A Brief History of Odissi | Digitally Repurposing Odissi | Odissi Gesture and Textuality

Odissi Gesture and Textuality

^^ A captioned video describing narrative meanings associated with movements in the dance sequence.

This technological experimentation complicates the textual basis of the history and performativity in Odissi. Odissi’s revival in the post-independence era was a Hindu nationalist political project that claimed to see an unbroken textual lineage of the dance form tracing it from the Sastric (Hindu scriptural) texts, Maheswar Mohapatra’s Abhinaya Chandrika, Abhinavagupta’s Abhinaya Darpanam, and Bharata’s Natyasastra. The historical formulation of Odissi dance as a two-thousand-year-old movement tradition instrumentally deploys the Mahari or the temple-dancer in order to establish cultural continuity while simultaneously constructing her as a timeless, mythical, and mute figure without any artistic contribution. The cultural revivalists branded Odissi as a classical dance form formulated on the template defined by prominent dance-scholar Rukmini Devi Arundale, known for the resurrection of the first instituted Indian classical dance form called Bharatnatyam (Coorlawala, 2004, p. 51). The postcolonial reconstruction of Odissi in the 1950s as a nationally recognized Indian classical dance form, prioritized textual linkages to the ancient and medieval Hindu religious manuscripts (Natyasastra, Abhinaya Darpana, and Abhinaya Chandrika) while disregarding the embodied contributions of the Maharis as historical practitioners of Odissi.

While textuality marks the historical construction in Odissi, it also governs the choreographic process of the dance. For example, the entire dance can be translated as an textual exegesis that corresponds to the gestural information as laid out in these historical texts, such as the Natyasastra and the Abhinaya Darpana. The gestures correspond to an array of textual meanings and lend a linear narrative to the reception of the Odissi dancing body. The digital repurposing of the Odissi movement questions the linear associations between text and hand gesture since during the motion capture sessions, the gestural information is lost. The finger movements are manually added onto the respective 3D animation sequences (skeletal, cloth, stone, and avatar) after syncing the skeletal framework with the Odissi movement to the respective skeletal frameworks of the animating systems. Mudras or hand gestures surface in the 3D models after undergoing a break from the physical body and its linguistic Odissi Mudras. This strategy decomposes the textual relationality of the Odissi body and the decomposition of the canonical convention enables the gesture to gain performative efficacy in the digital domain.

Judith Butler’s (2014) idea of the citational break of gesture throws light on the performative meaning of digital iterations. Butler argues that in order to be efficacious, gesture draws from a social and linguistic infrastructure. Butler recognizes the citational character of gesture that repeats what has come before and is supported by an existing linguistic infrastructure. For example, the act of waving the hand for gesturing ‘good-bye’ requires the prior acceptance of its deployment for legibility. This gesture, while drawing its efficacy from its citationality and given infrastructure, also has the potential to break away from its conventional deployment. Butler finds such a break in gestural deployment in Brechtian theatre where she notes that the citational break decomposes the linguistic gesture. Following Butler’s citational decomposition of gesture in western theatrical performance, the digitized Odissi bodies access the somatic dimensions of the historical Mahari via a decomposition of canonical gestures of the classical Indian aesthetic vocabulary. The linguistic citations of the classical gestures question the ease of reading embodiment in live dancing.

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.