Dancing and Listening: Odissi across Cultures

Abstract

This paper discusses issues that arose for me when I interviewed an Odissi dancer about her learning this Indian dance form, travelling as she did from Australia to Orissa to spend several months of each year over an 11-year period to live with her guru, the late Sanjukta Panigrahi. The issues I discuss are the problems associated with making a text from a live encounter, and the choice of perspectives used in analysing that text. Drawing on discussions by ethnographers, anthropologists and others about the role of poetics in intercultural research, and on my own dance experience, I reflect on my ‘positioning’ in the various stages of the research. I go on to propose that the live, the temporal and what is remembered in the body are important, potentially poetic modalities of knowledge, which can easily be elided in academically validated ways of thinking and doing.

Keywords:

• Odissi Dance
• Poetics
• Ethnography
• Translation

Notes

1. ‘Dance’ here refers to modern dance or contemporary dance.

2. Stathis Gourgouris writes that: “The transformative power of poiein, first of all as a social-imaginary but also as artistic (poetic, strictly speaking) force, is consistently underplayed in favor of a certain analytic relation to knowledge, a philosophical scientia which, having fully engaged the permutations of technē, has formed the backbone of the pseudo-rationality that animates the instrumental logic of capitalist globalization. I say this because poetry continues to remain intransigent and socially significant in largely pre-capitalist modes of life, even while capitalist logic is raging infrastructurally (economically, technologically, even politically in some cases) at an extraordinary speed and scale. In this respect, philosophically speaking, my understanding of poiein must be entwined with a notion of prattein, so long as we don't signify the latter as an instrumental(ist) process, precisely so as to counter the permutations of technē as the primary agent of the production of knowledge and the making of history.” See “Poiein – Political Infinitive”, https://www.lsa.umich.edu/UMICH/modgreek/Home/_TOPNAV_WTGC/C.P.%20Cavafy%20Forum/Cavafy_gourgouris.pdf [accessed 16 August 2011].

3. Buckland (2006) notes (but also problematises) a distinction between ethnography and history. The ‘usual territory’ of the ethnographer she writes involves the “transient actions and words of people dancing in the present”, while for the historian, “the familiar realm is the archive, where … sources … have been created by people other than the researcher” (3). She notes that ethnography is often an approach (ideologically) associated with non-Western cultures, while history belongs to the West – along the lines of ‘oral’ vs. ‘literate’ societies.

4. Okely writes that “anthropological questions of autobiography and reflexivity were never raised in the academy before or during my fieldwork in the early 1970s” (1992: 14).

5. In 1992, the journal Women and Performance devoted an issue to “Feminist Ethnography and Performance” (Issue #10, Vol. 5, No. 2). The work of artist and experimental filmmaker Maya Deren is discussed in the issue – in particular her book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. “In her book, she defends herself as an artist by contending that it is precisely her lack of scientific training which led her to discover what she claimed was the essence of Voudoun culture and mythology. ‘In effect,’ Deren writes in her preface, ‘sensitivity to form provides the artist with a vast area of clues and data that might elude the professional anthropologist whose training emphasizes, precisely, that “scientific” detachment which may muffle even his normal sensitivity and responsiveness to formal nuance and subtlety’” (DeBouzek 1992: 9). Teresa Buckland (2006) writes of the discipline of ethnography that “it has become a favoured technique since the 1990s to use the researcher's body as a means of access to information” (13).

6. Of course, the intercultural field is also the dance field where both so-called ‘Indian’ dance forms and modern dance are already intercultural. See Allen 1997.

7. Samuel Weber writes that “English demands empirical concreteness from the outset”. He discusses the German word ‘erkennen’ which in English is “circumscribed as ‘the cognitive act’; ‘knowing’ and ‘knowledge’ designating the static fund of facts, information and insights over which the knower disposes, but the simple and crucial notion of ‘coming-to-know’, er-kennen must be reserved for specialists; ‘learn’ is similarly unsatisfactory, being too heavily burdened with passivity, which if it does indeed conform to empirical fact, nevertheless deprives English of the name of a cognitive process that would be universal, spontaneous, active” (Weber 1967: 12–13).

8. Because I am acknowledging that my writing is authored and is an ‘invention of (a) culture’ I will give my informant a fictional name – Sangeeta.

9. See, for example, Meduri (1988), Chatterjee (1996) and especially Citaristi (2001) for discussion of Indian so-called ‘classical’ dance history in relation to pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods. I visited Orissa in 2001 and saw the dancing of Manoranjan Pradhan and gotipua dancers at Konark and in 2010 saw the dancing of students of the now late Guru Gangadhar Pradhan and his disciple at Konark and Bhubaneswar, of Ileana Citaristi and her students at Art Vision in Bhubaneswar, at the Odissi Research Institute, Bhubaneswar, and of Mira Das during the 2010 monsoon festival. I also studied Odissi briefly with Dr Chandrabhanu in Melbourne and have seen Odissi performances in Melbourne, at Kalakshetra in Chennai, at the Chennai festival of music and dance and at the dance festival of Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu. I had first seen images of the temple sculptures when studying Asian Civilizations with Professor A.L. Basham as an undergraduate at the Australian National University in 1972.

10. ‘In reality’ but at the same time in the highly structured situation between a professional researcher and a private individual from whom the former is seeking to gain information.

11. Sangeeta said that Panigrahi “needed to get permission from her teacher (Kelucharan Mohapatra – my addition) to see if she was ready to teach or not”. Prior to this Panigrahi had taught workshops to groups and other teachers but had not apparently had a student in the guru–sisya way.

12. Sarah Morelli (2010) writes that the guru–sisya parampara is “a system responsive to the individual needs of students and to changing socio-cultural dynamics” (77–78).

13. Morelli (2010) discusses how gurus’ teaching practices adapt to diasporic and individual circumstances. It is possible that both Panigrahi and ‘Sangeeta’ were on unfamiliar ground with respect to their roles and circumstances – Panigrahi as a new guru in her own right teaching a dancer who was not from her community, and Sangeeta as a young woman previously used to spending her holidays in Calcutta and now spending them far from that cosmopolitan centre in Bhubaneswar, Orissa and living in unfamiliar and uncertain relationships.

14. See Bergson: “the past survives under two distinct forms: first in motor mechanisms; secondly, in independent recollections” (1962: 87).

15. See, for example, Meduri (1988, 1992, 2004), Hanna (1993), Ram (1995, 2000, 2005), Chatterjee (1996), Ghandhi (1998) and Spear and Meduri (2004). Diana Taylor who makes a distinction between “the archive” and “the repertoire” argues that “repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning” (2003: 20).

16. Taylor writes that performances are “in a sense, always in situ: intelligible in the framework of the immediate environment and issues surrounding them” (2003: 3). In addition, Morelli quotes Cynthia Cohen Bull who writes that: “… the multiplicity of ethnographic realities shapes the unique and historical occasion of any dance” (Morelli 2010: 77).

17. Clifford also acknowledges that “the poetic and the political are inseparable” (1986a: 2).

18. Stoller writes that although “anthropologists, like painters, lend their bodies to the world, we tend to allow our senses to penetrate the other's world rather than letting our senses be penetrated by the world of the other” (1989: 39).

19. See Chatterjee 1996: 73.

20. For a discussion of Panigrahi's ecstasy and ‘loss of control’ while dancing, see Meduri 1992. In addition, Stoller argues that: “The problem of anthropological representation meets its greatest test, however, in studies of shamanism, magic and sorcery … in which the ‘irrationality’ of, say, a magical vision, play a major role” (1989: 39).

21. Chakrabarty writes: “The moment we think of the world as disenchanted … we set limits to the ways the past can be narrated” (2000: 89).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sally Gardner

Sally Gardner is a dancer and lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Melbourne and is co-editor of Writings on Dance, a journal dedicated to the moving body. She is a regular contributor to local and international arts' and humanities' forums. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The Drama Review, Dance Research, Performance Research, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal and Outskirts: Women on the Edge amongst others. She is a member of the “Writing Past Colonialism” book series committee of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne; and recently translated Laurence Louppe's Poétique de la danse contemporaine into English (Poetics of Contemporary Dance, Dance Books, 2010)