improvised choreography and performance: Cynthia Ling Lee

running time: 10-14 minutes

A talking dancer negotiates a really long piece of cloth while humorously commenting on the conflicts she experienced as a Taiwanese-American feminist learning classical kathak in Calcutta.  The cloth transforms from a braid of long hair, to the walls of her dance guru’s house, to the holy river Yamuna, to a dupatta tied across her chest, twisting and tripping her as she butts up against the overwhelming love and expectations of her guru and tradition.  Faced with the requirement to perform gender – to walk like Radha – in ways that she cannot quite grasp or agree with, she finds herself torn between competing impulses to act as obedient disciple, earnest anthropologist, and stubborn feminist.

Inspired by Simone Forti’s text-movement improvisation structures.  Traditional kathak material learned from Bandana Sen.