Seiji Shimoda's Performance at KIPAF 15

Neha Tickoo's Report

There is something omnipresent about the newspaper. And it is reluctantly and relentlessly so. We can say that the whole gamut of information industry is ubiquitous and even though we have stepped deep into the virtual world of consuming multitudes of information, the newspaper is still held dear in its very irrefutable materiality. Perhaps it is this all-pervasiveness of the printed word that gets imitated by the virtual proliferation of textual information. Then, the tangible and locally available newspaper can become a potent object to be manipulated through performance. Seiji Shimoda, an artist from Nagano, Japan, merely uses this newspaper and sellotape to create this piece of work.

Seiji enters the same venue, the vast ground in front of Victoria Memorial armed with his bundle of newspapers and a roll of sellotape. Come to think of it, it is rather a common sight to find a foreigner with newspaper strolling into that space, outside the Victoria Memorial gate, a famous tourist spot in Kolkata. However, Seiji goes on to lay down his tools – one by one each sheet of the newspaper bundle is laid in front of him along while he strips off pieces of the sellotape for what is to come. Most often than not, newspapers in art have been amply used as cheap raw material to create new sub-objects, sometimes to impose or to be superimposed upon. What Seiji does with the newspaper is quite neat even while demonstrating the crisp fluidity of paper.

He begins by placing one sheet of paper in the middle of the audience- a collection of Pi members and artists among plenty of local people. He takes another full sheet of newspaper and with the help of sellotape, he attaches it to the newspaper sheet already placed there. He picks up the edge of this elongated narrow sheet of newspapers in his hands and raises it over his head letting rest of the paper fall on his back. After maintaining that particular crouching position for a while, he leaps forward, as far as he can, allowing the newspaper on his head flutter accordingly. When at his new position, he makes time to add another sheet of paper to this strip of newspapers and jumps back to his original position. Once again, he goes on to add another sheet of paper and repeats his leap, back and forth-ing between the two fixed but unmarked points, as the sheets go on to be added after each leap. He continues doing so until he transforms into a totally different creature and the strip of newspapers begins to look more like a long cape, a veil, a frog’s tongue also perhaps. Towards the end it becomes so elongated that he makes effort to collect the entire roll of newspapers in his hands over his head while ensuring a far reaching jump. The performance lasted a good 20-25 minutes and the strip of taped newspaper sheets must have become more than 10 feet long. Seiji ended it with crumble-folding the enormous strip back to himself while walking back into the crowd not letting the bundle away from him.

There are many images that shot up in my mind while Seiji performed this act among a curious audience. There are very anthropomorphic attributions with which one can look at Seiji’s work. In his acts of leaping, he transforms into a frog, with the same postures and the flying strip of newspaper become his tongue, which only shoots out and never retrieves back, following him wherever he jumps off to. His movements slowed down a bit as he was extremely careful of laying down his tool in order. I could then find time to read what the newspaper offered in the fleeting “in-between” moments. It was of course one of leading English newspapers of the country and what flashed were the news headlines like “Can USA be an All-weather Friend?” and “Kolkata is No. 1 in Faking It.” Or the other side read, “Measures To Job Hunting”. Perhaps the tongue of the Frog was telling me what i wanted to read!

Neha ‘Zooni’ Tickoo is a dancer, a student of Performance and a poet hailing from Kashmir and based in Delhi. She dabbles in Art and Performance Writing. Some of her writing works can be accessed at www.zoonitickoo.blogspot.com and www.zooni-aloneinthewilderness.blogspot.com

Pavitra Mehta's piece at KIPAF 15

Pavitra Mehta's Performance @College Square - #kipaf15 Day 3

Neha Tickoo's Report

A performer, one who is able to make most of the stuff available in the environment is able to create works that may astound, and may create some effect in the heart and the mind of the onlooker. Pavitra chose to do her performance during evening of the third day of the KIPAF. She chose a rather unused space besides the abandoned pool. Just when it was her turn to perform, she was already among the audiences and she used Bhaskar Hazarika done up full in his regal attire complete with the silver foil mask as he ushered all the audiences beating a drum in a somber rhythm, drawing them closer with sufficient attention following. Interestingly, she had set up her performance venue in a circle, made out of broken discarded bricks she used as found objects. This circular formation had interesting effect on the way the audience arranged itself to watch the performance, a large semi-circle with enough space between her, seated in her circle of bricks and themselves. It looked as if a serious ritual would be executed by her as she placed herself in the middle of that circle and sat on her thighs. She did this after she removed her shoes, and so invariably it indicated sanctity of her chosen space of performance.

As she settled conveniently in the middle of the circle, the drumming stopped. Now the attention began concentrating towards the center of the circle. She had already placed a earthen pot of black colour near the edge of the circle. There was also red paint on her hands, which she brandishes at the audience and clearly showing as if revealing their emptiness and the colour. She had a brown paperbag kept besides her. She places the paperbag on her head and suddenly she transforms into a faceless creature.

The final and the most important stage in the performance was Pavitra picking up the paint brush from the earthen pot containing black paint and attempting to paint a face over the brown paper bag placed over her face and head. She began to superimpose suggestive dots on the brown paper bag indicating her eyes, her nose, and her mouth. Soon the paper bag began to get soggy but she continued to smear the wet black paint on the torn-at-places paper bag on her face. Simultaneously her face began to become visible. Occasionally she keeps flashing her red painted hands at the audiences, in slow movements. Finally the paper-bag is not able to hold itself due to excess sogginess and tears off. She tears off the paper and ends the performance.

All through the performance, I could get reminded of the performance of Olivier de Sagazan’s ‘Transfiguration’[1]. This performance involves, on a much deeper level, the idea of physical appearance and its transformation. Sagazan uses clay as a tool to transform his physical appearance, and with this wet clay he moulds and re-moulds into different creatures like a woman, with ravaged hair, a man with enormous phallus, or sometimes into an alien, a predator. He becomes as grotesque as possible but all the time he is amply recognizable as we go on recollecting and recognizing the dynamics played by the clay on his physical being. Paritrahere, seemingly does not aim for radical transformation of this measure but there are some structural similarities, which cannot be denied, even though these similarities may perhaps be attributed to chance entirely! However, the way she sits in the circle, or the way she places the pot of black paint in front of her and the use of clayey coloured paper bag on her head, the urge to depict a face over the paper bag, and culmination with eventual rupture of the soggy paper bag become essential indicators that compel one to make mention of Sagazan’s work in order to look at Pavitra’s performance. One can at least say that Pavitra seems inspired by Sagazan’s work invariably, but in the content and the motives of her performance, however, she is not able to imitate what Sagazan achieves. Rather she sets up an altogether different tone and mood for maybe different purpose entirely, which, I believe, will be more visible to anyone unaware of Sagazan’s work altogether.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYBXRwsDjY

Dorothea Rust's Performance @ KIPAF 2015

this report was published here : http://kipaf.blogspot.in/2015/02/dorothea-rusts-performance-victoria.html

Neha Tickoo's Review

As the group of performers have assembled around one corner of Victoria Gate , Swiss artist Dorothea Rust begins to mobilise them by pushing the people around with her shoulder and with her sound like “hooh”. The audiences around her were the group of performers from PI who already knew of her performance. People on their part, were responding favouring her insistence, her shoving and cajoling to move. But since some members decided to defy the mob reactions, she began to make use of expressions of helplessness while asking the audiences to “move” repeatedly. Her facial expressions transformed dramatically, almost like pleading in askance. Her intention was to gather the whole group to the centre of the vast ground. Eventually as all of them gathered at the centre she makes use of few drawings. These were roughly maps of some European countries like Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland and a couple more.

Along with the outlined drawings of the countries, there were outlined drawings of a donkey as well. After a few interactive rounds with the audiences urging the people to think of their origins as homo sapiens, she begins to talk about how the human being is also an animal trudging with two legs. There is certain affection with which she talks about the specie of donkey. She explains post this performance that some time ago in Chille, she had performed a work, where she had herself photographed along with the carcass of a donkey which she found fascinating.

Proceeding further with her performance, she insists the audience to participate in a mirroring exercise. They willingly oblige and what ensues is a movement session roughly along the lines of a song “you are so beautiful to me” by Ray Charles. This part of her performance is especially endearing as one can notice a playful interaction between her and her followers, in that short song-dance session.

The juice of Dorothea’s performance lies in the fact that she is a trained dancer and a musician and for her the experience of the physical corporeal body is of a much greater importance. By making the participants move along with her coordinating with her movements, perhaps she brought the human being on the same bar as that of a donkey, considered a beast of burden, a stupid animal. It was from some strange sentimentality that she radiated her love for a donkey, and which radiated far enough to the so-called intellectual animal - homo sapiens, one that build all the countries of this planet, singing well in tune with her emotions.  

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!