Odissi Across Media | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Breaking away from this textual canon to allow the surfacing of marginalized stories in embodiment has been the primary motive behind this digital reconstruction of movement. In this experiment, I deconstruct my dancing Odissi body by a cyclical process of choreographic and technological practices. To facilitate the process of deconstruction, I choreograph a short segment that I digitize into the skeletal avatar by using motion capture. I start by reincorporating in my practice, Mahari motility as inspired from my viewing of Sashimoni Devi's movement in the documentary Given to Dance (Hess, 1986). I make explicit the implicit traces of Mahari movement within my practice. Odissi scholar Ananya Chatterjea (2008) enlists the characteristics of Mahari movement as sensuous "torso movements, displaced hip line, and rounded curvilinearity, the full articulation of female sexuality, and the belief in the utter unison of bodily and spiritual desire" (p. 149). The Mahari full-bodied aesthetic inspires my choreographic experimentation.
In this exercise, I focus less on percussive footwork and torso isolations. Rather, I focus on making sinuous curvilinear movements with my body. In my digital abstraction, there is considerable loss involving finger and toe movement, facial expression, and the intricate expressive quality of my dancing body. I gain access to my movement from a three-dimensional perspective—a phenomenon not accomplished easily even with a studio mirror. Further, I superimpose my 3D movement data onto a 3D model or an avatar. In this iteration, I manually compose the finger movements into Mudras, or hand gestures that are integral to the dance. I manually add the finger movements after syncing the kinematic frameworks across my movement data and animating systems. Mudras, or hand gestures, surface in the 3D models after undergoing a break from the physical body. The physical dissociation of the Mudras from my body, I argue, causes a linguistic break as well. This strategy decomposes the textual relationality of the Odissi body and the decomposition of the canonical convention enables the gesture to gain performative efficacy in the digital domain.
After moving from body to skeletal to avatar, I revisit my choreography to integrate the technological processes of deconstruction—the missing optical marker translating as a missed step, the missing finger information resulting in rarity and sparse gesturing, the 3D perspective giving me more access to a whole-bodied perspective rather than just the frontal as afforded by the visual domain—in my practice. After revisiting, I tweak parts of my movement to record a video of the final version of my choreography surfacing the Mahari. Choreographic and technological practices work in tandem in this creative process involving movement, data, observation, simulation, and analysis. I use a non-linear process of body-to-data-to-body to surface the Mahari in choreography and choreographic mediation.