Kaustavi Sarkar (Dance and Motion Capture) ● Kerry Murphy (Professional Animation) ● Erin Kathleen Bahl (Web Design)

Kaustavi Sarkar (Dance and Motion Capture)

Archiving was never the reason behind this project; I believe in the disappearance of movement beyond the moment of its inception. However, at the same time, I am working with the materialization of historical movement. How can my moving body move with the breath and life of the Mahari? How can my expressive limbs generate Rasa (aesthetic flavor) through the means of the Mahari's mode of connecting with the audience or the divine being? How can I access movement that is lost? How can I tell the Mahari story through her movement? That is the primary motivation behind this process.

To even begin answering these questions, I have to be able to access movement across time. I have to find a way to believe that movement exists across its immediate inception in some form, shape, and size. If I find a way to access the Mahari in my moving body despite the changes that my body brings to it, I should be able to analyze, observe, describe, play with, and learn from the movement outside of my body. This brings me to the impulse of the recording. The recording exists as an archive of my moving self. My moving body is captured on screen, as video, as motion capture data, as 3D avatar moving with my movement data, and as the creation of a 3D animation model where my data is creating the object and it is being created in the processes of stasis and motility in my movement.

I took the ACCAD course on Motion Capture taught by Instructor Vitalya Berezin-Blackburn and captured my movement in a dance studio with Marley Floors at the Department of Dance in The Ohio State University. I had to work long hours to familiarize with the interface while experiencing the motion capture process. That was such a ritualistic experience; there were clear rules and guidelines as to how the capture can work. The optical cameras needed to recognize my moving body and there were specific movements that I had to engage with in order to activate the optical system. I had to stand in a T-pose at the center of the room. The space was marked with clear boundaries with the use of black tape. I repeated the first set of exercises constituting a series of hip rolls, shoulder rotations, upper body twists, knee to chest, and wrist rolls. It gave me a sense of the Bhumi Pronam, the first series of movements I engage to honor the space before I start my dance practice. I felt the motion capture process was exactly like the Bhumi Pronam, a series of moves to activate the cameras in order for it to then recognize the moving body. Without this initial calibration of the system, the system will start malfunctioning—analogous to the indigenous wisdom in my dance, which is that non-compliance with the ritualistic discipline might lead to angering the gods and goddesses who protect the Bhumi or the earth on which I will stomp with my feet, hurting it in the process.

After capturing the data, I started working on cleaning it, the most time-consuming part of my composing process. It required me to work with the F-curves of each marker of the fifty-one markers on my body. Each marker disseminated 120 frames/ second that sometimes led to erroneous capture due to occlusion between markers or the physical displacement of the markers. I was careful to erase the non-anatomical movements such as a sudden displacement of the neck or the disaligned hip or the flickering of the wrist. It took me nearly four hours to clean a minute of data to make it look as realistic and plausible as possible. I rendered the cleaned data into a 2D video, the first ("Skeletal") movement representation in our webtext.

Next, I worked with a 3D avatar ("Avatar") to move with the clean version of my movement data. I ordered an avatar from Autodesk Character generator. To keep things simple, I chose a male body with simple black pants and shirt. After making sure the new avatar moved without any technical glitch, I started adding mudras (gestural hand movements) to the fingers. The skeletal motion-capture body did not have any fingers. In this new body, however, I was able to add on the gestural information. I manually keyed in the movements of the fingers at key points in the dance. This way the representation of movement was not only movement-related information such as weight-shifts, connection of spine to upper-arm, curvilinear hip and torso spirals, and subtle transitions between stasis and motion, but also narrative information associated with the technical vocabulary of Indian classical aesthetics.

Along with the mudras, I composed the 3D digital space using pictures that refer to the particular gesture being represented. With the Tripataka I used a lamp showing the representational nature of the movement that added a literal and contextual meaning. I also used some pictures to show the aesthetics of the movement and its quality to be evocative, such as a scenic image with flowers in order to show the advent of spring in my movement as well as in the imagery. In another instance, I borrowed a sculptural figure from the Odishan temples, the Alasa-Kanya (indolent female body) to show the direct connection between my full-bodied pose and its real-life existence outside the moving body in another medium. This way I tried to find parity in technologies of movement, sculpture, and digital animation.

Finally, I would like to comment on my choreographic process in creating the movement. The piece was inspired by a song by a South Asian singer named Sonu Nigam from his album Classically Mild in 2008. The name of the song is "Soona Soona Des Kahe Ajare" (translated as the "homeland asks you to return as it is empty now that you have left it"). This song is a combination of Hindustani classical and jazz music that provides an interesting variation of tonality and juxtaposition of sorts as the foundation to my movement. Ultimately, though, I created my piece to silence. There is no musical or rhythmic accompaniment to this piece. It is grounded in traditional Odissi movement as I borrow from the classical repertoire in terms of gestural moves and abstract poses to provide the sense of composition. It is linear in terms of a story or description but is a choreographed juxtaposition of images quite similar to the digital composition in the case of the 3D avatar as described above.