LAST(ING)
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LAST(ING) 〰️
LAST(ING) : WEEK 1
Ranjana Dave | November 27, 2022
An edition accrues over time. The etymological underpinnings of the term ‘edition’ gesture at acts of ‘giving’, ‘producing’, or ‘bringing forth’, doing so ‘out of’ or ‘from within’ bodies and repositories of people, ideas and images. ‘Last(ing)’ has been several years in the making, starting from murmurs in 2020, to a proposal in 2021, and finally, an edition with 12 works spanning writing, video, and photographs in 2022. What it has meant to us has changed constantly; imagined in a shaky post-pandemic moment, it now manifests as the intention to endure, to remain, to leave traces. To last, leakily.
OF SKY AND FIREFLIES
Manjari Kaul and Nisha Abdulla | November 27, 2022
Resistance is often understood as something that resides in protest sites only, or in particular events that overthrow or subvert the status quo in society. In annotating fragments from two solo performance projects, Manjari Kaul and Nisha Abdulla invite the audience to witness and experience resistance in the everyday - through memory keeping, intentional relationships and collective dreaming. Tracing symbiotic connections between their projects, Firefly Women (Manjari Kaul) and wepushthesky (Nisha Abdulla), they set up a jugalbandi, gesturing at the interconnectedness between their two works. Both performances retrace moments of solidarity from the multiple Shaheen Baghs across the country and recognise their continued reverberation through our bodies in urgent yet nourishing ways.
Beyond and Between - Space Studies for a Diasporic Dance
Andrea Itacarambi Albergaria | November 29, 2022
‘Beyond and Between - Space Studies for a Diasporic Dance’ is a project of photography, diasporic dance and empty space, designed for exploring poetic narratives. From her poem Inspired by August Strindberg’s ‘The Dream Play’, the writer arrives at some future plans. Are they to remain hallucinated poetry? What does it mean to dance alone? When does a dance sit on the edge of ‘poetic diaspora’? We are offered this term and a danced exposition of it, by Brazil-based Odissi dancer and researcher Andrea Itacarambi Albergaria. In this essay, she builds a space for investigating movement, concepts of being in the world and also how to go beyond and between.
STORY OF THE LAST RAAS: DIBA RAAS
Chabungbam Babina | November 30, 2022
The last of the five Jagoi Raas’ of Manipur, Diba Raas was introduced in the middle of the twentieth century. What sets Diba raas apart from the previous ones is its introduction in the backdrop of the rising anti-colonial and anti-feudal movements in Manipur. It signifies the democratisation of a performance, which was otherwise bound by strict rules of religious and monarchical orthodoxy. What was once a royal spectacle, becomes a performance accessible to the larger public. Today, the story of Diba Raas displays shifts in the sites of cultural memory, from the dancers’ bodies to prescribed dance curriculum, from published texts codifying rules to their practice amid the rhythms of life in the twenty-first century. Chabungam Babina’s essay tells the story of this last Raas, drawn from her own participation in a Diba Raas, and from conversations and anecdotes among the dancers during rehearsals.
Read more…
LAST(ING): WEEK 2
Parvathi Ramanathan | December 4, 2022
This edition of Indent comes together from many sites. It evokes many nooks and spaces, in the body and in places that can be marked clearly on a map. My own participation was primarily from Berlin, my new home for about a year now. While reading and working on these essays, I sometimes caught a certain smell on myself - one I latently associated with the ‘foreign‘. I observed this feeling with curiosity. What is my association with the idea of foreign-ness? When did my smell start changing? Does this alter my connection with a sense of home? How long does a fragrance on the skin last?
Like my preoccupation with the smell of ‘foreign’, this week’s essays in 'Last(ing)’ offer an intimate inspection of the body to locate that which is ephemeral and invisible.
THE ENDURING GRIEF OF IMAGINARY LIVES
Amulya B | December 5, 2022
In this personal essay, Amulya B evocatively reflects on the idea of ‘lasting’ within the paradigm of grief. How many syllables does grief have? She notes a difference between grieving in her mother tongue Kannada and in English. She finds answers for questions put forth elsewhere: if faith and grief are the same? Through literary texts, she studies the grief of others and ponders over the colour of this emotion. She traces its movement in the body and its many transformations. After all, she says, grief does not come alone. It always has company. Be it regret, sadness, relief or something else. But, they can get complicated when the body they house is malfunctioning.
The writer grieves not only for the people lost, but also for the imaginary body. A simple, undemanding body. She grieves the body that lasts.
MY LAST STRETCH
Dayita Nereyeth | December 6, 2022
Stretching: an activity that is commonly ingrained as a necessary prologue and epilogue of every dance class, performance, or practice. For Dayita Nereyeth, moulding the body into meaningless ‘shapes’ left her stuck in an endless cycle of pain and disconnection. In this essay, she marks the path to her ‘last stretch’ and arrival into a personal embodied practice informed by principles of Alexander Technique. Stretching is doing, she observes. Her autobiographical account is rooted in personal experience and supplemented by embodied research. She writes, “I hope that the ideas resonate with movers all around the world, so we can begin to collectively shed constricting ideals and practices to allow our free, natural selves to live and dance uninhibited.” Through images and a recorded talk-through accompanying the essay, readers are invited to experience an activity from the Alexander Technique.
HOW TO DO A DOWNWARD FACING DOG?
Johanna Heusser | December 8, 2022
In her ongoing research and performance, How to do a Downward Facing Dog?, Johanna Heusser attempts to open up different perspectives that make yoga visible as part of postcolonial and neoliberal entanglements. Based on her own biographical experience and intensive research, she reflects upon and critically questions her role as a white cisgender woman from Switzerland in this system. She takes an artistic approach to complex socio-political issues and a constructive search for utopian models. She asks: What strategies are there for decolonizing our yoga practice? Is there a feminist yoga? Or can yoga be a left protest? How can I be political with the help of my body? In this essay, she reflects further on her motivations to create a performance about yoga as a global practice and where the creation of a performance on this theme has taken her. She dialogues with performer and yoga practitioner Manjari Kaul on the subject and considers what it means to counter yoga’s glamourised social media presence by performing downward-facing dogs in mundane or everyday spaces.
LAST(ING): WEEK 3
Ranjana Dave | December 12, 2022
Have you ever listened to the silences between your breaths? Specifically, the gap between an exhalation and preparing to inhale again, before the body starts reorganising itself to make space for a new breath. Those few seconds have a void-like quality to them; full of emptiness, and thus, strangely, of possibility. Nothing is happening, because the body has ended a cycle of breath. Yet, something can happen, and I sense every pore and cell in the body relinquishing its hold on breath, steady in the belief that new breaths will return.
Let’s try this together. Breathe in for four counts, breathe out for four, and then listen to the void for four counts. How does your body occupy the void?
How does your body prepare for breath?
THE LAST CONVERSATION
Anish Cherian and Vidur Sethi | December 12, 2022
The ‘last’ for any life is a condition where it reaches maximum entropy, where deviances between life and their surroundings collapse, where disorder negates the desire to transfer, transform, transmute, or transcend. Through a series of exchanges in the form of letters, two entangled figures across either side of a wormhole have their ‘last conversation’. Zoe, developed by Anish Cherian, is a speculative figuration of the human as a leaky body corrupting itself against the principles of exclusions that have come to define humans into newer forms. Vidur Sethi’s Whippersnapper is a resistant provocateur who enters in a mothership desiring to queer surrounding architectures. Through words and fragmenting images in this post-human exploration, the figures spill over and constantly evade any finality in their own forms, metamorphosing what a human may entail.
NOTES FOR THE REVOLUTION: LASTING
Tanima | December 13, 2022
How does one sustain a musical note? How can one sustain a revolution?
Tanima’s essay reflects on lasting and enduring in the context of her work with the Zanana Ensemble which came into being during the 2019-20 anti-NRC/CAA movement in Delhi. As the ensemble took the form of a choir, though its members did not all have prior training in music or performance, they nevertheless held a melody, a poem, a hope. They lasted for as long as the movement did, which had its own dynamics of sustenance.
Going from breath, to voice, to note, to song, the essay journeys towards the possibility of a lasting song, sung together.
IN response to the last
Kapil Paharia | December 14, 2022
A tool that lasts and the last use of that tool is always important for any art practitioner. The last time a practitioner uses their tool, whether it’s a puppeteer’s puppet, a performer’s body, or an artist’s tool is a process of constant and uncertain negotiation.
In this intimate montage of words and gestures on video, Kapil Paharia looks at the performer’s practice, asking how the use of the word ‘last’ and all its definitions affects how the tool is engaged with. Made in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, he asks how the absence of the tool affects the performer. How does this affect the process of performance and also one’s recollections or retellings of it?
LAST(ING): WEEK 4
Parvathi Ramanathan | December 18, 2022
In the weeks that the near-final essay drafts from ‘Last(ing)’ were coming together, co-editor Ranjana Dave and I observed the collection of ideas with wonder. While the words ‘last’ and ‘lasting’ may appear to point towards an apparent telos, we found ourselves in twelve processes that rejected any notion of culmination. Departures from a single word had accrued wide interpretations and pathways that stood in a state of still-forming.
How do you choose a moment to stop, when it is not yet the end? In the state of ‘still-forming', are there several minute points that can be marked like little flag posts, to claim ‘already there’? Preparing final drafts of an essay or announcing that this edition is ready to be published was, in many ways, such a declaration.
The final three essays of ‘Last(ing)’ especially represent this state of extended flux.
NAVIGATING ROOTLESSNESS AND BEING A BEGINNER
Jasmine Yadav, with photos by Venus Maku Thokchom | December 19, 2022
Can ‘form’ be thought of as the body actively discovering movement language?
How would the meaning of creation shift if it honoured the very human experience of failure?
These are some of the questions the author asks of her artistic practice, and of readers, in her essay on being a ‘beginner’ in dance and movement. What can a body that carries memories of various forms produce? What happens when movement becomes a mix or fusion of different vocabularies and approaches? What do the memories of various forms bring up in the body of the dancer? And what then are her roots or points of departure? The author chronicles her discovery of ‘rootlessness’, as her body adjusted to living through a pandemic, in the prolonged solitude and isolation that the body had to endure, or in the experience of illness, as the body fought Covid-19, then making a long and slow recovery. In layers of text accompanied by images shot in her bedroom and bathroom, both spaces her body came to inhabit deeply and enduringly through several lockdowns, the author offers prompts, questions and a sense of her own journey towards an ownership of this state of ‘rootlessness’ as embodied experience.
of the unexpected and the ordinary
Sanyukta Saha and Vrinda Misra | December 21, 2022
" ‘The last thing I expected’ or ‘sudden’ evokes the sense of a jerk, like sitting on the last seat of a DTC bus, right above the tyre, and the driver pushes the brake, and the head and the body are thrown off centre - opposite to each other. It lasts for a moment, and is a small movement. What if ordinary living was a series of these moments and movements that destabilise you, woven in and layered with each other across time and space. When life is systemically a series of happenings that throw you off, suddenness acquires a quality that is pervasive, invisible in its constancy, and slow. "
In this essay, two members of Aagaaz Theatre Trust document the beginnings of a long-term engagement with 6 girls from Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti in New Delhi, a neighbourhood they have worked in individually, and then collectively, since 2009. How do chronic stressors and structural violence impact the lives of these girls? Then, what does the work of creating long-term adolescent support circles look like?
what will last when everything vanishes?
Vikram Iyengar | December 23, 2022
How do we know our bodies? What happens when connections between the mind and body seem to splinter? Vikram Iyengar chronicles his mother's journey through Alzheimer's Disease, noting the dramatic changes and shifts in physical, psychological, cognitive, and mental expression and ability over time, as a son, caregiver and dancer. He shares fragments from his 'Ma journal', where he records small details of listening to and experiencing his mother's imagination of time and space. This act of witnessing uncertain time and space begins to infiltrate his own documentation of his artistic practice, as he goes back and forth between choreographic works, textual references, conversations and memories. How does the body 'learn to forget'?