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

Erin Kathleen Bahl (Web Design)

I met Kaustavi at a folklore conference in Spring 2016. As a scholar with feet in both the digital composing and folklore worlds, I was immediately intrigued by her work; it seemed like the kind of project that needed a digital home attuned to its critical capacity, and that needed to be seen and interactively engaged for full impact. We've been in collaborative conversation since Summer 2016, and have met on a weekly basis to share ideas throughout the Fall 2016 semester. Although I am neither a dancer nor a cultural insider to the Odissi world, as a digital composing scholar I have learned much from our conversations about embodied, culturally situated composing. I hope that this web space serves as a complement to Kaustavi and her video collaborators' hauntingly beautiful work.

All media elements apart from the videos are images from Kaustavi's trip to India in Summer 2016, during which she took many photos of the dancing figures featured on the walls of Hindu temples (and even posed as such a figure herself, as seen in the feature image on the homepage). The background images on the video pages have been edited to echo the aesthetic of the respective video. The subtle wave animation on the non-video pages is a reference to the S-shaped curve between knees, waist, and neck that forms a significant component of the Odissi movement vocabulary. No page is completely still; rather, movement is the default, and each page is shaped by Odissi-inspired motion in some way.

In an early draft, I intended to embed the dance videos like statues in the temple walls, so as to connect them as closely as possible to a space and source of remediation central to Odissi tradition. As soon as the code hit the page, though, these videos pushed back, refusing to fit into the neat sculptural frames of my well-intentioned, unwitting attempts to freeze them back into stone once more. Instead, they now float over the top of the temple, present but ethereal, haunting the spaces of their technological foremothers but not bound to them, anchored by the figure of Kaustavi at the embodied intersection between past and possibility.