Methods
Practice as Research | Mediation as Method | Design as Argument | Analysis
Practice as Research
This new media experiment is a Practice as Research (PaR) webtext that focuses on the use of dance practice as a means of establishing links between historical and contemporary understandings. I imbricate theory and practice as proposed by leading PaR scholar Robin Nelson to present a holistic perspective on creative practice (Practice as Research in the Arts). Nelson claims that his “use of ‘praxis’ is intended to denote the possibility of thought within both ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ in an iterative process of ‘doing-reflecting-reading-articulating-doing” (Nelson, 2013, p. 32). In a similar strategy, theory and practice function together as a continuous loop in my methodology where I deconstruct my practice not from the outside but from the very core of my Odissi dancing body that then undergoes further deconstruction in the 3D medium. By employing a Derridean deconstructive lens, I look for and theorize the intersections and departures of embodied movement and its multifaceted digital translations. As a professional practitioner of a South Asian dance form with twenty-five years’ experience, I deconstruct my contemporary Odissi practice to connect it to the historical practice of the form, simultaneously finding ways of emanating the historical in the digital environment.
Mediation as Method
Mediation through motion capture technology—mediating the moving body as a skeletal system—initiates a particular anatomical, structural, and spatial analysis of movement from multiple perspectives given the 3D environment of MotionBuilder software. Also, mediation functions as a metaphor for embodiment given that as an Odissi practitioner, I consider myself to be mediating historical dances of the Maharis and the Gotipuas. As a metaphor for historical mediation, digital mediation provides a space for understanding multiple strands constituting the Odissi dancing body, such as Natyasastric philosophy, Rasa theory, along with the evolution of Odissi movement along the nexus of historical, cultural, and socio-political conditions. For example, given the disembodiment of the Maharis and Gotipuas, via the homogenous standardization of Odissi, digital mediation might appear to perform yet another layer of erasing history.1 I hypothesize that the unadorned mediated skeletal body as compared to the ornate Odissi body prevents any reductionist claim about live embodiment and abstract mediation. The death of the last surviving Mahari in March 2015 sparked my interest in this project of articulating the layered Odissi body through a possible recuperation of the Mahari in the digital domain. Mediation functions as a metaphor since the ghostliness of the mediated Odissi body resurfaces the notion of the erasure of the dying Mahari. Odissi dancers continue to perform as or in memory of the Mahari, and she exists also as a costuming convention. Digital mediation becomes a trope of reinscribing the Mahari body onto the Odissi form, which I accuse of disembodiment for neutering the Mahari and marginalizing the Gotipua. Digital mediation seems to be the perfect trope of excavating the erased histories by getting rid of the ornamentations, costumes, facial expressions, make-up, and linguistic gestural information of Odissi devoting attention to its erased embodied practices.2
Design as Argument
This is a project about moving bodies represented in digital space. As such, we argue, it needs not only to be discussed, but also to be seen and experienced for the full weight of its argument to be communicated. We echo Cheryl Ball (2004) in arguing for design as a crucial component of communicating a webtext's argument. Our work of making builds on DH methods for using digital tools to represent humanities knowledge (Gold and Klein, 2016) by not archiving but rather building on traditional practices with contemporary technologies. In our act of constructing a digital space for engaging Odissi dance, we build on a history of translating Odissi movement across media, from bodies to texts to temples and back again. We argue that the act of making and design in our project is important for its own sake: an implicit argument for seeing and experiencing the videos as movement in space rather than absent references in textual discussion. We represent these videos on a digital stage that takes advantage of multiple channels—especially visual, spatial, and gestural—to facilitate the readers' experiences of the information thereby communicated.
Analysis
In an embodied performance setting, the dancer employs multiple design channels (New London Group, 2000, p. 26) 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, song lyrics, programs, etc.). With mocap technology, however, the dancer has the agency to focus the audience's attention on particular communicative channels—in this case, gestural—by decreasing the salience (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, p. 212) of information from other channels to varying degrees. Our analysis investigates each representation's affordances and constraints for writing the Odissi body in digital space. We include for comparison a thumbnail of an embodied studio performance of the dance, complete with sound and the smack of the dancer's feet striking the earth. All interior videos play automatically upon loading but may be paused or restarted with a click. These videos are for comparative reference and do not line up perfectly—emphasizing the fact that even the motion-capture data animating these videos is not "the dance" in its most essential form, but rather one more unique performance on a different (digital) stage.
1 Odissi scholar Anurima Banerji shows the historical processes of the disenfranchisement of the Maharis and the Gotipuas and the appropriation of the dance form by middle classes and elites. While the Odissi dance is based on Mahari ritual, the actual Mahari body remains obscured in its nationalist and chauvinist dichotomous overdeterminations as being virginally pure as Jagannath’s consort or as being sexually promiscuous prostitutes.
2 As an Indian classical form, Odissi is based on the Hindu scriptures that are written in Sanskrit, the language of attributed to upper-caste Hindu Brahmins, and the embodiment, through gestures, footwork, movements etc. portray the verbal inscription of Odissi over and above the influences of the indigenous dancing bodies of the Maharis and the Gotipuas who actually practiced the dance form. Another dimension to be mindful of is the differential treatment between the Maharis and the Gotipuas. While the Maharis have disappeared from the landscape of Odisha, the Gotipuas continue to thrive in their indigenous contexts in the village, Raghurajpur. The Brahmanical appropriation and supremacy remain inscribed in the attribution of its origin to the Sastras or scriptures that led to the appellation of the term classical to Odissi. Odissi downplays the contribution of lower class-caste marginalized performers to the textual inscription in the numerous historical texts on performance in Odisha, most of them directly communicating with the Natyasastra.