1. The language of the Gods in the World of Men (Sheldon Pollack)
2. Karanas: Common Dance Codes of India, Volumes 1 and 2 (Padma Subramanyam)
3. The Invention of Tradition (Hobsbaum and Ranger)
4. A Precise History of India (Metcalf and Metcalf)
5. At Home in the World: Bharatanatyam on the Global Stage (Janet O' Shea)
6. Between Theater and Anthropology (Richard Schechner)
7. Natyashastra (Ghosh)
8. Abhinaya Darpana (which translation works best?)
9. The Yoga of Indian Dance (Mandakini Trivedi) - to help understand how dancers perceive their work now in the globalized scheme of things.
10. Puranas (again, translation choice...)
11. Playing in the Dark (Toni Morrison) - I wonder if her application of the analysis of the use of the African American in books written before civil rights allows us to also understand the European - Indian relationship)
12. The Indus Valley: New Perspectives (Jane R. McIntosh) - to get a feel for the history of where many pinpoint showed the first signs of "Indian" arts
13. Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series) by Joan Aruz
14. The Indus Civiliazation by Mortimer Wheeler - again, to understand the "beginning" so to speak
15. Ka by Roberto Calasso - to understand reinterpretations
16. The Clay Library Sanskrit Series - translations of actual plays (to mark similarities in metaphor and use of description and extrapolation in dance and music now)
17. Sanskrit Play Production in Ancient India (Performing Arts Series) by Tarla Mehta
18. Silipadikaram: The Lay of the Ankle Bracelet - this book was used to pinpoint and understand early arts in India
19. Kutiyattam: Sanskrit Theater of India - as one of the forms considered most unchanged in the past few thousand years, it is good to see where it's come from
20. Theatre in Ancient India by Siddheswar Chattopadhyay
21. Contemporary Indian Dance: New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora (Studies in International Performance) by Ketu H. Katrak
22. Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance (Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies) by Susan Kattwinkel - ideas on rasa, one of the most important components of the Indian aesthetic theory
23. Time in Indian Music: Rhythm, Metre, and Form in North Indian Rag Performance (Oxf Monographs Music Ncs) by Martin Clayton
24. Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition by Janaki Bakhle
25. The Rags of North Indian Music: Their Structure and Evolution by Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy
26. History of South Indian (Carnatic) music, from Vedic times to the present by R Rangaramanuja Iyengar
27. The Ragas of Somanatha: History and Analysis, Musical Examples (Asian Studies) by Emmie te Nijenhuis (Aug 1997)
28. Indian Classical Dance: Tradition in Transition by Leela Venkataraman and Avinash Pasricha - a particularly good book to understand the current "Indian from India" mindset
29. Indian Dance: The Ultimate Metaphor by Shanta Serbjeet Singh
30. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse by Partha Chatterjee
31. Rasa: Performing the Divine in India by Susan L. Schwartz
32. Thanjavur: A Cultural History by Pradeep Chakravarthy and Vikram Sathyanathan - particularly important because this is a major change in south indian dance and music history and execution
33. Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora (Anthem South Asian Studies) by Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande - it would be good to note how Bollywood borrows and plays a role in all of this
34. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Perverse Modernities) by Gayatri Gopinath (I also wonder how the cross-dressing, role-playing, and gender issues may or may not come into play in all this)
35. Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life by Douglas M. Knight (a staunch advocate who kept away from sanskritization of the body, whereas rukmini devi did otherwise)
36. Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (South Asia Across the Disciplines) by Devesh Soneji
37. Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern (Amanda J. Weidman)
38. Dance Research Journal 36/2 (2004)
39. Rethinking Dance History: A Reader by Alexandra Carter
40. DVDs: Kalakshetra,
41. Nayikas: The Clay Library Series: Sheldon Pollack
42. Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works by Kalidasa (or from the Raghuvamsa as translated in one of my classes)
43. Ãndandavardhana's classic on poetics, the Dhvanyāloka (which introduces the santa, or peace, rasa)
44. St. Thyagaraja, the divine singer: His life and teachings, by Shuddhananda Bharati
45. Mahābhāṣya by Patañjali (contains the first seeds of Sanskrit drama and poetry)
Topics I cannot find enough books on: rasa theory, or the introduction of the bhakti rasa, and obviously on ancient sanskrit drama traditions
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
The difference 20 years can make in dance...
MACE | Media Archive for Central England | Media clip[Midland Montage: 27.11.1958: Indian Classical Dance]
Insane how different dance looks even 20-30 years ago!!!
Insane how different dance looks even 20-30 years ago!!!
Monday, September 19, 2011
The codification of Sanskirt poetry and literature into Indian classical dance and music
I think, after everything I've learned, that I do believe there is a traceable lineage of evolution between sanskrit poetry and Indian performance arts. I say this in reference to my post on The Invention of Tradition, and definitely keeping in mind all of my confusion about where bharatanatyam has grown from. I think there are definite ruptures, but in the grand scheme of things, it is an evolution of sorts.
I am going to make this a point of my research over the next year, really trying to understand what happened from the Sanskrit literary tradition to dance and music. Here are the unofficial reasons for my hypothesis:
1. When poets would read Sanskrit literature way back when (not sure of the date) they would use hand gestures while they were speaking to help people understand the meaning of what they were saying. Whether this was an acoustic thing or just extra, who knows? But I wonder if this is a pre-cursor to mudras.
2. During recitation of slokas, etc, people started to assign specific pitches at specific times. Could this in turn indicate some sort of precursor for ragas? Eventually this was also implemented with specific hand gestural use.
These two things sparked my interest. What actually happened to separate literature from drama, and then drama from dance and music? There used to be a saying: "without language, music, and dance, there is no art". Obviously we view these 3 as separate, distinct categories now. How did that happen?
More to come on books I have to read in order to further probe this topic.
I am going to make this a point of my research over the next year, really trying to understand what happened from the Sanskrit literary tradition to dance and music. Here are the unofficial reasons for my hypothesis:
1. When poets would read Sanskrit literature way back when (not sure of the date) they would use hand gestures while they were speaking to help people understand the meaning of what they were saying. Whether this was an acoustic thing or just extra, who knows? But I wonder if this is a pre-cursor to mudras.
2. During recitation of slokas, etc, people started to assign specific pitches at specific times. Could this in turn indicate some sort of precursor for ragas? Eventually this was also implemented with specific hand gestural use.
These two things sparked my interest. What actually happened to separate literature from drama, and then drama from dance and music? There used to be a saying: "without language, music, and dance, there is no art". Obviously we view these 3 as separate, distinct categories now. How did that happen?
More to come on books I have to read in order to further probe this topic.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Angry Ranting
http://auroville2.wordpress.com/2008/07/03/auroville-life-through-the-mirror-of-shanti-pillais-outrageous-dissertations/
The article above is a rant as to Shanti Pillai's work. While I may not agree with everything she says in her dissertation, I don't believe it is so poorly done that so many of bits and pieces of the article can be taken as the author above does. Anyway I wanted to post now so I would come back to it later and really parse it, but I think one of my professors said it best:
When you are young, everything seems ridiculous to you and you are galled by the state of things. You become an angry scholar, intent upon spreading as much of your "knowledge" as possible and "rectifying" everyone's way of acknowledging things as wrong. However, as you get older, you begin to understand pluralism much, much better - and that all arguments are correct - just that some arguments are better than others.
The article above is a rant as to Shanti Pillai's work. While I may not agree with everything she says in her dissertation, I don't believe it is so poorly done that so many of bits and pieces of the article can be taken as the author above does. Anyway I wanted to post now so I would come back to it later and really parse it, but I think one of my professors said it best:
When you are young, everything seems ridiculous to you and you are galled by the state of things. You become an angry scholar, intent upon spreading as much of your "knowledge" as possible and "rectifying" everyone's way of acknowledging things as wrong. However, as you get older, you begin to understand pluralism much, much better - and that all arguments are correct - just that some arguments are better than others.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Lyrical Help
This site looks incredibly informative and helpful for if you need to look up lyrics to a particular song or request help --
Enjoy!
http://www.allyouwannaknow.net/musicandme/2009/11/03/jagadaanandakaaraka-nattai/
Enjoy!
http://www.allyouwannaknow.net/musicandme/2009/11/03/jagadaanandakaaraka-nattai/
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Feeling Cheated
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day, and she put into words perfectly how artists feel.
"Cheated. We all feel cheated and undervalued."
The more I thought about this word, the more I felt she had it spot on. That is exactly how every person feels. The honest to god truth is, if we were all living comfortable - making as much money as our lawyer and engineer and finance friends instead of struggling day in and day out to make ends meet doing something we supposedly love, I doubt any of these "wars" would happen. The musician feels cheated because they are not getting enough from a performance where they see endless amounts of people coming through for a performance. The dancer feels cheated because they are spending hundreds of hours creating and choreographing and rehearsing a performance and then the musician is making more money than them for maybe 1/16 of the time they have put in, if that. The producer feels cheated because artists see "big money" and are continuously asking for more - again, making more money than the producers themselves.
Money does make the world go around and art has certainly become more of a money oriented business than ever before, to the point where I think the art world itself - at least the one we have created for South Asian ones here in NYC - is hurting itself. The suspicion, the politics, the egos - it's become really unbearable and almost sad to witness.
Bring back the selfless patrons who would just pay for an artist to sit around and be creative! Then we'd all happily help each other out, work for one another, and perhaps smile again instead of making our working lives so miserable!
"Cheated. We all feel cheated and undervalued."
The more I thought about this word, the more I felt she had it spot on. That is exactly how every person feels. The honest to god truth is, if we were all living comfortable - making as much money as our lawyer and engineer and finance friends instead of struggling day in and day out to make ends meet doing something we supposedly love, I doubt any of these "wars" would happen. The musician feels cheated because they are not getting enough from a performance where they see endless amounts of people coming through for a performance. The dancer feels cheated because they are spending hundreds of hours creating and choreographing and rehearsing a performance and then the musician is making more money than them for maybe 1/16 of the time they have put in, if that. The producer feels cheated because artists see "big money" and are continuously asking for more - again, making more money than the producers themselves.
Money does make the world go around and art has certainly become more of a money oriented business than ever before, to the point where I think the art world itself - at least the one we have created for South Asian ones here in NYC - is hurting itself. The suspicion, the politics, the egos - it's become really unbearable and almost sad to witness.
Bring back the selfless patrons who would just pay for an artist to sit around and be creative! Then we'd all happily help each other out, work for one another, and perhaps smile again instead of making our working lives so miserable!
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
The language of puns
One of the interesting things about Sanskrit that leads to its poetic complexity is the double, triple, or even quadruple meaning of certain words.
Sanskrit is all about complex puns. Sanskrit will take a phrase like "That person has baggage" and mean both that they have literal baggage as well as problems from their past that screw with their present.
In fact, the number one itself has, as I've seen, close to 30 words for it. Words like sun and moon, of which there are only one in the world. It can lead to some fascinating metaphors.
For instance, there is a poem we read once that I loved - I have been searching for it but cannot remember its name or find it anywhere anymore, but it's entire meaning was of two. Read literally, it was about a tree's growth, and it's different stages. But the other meaning within was that the words could be taken to mean the different (I believe in Sanskrit there are 7) stages of love. Not just a metaphor, but actual literal meaning. (Eg one line could mean that the tree was becoming red with blooms but also could read that the man was bleeding from the heart).
There's another kind of interesting interpretation one can do with Sanskrit that is particular to its strange sandhi rules, where all the syllables are mashed together and you're not quite sure where words begin and ends. In fact, there was a verse where someone was addressing a god - and depending on where you broke it up - you could either be praising the God or being completely blasphemous. It all stood in perspective.
Perspective does seem to be everything, doesn't it?
Sanskrit is all about complex puns. Sanskrit will take a phrase like "That person has baggage" and mean both that they have literal baggage as well as problems from their past that screw with their present.
In fact, the number one itself has, as I've seen, close to 30 words for it. Words like sun and moon, of which there are only one in the world. It can lead to some fascinating metaphors.
For instance, there is a poem we read once that I loved - I have been searching for it but cannot remember its name or find it anywhere anymore, but it's entire meaning was of two. Read literally, it was about a tree's growth, and it's different stages. But the other meaning within was that the words could be taken to mean the different (I believe in Sanskrit there are 7) stages of love. Not just a metaphor, but actual literal meaning. (Eg one line could mean that the tree was becoming red with blooms but also could read that the man was bleeding from the heart).
There's another kind of interesting interpretation one can do with Sanskrit that is particular to its strange sandhi rules, where all the syllables are mashed together and you're not quite sure where words begin and ends. In fact, there was a verse where someone was addressing a god - and depending on where you broke it up - you could either be praising the God or being completely blasphemous. It all stood in perspective.
Perspective does seem to be everything, doesn't it?
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