About the Project ● Odissi ● Odissi and Motion-Capture Technology ● Composing the Odissi Body ● Analysis

Composing the Odissi Body

Our project responds to recent calls among scholars in the digital humanities and related fields to practice an ethic of making (Hayles and Pressman, 2013) with culturally situated digital technologies in conversation with community stakeholders (Christen, n.d.; Fitzpatrick, 2012; Getto et al., 2011; Kalay, 2008; Sun, 2012; Underberg & Zorn, 2013). Toward this end, it is crucial for researchers and designers engaged in digital representation to recognize that interfaces are never neutral (Selfe and Selfe 1994), and to attend to a community's values and traditional infrastructures. We acknowledge tensions over "legitimate remediations" (Ghosh, 2012, p. 103; see also Getto et al., 2011) in combining Odissi dance with digital technologies. However, like Ghosh (2012, p. 130), we foreground Odissi's long history of transfer across a range of media forms, from written texts to temple sculptures to live performing bodies. By highlighting these practices as part of the tradition's available designs (New London Group, 2000) for creative generation— or in Arola's (2017) term, as ways of "culturing"— we emphasize a dynamic rather than a divide (Blank and Howard, 2013) between traditional and more recent (digital) remediation technologies.

Furthermore, investigating motion capture 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. We especially note the historical Maharis, temple-dancers whose ritual performance became a source for Odissi's revival even as the dancers themselves were ultimately erased (Ghosh, 2012, pp. 54-56). Our investigation of mocap technology foregrounds the dancer's agency to write the body (Arola & Wysocki, 2012; Campbell, 2016; Hansen, 2006; Fleckenstein, 1999; Knoblauch, 2012; Rhodes & Alexander, 2012, Rhodes & Alexander, 2015; Shipka, 2016) both within and beyond the moment of performance, in a way that historically was in the hands of writers or sculptors but rarely the dancers themselves. Our project is thus also a feminist one in that our creative work enacts "critical imagination" and "strategic contemplation" (Royster and Kirsch, 2012) in order to connect to historically silent women in an embodied way, even while recognizing that their voices can never fully be recovered. Finally, we echo Gardner's (2012) investigation of Odissi learning practices in designing this digital space to foreground "the live, the temporal, and what is remembered in the body" as important modes of knowledge-making that can be too easily ignored in academic contexts (p. 411).

In the words of Arola and Wysocki (2012), "Mediation is not to be performed only on one; one is to be actively engaged with mediation, with attending productively to one's own felt experiences and with learning how to compose media out of these experiences, media for circulating and eliciting engagements with others" (p. 19). In this light, mocap representation of the Odissi body becomes an extended stage for the dancer to compose and design, instead of an external eye meant to trap and freeze (Hansen, 2006, p. 25). Ultimately, this project explores possibilities for new collaborations between the Odissi dancing body and digital technologies: not to trap the dancing body through recording technologies, but rather for the dancing body to extend itself as an active composer into (and of) digital space—an equal collaboration between the body, Odissi tradition, and digital media as complementary dance technologies.