Friday, August 10, 2012, 8:30 pm
Highways Performance Space at the 18th Street Arts Center
Post Natyam Collective members Cynthia Ling Lee and Shyamala Moorty present an evening of interdisciplinary performance that queers Indian dance, where gender-bending super-heroines, deconstructed mudras, and lesbian fantasies of courtesan-ancestors descend upon Highways unsuspecting audience. Using queer tactics of parodying and personalizing received legacies of gendered performance, this compelling m...
Friday, August 10, 2012, 8:30 pm
Highways Performance Space at the 18th Street Arts Center
Post Natyam Collective members Cynthia Ling Lee and Shyamala Moorty present an evening of interdisciplinary performance that queers Indian dance, where gender-bending super-heroines, deconstructed mudras, and lesbian fantasies of courtesan-ancestors descend upon Highways unsuspecting audience. Using queer tactics of parodying and personalizing received legacies of gendered performance, this compelling mixture of contemporary Indian dance, multimedia, and theater features special invited guests and audience interaction.
Subversive Gestures features the world premieres of several works, including "29 Subversive Gestures," a serio-comic tribute to Joe Goode's iconic 29 Effeminate Gestures (1987), which re-contextualizes the original piece's investigations of the queer, gendered, dancing body for Indian classical dance; and "Super Ruwaxi: Origins," a live comic-book story in which Ruwaxi, the dutiful daughter of Chinese immigrants, discovers her true super-identity as the Hairy Arm-Pitted Feminist, armed with magical body odor that can change the course of patriarchal oppression.
The Post Natyam Collective is a transnational, web-based coalition of women artists who creatively and critically engage South Asian dance. Unique to their networked nature, they use collaborative processes online to produce innovative dance and media work that rigorously tackles South Asian traditions and theory. In addition to dance, they work with multimedia, theater, art installations, creative writing, music, and scholarship. Drawing on these diverse tools, they create feminist, postcolonial, border-crossing artistic works shared with audiences on the web, in theaters, universities, and with communities. The Post Natyam Collective consists of Sandra Chatterjee (Munich/Salzburg/India), Cynthia Ling Lee (Los Angeles), Shyamala Moorty (Los Angeles), and Anjali Tata (Kansas City), with Sangita Shresthova (Los Angeles) as an affiliated media choreographer.
1651 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA 90404
Tickets: www.highwaysperformance.org, 310-315-1459
Info: www.postnatyam.net, www.postnatyam.blogspot.com.