Description
A humanoid figure performs an Odissi dance sequence in three-dimensional space. The figure appears to be a nude female in monochromatic tan tones, with a stone-like texture. The figure possesses human facial features that do not change. The texture emulating the stone sculpture takes the viewer to the luscious temple-walls of Odisha inundated with languorous, erotic, and voluptuous sculptures of the Alasa-Kanyas. Layered over the focal video in the top right corner is a smaller video of Kaustavi Sarkar performing the Odissi dance sequence from which the motion-capture movement data was generated.
Analysis
The third animation— the first of two professional animations— provides the fluidity of motion perhaps closest to the movement of the performing human body. The avatar is gendered female and appears nude. The face is still expressionless (and perhaps somewhat uncanny in its detachment), but the hand gestures are represented in even more intricate, fluid detail. The avatar's single-tone tan color is perhaps helpful in decreasing the avatar's almost-not-quite-human dissonance by heightening the distinction between an embodied human performer and a digital avatar representing a human body. Despite its fluid movements, it appears as if it were a stone sculpture come to life— resonances that are especially interesting in light of this project's goal to account for the creative agency of the Mahari dancers, silenced in history but preserved in stone.
With this background and context, this avatar (and its previously discussed counterparts) could be framed as a new layer of literate activity (Prior and Shipka, 2003) in a tradition of remediation, with dance data passed through sculpture and written text to the more recently available technology of digital motion capture. In these acts of composing, however, the dancer is able to participate in her own self-representation through recording and collaborating in the animation of her own performance, rather than being the producer of an ephemeral performance that only others' hands can capture.
