahe Rukata,” in a writing style inspired by experimental language poets Harryette Mullen and Gertrude Stein.Anjali Tata’s video translates the poem into a dance composed of close-ups on the wrist (caressing animal-like choking wrist/neck suddenly wild, clean us off, dirty girl) and is a product of the Post Natyam Collective’s long distance collaborations, where members translate each other’s work into their own artistic products.
Harassing the Sanskrit Heroine - This artbook, written and designed by Cynthia Lee with photography by Shyamala Moorty, combines poetic text and photographic imageto explode the North Indian light classical song form of thumri.Thumri was performed by high-class North Indian courtesans and is danced by modern-day kathak dancers.These imaginative contemporary translations reveal the historical layers, erasures, and troubled eroticism embedded in the thumri form.
And then, of course, there was the live performance, which unfolded as follows.
The audience started outside on the sidewalk, where they watched me (Cynthia) perform hidden tamarind, an abhinaya piece inspired by a fragment from an Annamaya padam, while sitting in the storefront window.
I then invited the audience inside, where they took their seats to see Shyamala perform When We're Alone, a poignant and powerful solo incorporating inverted Bharata Natyam, rhythm, and voice to express the emotional crisis of a young South Asian woman struggling to untangle herself from cultural and familial webs.
Shyamala and I then performed Adda with the Ancestors, an improvisational score created by Carol McDowell. The score enacts an “adda” or conversation between two dancers with hybrid histories, the real and imagined ancestors of their dance memories, a guardian, and a curious friend.The audience was encouraged to ask us questions during the performance, and it was wonderful to have some of the actual ancestors of our dance memories in the audience itself.
Then we gave the audience a short break to make more poems (Make Your Own Padam), which provided the material for the next performance piece. The above poem was actually used in performance on the second day.
(Sara Kumar and Gayle Fekete in Rasa Re-routed)
(Sara Kumar and Prumsodum Ok in Rasa Re-routed)
A remarkable group of guest artists hailing from theater, performance art, post/modern dance, and Cambodian dance backgrounds made the final piece, Rasa Re-routed, come alive. The performers (four on each day) were Rebekah Davidson, Latrice Dixon,Gayle Fekete, Carmela Hermann, Carol McDowell, Prumsodun Ok, Sara Kumar, and Lailye Weidman. Working together in duets of one reader and one mover, the same poem, selected from the poetry created by the audience that day, was interpreted nine times through the nine rasas (emotions) of Indian classical aesthetic theory: sringara (love), hasya (laughter), raudra (anger), karuna (compassion), bibhatsa (disgust), bhayanaka (fear), vira (courage), adbhuta (wonder), and shanta (peace). It was a gift to see the tradition of abhinaya reinterpreted boldly, rigorously, and in such radically diverse ways according to the individual sensibilities and training of the performers.
