Dance in/and Space

Dance in/and Space

Submitted by: Neha Tickoo (this piece was previously published in November 2014 newsletter at Bibahan, an experimental theatre group based in Kolkata, India)

“Sunil Shanbag : So if you were to put it in concrete terms, when you enter a space, what would you look at?

Astad Deboo : Challenge.”[1]

The word “challenge” and it's utterance by a dancer. That is all that intrigues me to enough, for the moment,  to be carried on to shreds. This word sums up all of the essence and purpose of the creative enquiry that an artist like Deboo undertakes, in relation to the space that he inhabits and moves in.  He begins with so much curiosity and speculation that eventually in the gradual process of movements, his presence and the space become inseparable, or one can say that the space feeds into his presence. Similarly, the understanding of performance in unconventional spaces of public interaction and spectatorship has had intrigued me for some time, given my own practice as a dancer-performer engaged in fresh perspectives. It unsettled me that almost always classical dance had to be subject to and depend on the availability of the illusory auditorium stage, which then involves an industry of it’s own, with respect to lights, sound, marketing etc. Evoking space with and for dance then becomes one aspect which challenges the dancer in me and provokes me to challenge it back. I take the cue of “challenge” from this understanding further to, first of all, discuss how space in performance history, both theatre and in dance has been invigorated and then how I propose to challenge space, through the platform of this dissertation and practice.

In the field of dance, there have been productions and explorations that have left indelible impressions by taking forward the notion of challenging not only the physical body but the space of performance as well[2]. In fact, Valerie A. Briginshaw’s book Dance, Space and Subjectivity[3], tells us that there seems to be an explosion of dance related spatial explorations in recent times yet maintains her lament that investigations about space through the medium of dance have hardly been undertaken for theoretical analysis.(Introduction, p5) Many of the dancers have worked and re-worked on innovating the content and the form as advanced performances but the modes and styles of performance presentation seem to remain stuck to the proscenium, majorly. The politics of proscenium has been well debated and discussed. One of the few people who have tried to venture beyond the closed notions of dance performance spaces is Astad Deboo[4].

The hint is also towards the ways dance-movement arts as a whole have been perceived and projected. True, there have been dance practitioners and theorists working methodically to measure the tides in dance and movement art trajectories across the globe. There have also been practices, internationally breaking the notion of public and conventional art spaces through the medium of dance and creative movement. Take for example the work done by The Movement Party[5], a group based in Poland; or the works based on Indian classical dance by a South Asian group called ‘Akademi’[6] based in the United Kingdom. But although there have been researches conducted like about for example: One of the significant pioneers in this regard is the Post-Natyam Collective[7], which uses the cyber space to create ‘long-distance choreographies’ on the computer screen while actually each dancer is situated at very different parts of the world. Yet to understand various creative and experimental tides arising within the dance fraternity, not much documentation work has taken place to garner the energies of dancers enlivening the open spaces of public contact like busy roads, market places, metro rail platforms, or public lavatories, etc.

In the case of Akademi, while it does incorporate classical Kathak performed in various open spaces, what it lacks is conceptual contextualization in the site that is used. Their mode of performance seems to represent South Asian classical dance cultures and bring them out in the open in cities like London, to an audience with western sensibilities. While their works do harbor an immensely interesting and spectacular quality[8], their site-specific choreographies include multiple numbers of performers and make enough use of technology like lighting and sound eventually to create an illusory effect. Additionally, as stated earlier: they play to a largely Western audience; most amongst them are not familiar with South Asian performance traditions and the politics of representations and aesthetics that are involved. Given such conditions, dance does not then become as socially rigorous and intervening or questioning. The element of “challenge” which Astad Deboo speaks of, gets decreased in and becomes ineffective.

One of the questions that arises is regarding the how's and why's of dance. To address this question one shall be look towards understanding the distinctions in perceiving dance, as a whole. As a speculative answer to such questions, one can think back to the ‘Gutai Manifesto’[9] and the inception of Butoh Dance[10] in the post WWII Japan. I believe that the very moment of inception of Butoh dance in significant here for the discussion, and not the dance itself. The point is that, dances emerge and various languages in dance undergo several many changes as times pass. Butoh itself has now transformed into something entirely different than how it was conceived to be, at the moment of its birth.

At this juncture, then, we need to understand the role of dancer as a public intellectual. Theatre practice enriched by the likes of Bertolt Brecht Eugenio Barba, Augusto Boal, Jerzy Grotowski has engaged itself into a mode of social reflection and critique. Then again, even Dance and Movements have in their very being, contained possibilities of change. The case of Pina Bausch[11] is an able example. The radical changes she brought in dance theatre (Tanztheater) were significant moments in German dance scenario. Yet some of her pieces for example, Victor( 1986) which was the first “residency piece”, as she called them and  Nur Du (Only You) in 1996 along many others which was performed when she travelled to Rome and Texas in US, respectively. Most of the non-proscenium performances she worked on came when she was able to travel to other parts of world.

Furthermore, this discussion brings us to one of the indispensable concepts of the ‘flaneur’. As has been conceived not just Charles Baudelaire[12] but Walter Benjamin, in Return of the Flaneur[13] ( 1929) the concept which he deeply analyzed in The Arcade Project (1965). In this project Benjamin undertook clicking photographs of the arcades all along Paris to form a huge compilation.

The Flaneuse, a lone female wanderer can also be a dancer. A Flaneuse is what has been sought out here in this article but is she really to be found? Where is her spatiality? If she is a wanderer and a dancer in the city-scape, then can she be found and located, and identified? What and who does she narrate of then? These are few questions then, I see not to be merely discussed but practiced as an experiment in the laboratory of the city-scape and its architecture.

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[1] Astad Deboo, dancer/choreographer,  in conversation with Sunil Shanbag, co-founder of Arpana, a theatre group, From Pg. 28, in the book Beyond The Proscenium – reimagining the space for performance , edited by Anmol Vellani,

[2] Take for example Chandralekha’s complete body of work, which dealt with challenging many notions of traditional dance, essentially through the medium of the dancing body. She did not shy away from taking  note that essentially human body is erotic. This she depicted by incorporating Yoga, Kalari, and Bharatnatyam.

[3]  p1-9 Edited by Briginshaw, published in 2001

[4] Refer to Deboo’s works like Five Minus Three, performed at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai,  and also his performances Great Wall of China.

[5] http://movementparty.com/tag/site-specific/ (Accessed on 5 March 2014 ) explorations of movement across diverse landscapes and terrains— from ponds, beaches, parking lots and public squares, to abandoned railroads.

[6]http://akademi.co.uk/portfolio/waterscapes/(Accessed  on 5 March 2014)

 http://www.youtube.com/user/AkademiSouthAsianDan,  for classical dance in site-specific works and videos

[7] http://www.postnatyam.net/about-2/(Accessed on 5 March 2014 )

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KFJFymbe6M (Accessed on 6 March 2014 )

[9] An art movement spearheaded by Jiro Yoshihara in 1954, in the post WWII Japan. Jiro wrote the manifesto for the Gutai art movement and it talked about the need for human society to look deeply into the aesthetics of the dead and decaying. This art movement involved many performance, installation and new media artists like Wolf Vostell, Allen Kaprow of Happenings etc.

[10] a dance  movement and a performance style that emerged in post war Japan, foremost dancers were Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. the dancer of this dance form resembles to unborn fetuses and in essence perform all that is de-generative in life n art.

[11] Bausch (1940-2009) was a German practitioner of modern dance, and choreographer.

[12] Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life", (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964)

[13] Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings II 1927-1934

a video compilation

The Transparent Performer

The Transparent Performer III: a Reflection. (on the work of Zuleikha Chaudhary)

The physical world we inhabit is not very complex. We have by and large made sense of this world by numerous, infinite light rays falling, clashing, reflecting on and from objects. Sense perception like sight responds to this very physical principle and thus we see the world as it is. We perceive dimensions of height depth and distance acutely to comprehend space and make decisions about it. Hence, we can say that we are also limited in access of knowledge, and there is only so much we can gather, be it from our immediate surroundings or to the farthest wide cosmos. It is an opaque world we live in. There is nothing much complicated about its opacity and i say this with certain nonchalance. This nonchalance I draw from under the covers of intellectual imaginative faculties that homo sapiens possess. Beneath this cover, we are mammals going about our lives with objective ease even in our savagery.

Through this larger lens of nonchalance, i am at a risk of being labelled as a pessimist anti-humanist. However, having said that, human being has hinged forever now to the unseen, imaginative and to the metaphysical. We cultivate a culture to ponder upon what may lie ‘beyond’. The tendency of human brain, in its highest intellectual capacity is that it inevitably tries to problematize the simple, and simplify the complex, only to garner on subjectivity. To decipher the truth, the absolute knowledge, then appears as a false propaganda with which humans have nevertheless been obsessed with and will continue to be. In other words, there just cannot be one single mode of looking and understanding.

Zuleikha Chaudhary’s latest work “The Transparent Performer” is a speculation on similar lines. About this work, there is an uncertainty that seems to lurk in the wings back-stage and makes sure not become overtly visible. While i am in attendance of her work, i can hear something playing in my head: “Duniya bane waale, kya tere mann mai samaayi, kaahe yeh duniya banaayi?!” (maker of the world, what transpired in your head that you created this world as it is?!). I have confessed earlier to the nonchalant point of view regarding the objective world we live in. But the parallel world Zuleikha had set up in this work, i ended up being not only curious but in awe. Of course, in performance history, there have been registered major shifts focusing from elaborate mise-en-scene towards corporeality of the performer, from it’s ability to act and to move, from baroque to grotesque. Hence, what Zuleikha proposes in “Transparent Performer”  is radical in that she is able to compose a work with alternative concept of a ‘performer’ and space. Here too, she strictly maintains that her work should not indicate that she abhors the actors and performers, but her investigation moves along a different track of conceptual questions. So, i could not help but pop the question at her too: ‘What was she thinking? How does she generally think?’ Despite all this, Zuleikha insists that it is above all a performance. It comes across as a massive installation piece, although Zuleikha obviously defines it as performance since she clearly demarcates herself as a theatre director. In a conceptual work such as this, with no live bodies in performance, she also agreed that expectations by herself as a director function on different levels. Perhaps she dealt with the carpenters and other helpers the way she works with actors, and so, performance was occurring on many different various levels even before the show dates. These are speculative thoughts that a spectator may only be able to indulge in retrospect, conceivably after investing considerable interest.

So how does one read this work? Atleast in this case, artistic articulation depends on the intent of the artist and thus plays the primary role. But to a spectator who is not initiated into art, would it be a folly to simply look at it as an art installation. Not entirely, I believe. Intent of artist may have have been fore-grounded but it cant become domineering in reading this or any piece of art. Perhaps still, Zuleikha’s emphasis on the work being called as a performance helps the viewer to look at the artwork in completely different light. All in all, these negotiations, then form a curious mix leading to interpret her art.

Being an early bird on the closing day of the exhibit, i was able to dedicate a good amount of time and attention to the sprawl in and around the building. I am talking about time when very few visitors were present. Visitors arriving later found themselves intrigued by the grand structure and few of them wanted to know where and how to enter the building from and where the ‘performance by Zuleikha’ was taking place. I found such questions amusing yet couldn’t have helped knowing how straight-jacketed and objective human perception has become. It also provided me with moments to retort back in quips which culminated in casual chatter amidst the presence of the grandiose surrounding us. However, there was another moment which seemed to alienate me from this flow of experiencing. I remember having felt an urge to relieve myself and looking for a restroom. Instantaneously, i wondered if the walls of the restroom inside the same building were designed/wrecked in similar fashion. I chuckled to myself thinking so, but thankfully i found one fit to be used. Such speculation, such need to think over and over again about the functionality of a building in a cityscape made me realize that i was quite familiar with this experience and yet caught unawares.

Looking at the window panes, at the illuminated wooden structure, at careful cuts made in the thick walls of the building and then eventually discovering stairs to the next floor replete with text and still more illuminated wooden rods was adding further to explorations. I was able to feel an uncanny presence of the transparent performer, and therefore maybe naively so, i was inclined to consider the building as a house. It was an eerie feeling, to say the least. The “text” seemed to know that i would be there. The architecture of that house screamed to me in that encounter as if providing me with information just like humans go into outer space to seek information, in exploration and in discovery.

                                       photo by: Shovan Gandhi

The analogy of cosmos is not a far-fetched one. Come to think of it, how can one look at the whole cosmos as a performance? Who is the performer and who is the spectator? To witness the performance of the universe, the spectator needs to pay a visitation and be among the innumerable light rays. Talking then of cosmos, the duality of timespace continuum is how Zuleikha also describes the event of a performing body into a performance space. Over a brief conversation with her she explained that it is the very presence and non-presence of the performer that she dabbles with. According to her the three-dimensional space that a performing body or non-body permeates into, is the subject matter that interests her the most. She laid emphasis on the fact of experientiality which is what she has tried to expound on in this art-work.

Rightly so, “The Transparent Performer” develops an ambiance of building’s architecture for a spectator into a performance along with the fourth dimension of ‘time’. Perhaps then, it will be fruitful to delve a bit more on the “transparent” aspect of this performance/artwork. Interestingly, one is reminded of how Susan Sontag[1] described Jorge Luis Borges as “the least egocentric and the most transparent of writers”. It is remarkable how the term transparent is implemented by Sontag and then intentionally here one can juxtapose it with Zuleikha’s transparent performer. It might very well come across as outrageous to bring about such a co-relation for an argument’s sake. However, Borges from his book  ‘Labyrinths’ in  the essay called ‘A New Refutation Of Time’[2],writes: “In the course of a life dedicated to letters, and at times to metaphysical perplexity, i have glimpsed and foreseen a refutation of time, [which] is found in some way or other in all of my books”. He adds later on, “The denial of time involves two negations: the negation of the succession of the terms of a series, negation of the synchronism of the terms in two different series. In fact if each term is absolute, it’s relations are reduced to the consciousness that those relations exist.” Further down the essay he adds: “Via the dialectics of Berkely (idealism) and Hume, i have arrived at Schopenhauer’s dictum: ‘the form of phenomenon of will is really only the present, not future, nor the past”. And yet, in summation he exclaims that “Time is the substance i am made of. Time is the river which sweeps me along but i am the river[...] The world unfortunately is real”.

There are several moments while reading Borges in this essay that one experiences similar transcendence that one might when entering Zuleikha’s artwork. Timespace is then the core of understanding the triangulation between cosmos, the Refutation of Time, and the Transparent Performer. From expounding on ‘time’ to moving into collapsing it through a “transparent” entity into the cauldron of warped experiential present, one is only then able to situate oneself in a certain time frame, only to dissipate it further. This particular perspective cannot be an end in itself too and thus, it would be only customary here to conclude with a full stop, which is not an end, but in fact a mere dot in time.

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[1] Susan Sontag, “Letters to Borges” in ‘Where The Stress Falls: Essays”. Published: June 1996

[2] George Luis Borges,  “A New Refutation of Time” in Labyrinths . Published: 1964 (New Directions, USA)

Interstellar and 'The Kiss of Love' protests

Interstellar and The Kiss of Love (Spoiler Alert! for the faint hearted )

November 15, 2014 at 2:32pm

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There is more to the coincidental release of Interstellar movie and the Kiss of Love protests in three Indian cities. Even when the world will have sustained itself after a mighty catastrophic threat, and the human will and spirit restored all thanks to a belief in Nothing, there will still be no place on Earth to love and make love. It will still be hostile and inhabitable for the lovers who are 'ahead of time'. I am in fact talking about the turbulent present warped in crooked social systems and taking a pick at the apocalyptic future. Future is a vague construct and yet there is an apocalyptic certainty about it and which we savour within a stoic present. To languish in the Future is a tight-rope walk between banal and profound. Such a stunt will be worth attempting for the sake of sheer irreverence in doing so. I will, therefore, speak of the present from a fictional attempt (Interstellar) of depicting future. While i do so, i will essentially be speaking of love, as an act of here and now.

Loving,making love, exhibiting affection is an extremely political act even when it is in the precincts of the personal.  It is communicating in the naked, an exchange of senses. Something is achieved and something is bestowed. Partners become collaborators in establishing their statement of presence in marking a joint act. On the other hand, when in public,loving is a statement to the onlookers, communicating the irony of public and personal spaces. Hence, i feel the elements of time and space are inevitable in any politically overt act.

However, the duality of time-space is also a contraption. I call it a contraption with acute pessimism. I have harboured a quietened disgust for the human species for awhile now and i strongly believe in being frank about it.  But this pessimism is not as easily quantifiable as your customary glass half empty. Instead, such pessimism is that which imputes an act like spitting, out of sheer disgust. It is like saliva that collects into your mouth, gets moulded as a spit to be darted out in a parabolic path,quite like how a rocket is shot out into the outer space. But, it is in the very drama of spitting where all its flavour lies. The gesture of spitting is extremely performative and conveys a lot. I have a feeling that spitting conveys more to the beholder of spit than to the onlooker. It is tremendously reassuring, to speak obliquely. It is masturbatory, in a pessimist-sadist sort of way, thus, to seek pleasure in expulsion of bodily fluids. So, while you hold that thought, am i saying that ‘i spit at the human race’?Exactly.

Since we can handle only so much of spitting, Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, Interstellar, thankfully is not a dive into the pessimistic glass tumbler. Yet i suspect that it is a dive, rather like a rocket’s parabolic launch into multi-dimensional vessel that is the imaginative human mind, especially towards the corner where emotion of love hides and then increasingly becomes alien, but only to be to-and-froing. Apart from all the spectacular science laden visualizations, the movie is very subtle, given its overtly poetic and allegorical contextualization. The face of ‘space-crafty science’ shown in the movie is not the usual vulgar and triumphant but bridled with doubt and folly, with a sharp zing for un-omissible grandiose. Still i maintain that it is not vulgar. However, there is a zest of curiosity, exploration and discovery at the root of the movie and as an emphasis towards the core of human existence. Interstellar ends with Earth restored to its humans in corrected dimensions and with clearer understanding of gravity and the black-holes, but centrally,with a never-ending time-travel expedition for love. What came as subtly naive and poignant simultaneously was that the protagonists ahead of timespace dimensions would not end up making Earth their home for love. The explorer in our protagonist takes him back to search for his love, which, incidentally, is no longer on Earth. He is a lover on a voyage and thus destined to be a voyeur,peeping into celestial worm-holes, looking for other dimensions where love is possible. Love is political even in the outer space.

Perhaps Nolan does not intend me to view his work with such gloomy darkness and conclude so cynically. But, I have warned the reader of occasional pessimism being sprinkled now and then. I have also declared that i shall be viewing the present murk in society from the gullible prism of depicting future imperfect. So,what you can clearly see from this window here is murky debris of lost, forgotten love and war-mongering human beings floating into the vacuum of present.

No. You are actually looking at your own social networking web-page informing about a man and a woman in love, kissing, displaying affection in a public space and consequently being beaten and driven out of the Kochi restaurant by Hindu right-wing vanguards of morality. You are aghast but not surprised. What you can also be sure to stumble upon rather frequently during these days is the John Lennon quote shared widely on news-feed : “We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad day-light”. You relate to this and you sigh repeatedly. Eventually there are event pages launched announcing the protest dates for Kiss of Love in Kochi, Kolkata and Delhi. There is unusual tingling and a lump in throat. You wait for the adrenalin to pump to the optimum level and some body fluids begin to gush. You then do not remain a person or a couple in love, but become an irreverent horde of slobbers eager to kiss and make love in open, defying the nay-sayers. You become multiple dimensional cosmos. Come back to saliva, this time not as a pessimistic spit. Saliva today then becomes your elixir taking you on a time-travelling joy-ride. The path of it’s trajectory is very simple: your mouth only seeks another black-hole, to suck and to get sucked into. The cosmos is a pervert to choose to have some many spots where time-space melts away. It nevertheless is masturbatory but of a celebratory kind.

zooni tickoo
13 nov 2014

‘Encountering’ Amitesh Grover.

AnecDOTes, Day II: New Media and the alternative 'Live'ness

‘Encountering’ Amitesh Grover.

 [Constructed Memory by ZOONI TICKOO]

New Media and the alternative 'Live'ness, Artist's showcase and Dialogue by Amitesh Grover, interlocutor: Aditya Shrinivas, 5-to-7 PM, 05 Aug, 2014, Tuesday. At: Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi. AnecDOTes is a series of events as an extension of the project "Understanding Performance as Art and Beyond: Multiple Gaze" initiated by Samudra Kajal Saikia.

Amitesh Grover at AnecDOTes

Day 2 at Vadehra Art Gallery was in conversation with the artist and performance maker Amitesh Grover. Grover is currently a faculty member at the National School of Drama and has been practicing performance making especially incorporating the genre of New Media and technology. He has presented his work nationally as well as internationally, prolifically spanning  around 125 shows across 11 countries. In the session, focused on the topic of "new media and 'live'ness", Amitesh did not immediately begin from detailing his past works. He descended into the discussion smoothly by setting forth a stage of understanding performance, ritual, encounters and finally the idea of puncturing them in ways of his interventions of performance making.

Amitesh very importantly and interestingly began from his own private experiences from life. he chose to show images from his own marriage ceremony rituals and an image from another event of 'hawan' meant for the dead ancestors of his family. The motive of projecting these images was, he explains, to narrate how he had asked the sanskrit couplets to be translated into language of common use, and thus, "demystifying" the whole ceremony besides prolonging the same in time. this is how he begins to explain the intention of "puncturing" performative aspects of human behaviour and then how he manifests them on similar principles through his art projects.

 

Amitesh Grover at AnecDOTes

The impact of new media and technology and how it is intertwined in the functioning of the human societies forms a major part of Amitesh's art. He keenly observes the behaviour on  television and off it and the mannerism of performance generated by events like reality TV and also getting oneself photographed. He makes note of few such aspects into observation like: the public at the present moment is in a state of Hyper Performances. The evidence of it is seen in the self generative content on social media and the massive flux of information. This phenomenon he understands as the Post Media Performance, where the utility of the media and communication has been exploited to the extremes and in excess. He also seeks to grapple with the question of Public and it's constantly increasing fluidity. This construct of fluid public, he maintains easily sheds  it identities and relations to communities. Yet he makes note if how the speech or the element of the spoken sound carries an indicator of identity. This is where he draws strings of similar observations and plays with them by incorporating games that eventually get translated into performance projects.

In the section detailing his conception of Media and the Body, he talks of his collaboration with theatre person and dancer Maya Rao in 'Lady Macbeth'. This performance which was conceived by Rao, was designed by Amitesh and it implemented the idea of fragmented physical body and it's multiple projections over live-feed. It also worked with juxtaposing popular TV actors of Macbeth with the live actor doing the character of ghost in the performance, simultaneously. Similarly another of Amitesh's work, that he makes mention of here, is 'Strange Lines'. It was adapted from a graphic novel. This project involved technology as a medium for interaction. On similar lines, was Amitesh's project inspired by writer Italo Cavino's Invisible Cities. This complex work of Calvino finds it's expression through Amitesh's interpretation as "Gnomonicity". This work dealt heavily on creating shadow audiences created through CCTV captures and collaborated with hackers who operated from different parts if the world like Zurich, Switzerland, Melbourne etc. another project called "Social Gaming" involved real time gaming in multiple cities and this involved giving quirky instructions like 'look without judging...' and 'collect a smile' and then send an SMS to score points.

Amitesh Grover at AnecDOTes

Through the works mentioned above there is an evident prominance of global hyper-connective world where Amitesh overtly exploits the same by using mechanisms of Skype conversations spanning continents. He invariably attempts to question the arguemet propunded by scholar like Peggy Phelan that a performance value is in it's "ephemeral" nature and that no two performances can be same. Amitesh, in contrast intends to understand and explain his performances through another scholar Philip Auslander's concept of the "liveness" by creating excess of virtual corporeality. This takes shape in his work called "Mahoganny is Everywhere" which was a long durational performance of 48 hours and carried out in a building. The performance included the participants to engage in transactions and activities involving a fake currency 'Neuro' only valid inside the building. he details how he himself played a palmist and how predictions he made decided the behavior of the participants in betting or in gamble. He also talks of intervening the proceedings with non-sense interventions thereby creating the effect of alienation.

Amitesh Grover at AnecDOTes

Finally he summed up the presentation with his forthcoming project, the concept of which can in fact resonate the sum total of his thought process behind most of his past performance ideas. “Encounter 6134” is perhaps as philosophically urgent as the need to address the discourses surrounding New Media or the hyper technological age. the rough idea he explains deals with the growing assertion from a new school of thought that representation of the capitalist world must involve greater speed, acceleration and excess so as to accelerate its collapse. The performance involves inviting the participants to come and be a philosopher and communicate with a stranger regarding topics like: beauty, death, time, and crisis. Amitesh surmounts this project on the quote by Alain Badiou, that can perhaps be paraphrased as mere random “encounters” forming capacities for multiple “beginnings”.

Amitesh Grover at AnecDOTes

In the Q-A discussion round-up, initiated by Aditya Srinivas, the debate began from pointing out how Amitesh’s work in fact easily breaks the bounding definitions of theatre, performance art, or participatory ritual even. What emerged from the post presentation discussion is that Amitesh’s work also, on several levels, questions the greater unified language and the loss of the native body reduced to hyper virtual. Important as an observation was also that his work is less directorial and more curational in terms of wading through and sewing together the live-ness of encounters in the age of new media.

Amitesh Grover at AnecDOTes 

There arose few questions about the frequent use of technology in his performances too. Artist Inder Salim raised doubts about the multiplicity of technologies as it is subject to availability. A dialogue ensued which prodded Amitesh to think further on de-stabilizing the human centric approach of technology. This interjection was towards perhaps the issues of, say, environment which has been victim of human explosion and thus need to be included in conceptual frameworks more often. The issue of documentation of his new-media performances also brought about an interesting point as Bhooma Padmanabhan asked Amitesh how it impacts the performance and his own repertoire. Amitesh seemed willing and agreed that documentation of his work is necessary for the sake of drawing on improvisations but since his interventions span from distinct cities to various media simultaneously, the registers may vary. He also points out that therefore in Performance Art, there is nothing right or wrong, and that such experiments form layers of encounters. These layers facilitate post-event narration thereby looking for newer beginnings. Interestingly, Amitesh speaks of all this as a mechanized process instilled in Capitalist society and which needs to be accelerated to witness multiple causalities and effects. Similarly, he notes that his forthcoming project is about the human sleep patterns, and how the mechanized ways of life have robbed one of their deep sleep. The project may involve participants to engage, simply, in sleep! 

AnecDOTes III: About perforations in the Performance Art of Inder Salim

AnecDOTes III: About perforations in the Performance Art of Inder Salim

Report by Zooni Tickoo

"Performance art is like Parasite!", Inder Salim with Anecdotes, 6-to-7 PM, 6th Aug, 2014, Wednesday. An AnecDOTes event. No one is invited. 5-to-7 PM, 13 Aug, 2014, Wednesday. AnecDOTes is a series of events as an extension of the project "Understanding Performance as Art and Beyond: Multiple Gaze" initiated by Samudra Kajal Saikia. At Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi.

 

Inder Salim at AnecDOTes

After an insightful session with Amitesh Grover and his high-tech media savvy conceptual performance works on day 2, the following day at AnecDOTes saw rather intimately discursive evening with Performance Artist Inder Salim. As Samudra himself pointed out that the motive of AnecDOTes is not just to locate issues pertaining documentation of Performance Art, but also to assess how the physicality of the performing body can become a major grounding factor. Inder is a Kashmiri artist based in delhi and has been practicing art and performance for the last 20 or more years. Like many Kashmiri Pandits, Inder had to shun the turmoil ridden Valley in the ill-fated years of 1988-90 to seek a life outside, in Delhi. Although, he was never trained in Fine Arts, Inder began his career with painting exhibitions in mid 1990s but soon realized that being medium bound will not answer his artistic quests. Thus, Performance became an expression that not only strengthened his metaphors but still remains the way he leaves a radical impact on issues pertaining politics to the personal, and many things in between. Performance Art is then perhaps how he negotiates between being Inder Tikku, a typical Kashmiri hindu name and then choosing to be Inder Salim.

Inder Salim at AnecDOTes

The session begins with Inder showing a clip from his very recent performance that took place at SAHMAT in solidarity with the victims of Gaza genocide. It involved smashing down numerous water-melons on a busy footpath after which the onlookers could find olives inside the fruit wrapped with lines of poetry by Mahmood Darwish.  He elaborates that the sensory understanding of violence must penetrate in art, which gets highlighted specifically in this performance.

 

Inder Salim's performance with Mahmood Darwish's poetry

Next, he projected clips from Hakeekat e Kashmir, a performance which was in opposition of State sponsored Ehsaas-e-Kashmir that featured Zubin Mehta and his team of classical philharmonic.  He explains that his performance was about how the highly refined, classical music is played and promoted by the state whereas thehaqeekat, or the truth is through mere sound. “Sound is rhythm”, he says. In the performance, he dons a folk performer’s (bhaand’s) perforated garment, and he recalls that was criticized for asking the Kashmiri audience to begin thinking about the sound “aa” first instead of “Aazaadi”. This was unsettling to many, Inder maintains, because it is his constant struggle to question even the objectivist understanding of Freedom, thereby, making it tricky to categorize his art and politics. To this, he eventually observes that even while he does abstracts , the viewers are nevertheless able to connect to some strands of his projected thought. 

Taking from similar experiences from political protests, there seems to have been a deep influence of stone pelters from the kashmir unrest making news for more that two decades now. He talks about performance he does against the capital punishment for Afzal Guru. He prints down the SC verdict as large " to satisfy the collective conscious ". The audience was then given a scrap of paper that was crumpled as a small pebble and pelted towards the upheld verdict. He talks how at Mina there is stonning of devil and how the largely Kashmiri audience was able to relate to the act. he basically compares the archetectural space of Mina and the auditorium space and draws it back to his previous I PROTEST performance dating back to 2010. It was not only this religious act that became the reference he drew this intervention on, but he also makes mention of being influenced by Allama Iqbal's 'Shaqwa, and Jawaab-e-Shaqwa', narrating how misfortunate the Muslim community has been in world order and justice.

He returns to his methods, noting down that performance art has to draw from the material already available in the space of performance. There he also talks of a certain confidence that the artist must have. The I PROTEST tree poster, for example, is a clear indiator of how an artist looks for his expression even when not actively joining the stone pelting processions. He emphasises how it is necessary to expand the idea of protest, with respect to his art. Subsequently, he roughly talks of THE BLACK SNOW performance in Kashmir where he asks a barber to give him a hair-cut while the chopped hair fell on mountains painted with thick white acrylic on a white board. The final image formed was that of black snow over mountains.

On similar lines, Inder made mention of several of his political performances that involved directly subverting the metaphors to highlight discomfort with State apparatuses. Some more of these works involved one about unfurling of his own black garment on 26th January on a busy road in Mumbai, and another about the murder case of Ishrat Jahan performed with vegetables at Art Konsult in Delhi. The involvement of the physical body into the political critique is a huge component of his work, and gets highlighted in other performances like "India Blood Is On Your Hands", also first performed in Mumbai.

It was only after showing several such works that Inder began to delve deeper about the topic of the session : Performance Art is like a Parasite. He projects an image which he called 'The seat of Heart and Brain', which shows the brain under the bottom and the heart on the back. He narrates how the cusions were used by another artist, Hanna in Last Minute Excercise, ( at the Insert Exhibit) and how they have been re used in the image by Inder. In similar context, he talks of his latest The proposal of FOUNTAIN for the Kochi Muzhiris Binealle. How the common looking proposal, black text on white background itself becomes the object of art, occilating  between rejection and acceptance by the larger art community and patrons. He explains then that the term parasite corborates his work so as to peal layers of understanding in the art community. His maintains that his work hinges on introducing discomfort along with subjective quirkiness, thus, defying the pure or the acceptable.

Jeebesh Bagchi and Maya Kóvskaya at AnecDOTes

With the end of the presentation by Inder, it was Jeebesh Bagchi of Raqs Media Collective who pointed out some of the most interesting and relevant questions in terms of Inder’s growth as an artist. First of all he pointed out that instead of the term “parasite”, a better term perhaps to use would be ‘epiphyte’, technically understood as a plant which grows by feeding itself from the atmosphere or the debris around it in the environment, and not from the host tree/organism. He prodded Inder to look at Performance art with similar understanding, not as destructive or parasitic at all times. He maintained that Inder’s art has been able to create a lot of it’s own as a repertoire and which cannot be limited to looking at it as an art parasite. Inder, on his part welcomed and recognized this suggestion.

Another issue regarding the larger presence of Kashmir politics was raised. Jeebesh called it “Kashmirification” of Inder’s performance. He observed that over the last 15 years or so,

there has emerged a lot of politically charged dissent in his performance language, stemming from his sensibilities rooted in Kashmir turmoil. He added that his art is now becoming easily decipherable and predictable to some extent, whereas in his earlier performances, there was some elements of evasive-ness that seemed hard to “chew” on. Jeebesh wondered aloud why Inder does no longer utilize “weird” turns that unsettle the comfort of the on-lookers. As an artist then, Jeebesh explains, becoming effortlessly predictable can lead to being bracketed in labels and categories such as “protest performance”, “political art” and can actually halt the growth. He also expresses a fear that it would be a great loss if Performance Art met the same fate as that of Street Theatre. This did not seem to find much resonance with another audience member, Maya Kovskaya, an art critic, who took the debate to a larger level to understand why the artist community is obsessed with producing more weird and “unreadable” work instead of generating functional dissent. She noted that there not only obsession but also certain extent of “valorization” of the un-readable, which she finds problematic and limiting. She also wanted Inder to talk a little more on what drives his work.

These interjections brought him to confess that the choice of works to be shown for the session has been a little faulty as it mostly consists recent political performances only, and that could have been avoided easily. Nevertheless, Inder willingly agreed to these questions being significant observations and a valuable constructive input. But he added in his reply that the idea and the politics of Kashmir at the hands of oppressive state mechanism has largely been absent in the interventions by the larger art community. The voices he incorporates in his performances are relevant, to say the least. Here he again re-emphasized his opinion that the current need of the hour in art making has to be cross-penetration of political voices and artistic metaphors. Another audience member added that perhaps one need not be afraid of the death of Performance art even if it means meeting similar fate as of Street Theatre, as it needs to decay and re-generate from time to time. To this both Jeebesh and Inder answered in partial agreement. They both agreed that Performance Art needs to rise beyond such insecurities while still upholding the ingredient of innovative and impactful critique along with resisting categorization. Jeebesh further added that the readability of a performance work must not become frivolous if that is not the intent, and should try be wide rather than narrowing down to being branded as “trouble maker” only.

Moving on, and finally, Bhooma Padmanabhan noticed that Performance Art, the way Inder understands is mostly in varied unconventional spaces and with a relatively younger audience. Then, is there a difference in Presentations of performance and the performance actually and where does documentation become an important aspect, if at all. Inder seemed rather contemplative of these questions and said that all of these ideas are still being processed. But he believes in the way he practices performance, a video, or an image is not mere documentation of the actual performance. They tend to acquire their separate lives and entities as works. Yet he maintains that every time a performance is repeated, it garners a different set of meanings with different audiences, space, and materiality.