[Theory of Rasa] [1 page] In this project, we seek to frame the motion-capture technologies not as an additional means of capturing, recording, and archiving the dancing body—another means of determining it and inscribing it—but rather as an additional space through which the body can inscribe itself/express itself, an extension of the stage as a composing space, such that the dancing body becomes a writing body rather than one that is being written. Like a writer, a dancer using motion-capture technology creates a simplified representation that captures some facet of a total overall experience in order to communicate with his/her audience. This shift in perspectives emphasizes the generative agency of the dancing body and of the dancer as a creative composer exploring new expressive possibilities, rather than as an object of the gaze. This is particularly important in a postcolonial context for looking at ways to frame Odissi as a vibrant, living tradition of dance in conversation with new forms of mediation and composing (a conversation that includes historical architectural and written remediations), rather than simply as a traditional form to be archived and preserved. In particular, using motion-capture technology enables the dancer to focus the viewers’ attention on one particular channel/mode of the performative experience. A dance performance is a complexly mediated event that communicates/creates an experience through many channels: movement, costume, facial expression, music, lighting, and so forth. Motion-capture technology enables both dancer and viewer to isolate one of those elements—movement—in order to examine more closely how these movements contribute to the overall experience of the dance. In the case of Odissi dance, informed by a performance tradition dedicated to the generation of rasa, such an isolation both does violence to the traditional experience of the dance as synchronization of the various media channels and enables the dancer/viewers to examine the generation of rasa as a concrete material (rather than solely affective) phenomenon through focused attention to one of the embodied channels that contributes to its creation. In investigating the potential to represent/experience rasa through motion capture of the Odissi dancing body, we seek to situate our project within three frames: digital composing and embodied agency; data visualization and emotion/interactivity; and digital folklore. Digital Composing and Embodied Agency [1 page] With our project’s digital composing lens, we investigate the dancer as multimodal composer in both physical and digital contexts. In an embodied performance setting, the dancer employs multiple design channels for communicating with an audience: gestural (dance movements, facial expressions); spatial (interaction with the dance space); visual (costume, makeup, props and setting); audio (music, footsteps); and linguistic (associated narratives, programs, etc.) (New London Group 26). With mocap technology, however, the dancer has the agency to focus the audience’s/viewers’ attention on particular communicative channels—in this case, gestural and spatial—by decreasing the salience (Kress and van Leeuwen 212) of information from other channels to varying degrees. While still highly sight-oriented, emphasizing gestural-spatial design over visual design challenges the audience/viewers to engage with the performance data in a different way, by highlighting the kinesthetic channels that may have otherwise been obscured by the prominence of the visual channels [cite?]. This focusing helps the audience (and the researchers) to trace along one thread of the complex material tapestry involved in the generation of rasa, in order to come to a better understanding of the phenomenon’s transmission across digital spaces. Research by Sakata et al. suggests that digitally recorded dances can communicate emotion through movement alone, in the complete absence of facial expressions or other contextualizing cues, and we hope to expand upon their work in our investigation of rasa in mocap visualizations of the Odissi dancing body. Furthermore, investigating mocap through the lens of digital composing highlights the dancer in performance as an active designer of a richly mediated sensory experience. This emphasis on the embodied agency and self-representation of the dancer as composer/designer is particularly important in light of a tradition in which the dancing body was objectified, silenced, and ultimately repressed under colonial influences [note here on Mahari/Gotipua]. Mocap representation becomes an extended space/stage for the dancer to compose and design, instead of an external eye meant to trap and freeze. In the words of Arola and Wysocki, “Mediation is not to be performed only on [the dancer]; [the dancer] is to be actively engaged with mediation, with attending productively to [the dancer’s] own felt experiences and with learning how to compose media out of those experiences, media for circulating and eliciting engagements with others [audience/viewers]” (19). Our investigation of mocap technology likewise foregrounds the dancer’s agency to “writ[e] the self” (Rhodes and Alexander) both within and beyond the moment of performance, in a way that historically was perhaps in the hands of authors or sculptors but rarely the dancers themselves. Culturally Informed Digital Design (1 page) Finally, in our project we seek to attend to the unique cultural contexts in which intersections between dance and digital technologies occur. Digital technologies and digitally created artifacts are never neutral, but rather embody and enact a particular set of culturally situated values and perspectives (Selfe and Selfe). Specifically, this study is situated in an Odissi dance context where understandings of emotion are rooted in the classical Indian concept of rasa. In examining the mocap videos, we seek to understand the dynamic relationship between dancer, digital data, and audience specifically in terms of the classical Indian aesthetic concept of rasa, or the complex generation of an emotional/aesthetic experience that arises out of interactions between the total elements of the performance. This project responds to calls for further investigation into emotional aspects of data representation (Kostelnick), but from a non-Western context stemming from a different history than the Western lineage Kostelnick traces, which may help to complicate and enrich conversations on designing data for diverse audiences (Sun, check and add). Additionally, from an ethical standpoint, it is crucial for researchers and designers to respect a community’s values and traditional infrastructures (Christen, Getto et al., Underberg and Zorn) in creating digital representations of that group. We acknowledge Ghosh’s concern for digitally representing Odissi dance from a pedagogical level, insofar as it detracts from the traditional relationship between teacher and student in which dance is learned through physically co-present instruction and imitation (Getto et al.). However, as Ghosh notes, Odissi has long been depicted in a range of media forms such as temple sculptures and sacred/classical texts [cite]. In emphasizing the tradition’s resources of available designs (New London Group) for creative generation and remediation, we hope to situate our project in conversation with the rich dynamic between traditional practice and creative/innovate