• English

1This essay will be treated differently from the presentation we gave at the SARI 16 conference. In Paris, before an academic audience, everything we said centred on the screening of a video piece that mixed together our two fields of interest: the sculptural experiments shaping contemporary art (Dorsett) and the long-established traditions of Indian dance now informing multicultural performance work (Nair). Every presentation we give together reflects a « practice-based » approach to the possibility of dialogue between current visual art practices in the UK and Kathakali theatre as it is still performed in southern India. Recently we have been working on a particularly beautiful song by the Bengali poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore entitled Hriday aamaar prakash holo. Our attempts at advancing knowledge in relation to this wonderful piece, apparently as resonant in Britain today as it was in India throughout the 20^th century, are always embodied within new creative works of our own. To then write up and publish these outcomes as we do now involves a further step, a « practice-led » development that untangles our thinking from our practical work and reconfigures the results in a more conventional academic format1. In this way we can openly use theoretical literature to decode and decipher aspects of our projects which otherwise remain latent. Because the tacit dimensions of the video we screened do not figure in a textual debate, the sensation of hearing a slow cross-fade between different versions of the Tagore song requires something like jātaka-style storytelling to explore the feelings involved. As a result, without further explanation, we will launch our essay with our own adaptation of a jātaka tale. This one is known as the Power of Rumour2.

Despite the primeval idyll that humans associate with the kingdom of the animals, any creature that sleeps in the depths of a beautiful forest is likely to dream anxiously about the destruction of their precious environment. And so it came to pass that a hare, having fallen asleep under a huge banyan tree, awoke suddenly when he heard a loud, calamitous, crashing noise. « My dream is true », the terrified creature thought, and taking no time to consider an escape route, he scarpered off at the kind of speed only hares can manage. As he dashed through the forest, every other hare he encountered was given the terrible news and, very soon, thousands were fleeing the forest shouting: « run, run, run – the earth is breaking up, the earth is breaking up, the earth is breaking up, we may all drown. »
On seeing an entire species running scared, other animals became frightened too. The news spread quickly and very soon every creature around the forest knew that the earth was breaking up. It didn’t take long before countless reptiles, birds, and even insects were racing to safety, and as they raced, their fearful cries created chaos around them.
Eventually, on hearing the commotion, a lion wondered what was going on. She positioned herself in the path of the panicking animals and, standing firm, halted the advance of the unruly crowd. When a parrot yelled « Quick, out the way, we must all flee, the earth is breaking up and we may drown », the lion naturally wanted to know who had spread the rumour. « It was the monkeys », the bird replied. But when the lion sought an explanation from these chattering, over-excited animals, they were sure the news came from the tigers, not them. Despite this, the tigers, when quizzed, thought they heard it from the elephants. The elephants, in turn, said that the buffaloes were their source. And so it went on. When the chain of accusations finally led back to the first hare, the lion wanted to know why such a terrifying idea had been allowed to send shock waves through the animal kingdom. « Well, your majesty », said the hare, « I heard the earth cracking apart with my very own ears. » And so the lion walked to the forest where she found a large coconut lying in a pile of rocks. Falling from its tree, it had caused a small, inconsequential landslide.

2In the end there was nothing for the animals to be alarmed about, but it took a sage-like creature to remind them that they should have remained calm. An ancient Buddhist story like this survives, both in its own belief system and in wider reflective social environments, because the underlying ethical message is so resonant within the unfolding narrative. The conclusion is that the hare should not have panicked and the animals were rightly humbled by their gullibility. Consequently, every creature returns to the forest paradise from which they fled in a state of enhanced wisdom and grace. It is not difficult to apply this moral tale to a contemporary context. The appeal is the openness to experiment and adaptation suggested by the narrative. For example, one might add a subsidiary ending. What if the rocks that cascaded one against the other as they spread across the forest floor were not so inconsequential after all? Just imagine that, many years later an artist’s studio is built on some land where the forest once stood. Here a sculptor regularly picks up these stones and, turning them over in his hands, thinks they seem creaturely. His act of imaginative anthropomorphism makes the rocks powerfully present, like strange beings from a forgotten world suddenly appearing in an everyday context. In perceiving the remarkable strangeness of our physical world, a special point is made about the experimental nature of sculpture. The modification of stones found lying around a studio garden, as actually practiced by the British modernist sculptor Henry Moore, creates archetypal beings of a kind that have occurred again and again throughout the history of sculpture-making. Furthermore, the stoniness of the stones used also underscores the brooding resistance of inert matter to interpretation, it prompts existential anxieties. Sculptural experiments happen in the potent interplay between a fictional representation and a material fact, an idea that remains central to the production and reception of contemporary art in every media and mode of display.

3Thus our experimental ending to the Power of Rumour involves a conflict between a primeval fear of the world breaking apart and a modern preference for the creative power of the present. Nothing handed down the generations matters, it is as if our Henry Moore character had never truly seen a stone before. Even though his eidetic encounter involves a powerful evocation of the past, something entirely familiar becomes frightful and this carries a degree of moral weight. Thus, the strained relationship between the original jātaka and our improvised version reveals a defiance of history embedded into the fabric of a story. This inbuilt tension brings us to the two versions of Tagore’s Hriday aamaar prakash holo in our video. They were recorded over half a century apart and so contrast old and new along the lines we have established with our Power of Rumour story. Having heard the jazz pianist Zoe Rahman improvising this tune with her brother Idris on Kindred Spirits3, a CD released in 2012, we sought out a famous 1956 recording by Suchitra Mitra made for domestic markets in the Indian sub-continent during the first decade of independence from British rule4. Rahman, of course, is part of a contemporary diaspora based in the UK who are a generation into producing music for multi-cultural audiences in the post-imperial West. The journey from the former historical point to the latter follows the familiar dynamics of globalism that shape our modern world and, in our particular case, locates a British artist in the same record-buying public as a Kathakali dancer. To play the Mitra-Rahman recordings one after the other is to experience a darkening of the earlier rendition as we move on to the later improvisation. The transition is an aural version of the gradual accommodation of the eyes to a truly dark environment. As Mitra reaches the end of the first verse, Idris Rahman’s clarinet works its way across the same modal shape, drowning the sparkling power of Tagore’s lyrics in dark obscurity. The alterity of this state often serves as the goal of experimental practices in contemporary art forms.

4Similarly, the juxtaposition of story and stone in our extended jātaka should be thought of as a curious compound that demands theoretical consideration. It is as if the hyphen we now use to construct the portmanteau name Mitra-Rahman concentrates the mind on the special kind of conjunction our research generates. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who provides the body of thought most utilised throughout this essay, has very relevant things to say about hyphenated terms. In a chapter that proposes a « philosophy of punctuation », we learn that a hyphen « unites only to the degree that it distinguishes and distinguishes only to the degree that it unites »5. This formula (derived from Gilles Deleuze) is entirely relevant to our essay. The maintenance of separation within unity is stock in trade for our practice-based activities, but to raise it here as a theoretical issue places all the conjunctions that shape our research partnership at the centre of our practice-led interests. In particular, the hyphenated name Mitra-Rahman, initially just a handy shorthand invented whilst making the video, now becomes a prototype concept for the dialectical nature of all our teamwork.

5At this point, a useful example of a dialectical theory at work that advanced our thinking was the « conjunction » that occurs in the subtitle of another Agamben book: The Open: Man and Animal6. The assumed coexistence of the natural and the social world is put in doubt by a seemingly simple « and ». Animality and humanity are held apart within a politically charged debate that closes with a meditation on two contrasting paintings by Titian: The Three Ages of Man and Nymph and Shepherd7. Alongside the Mitra-Rahman soundtrack, these two pictures formed a hyphenated cross-fade in the video screened at the conference. Like the recordings, these artworks were created five decades apart at the different ends of Titian’s life. His earlier painting buzzes youthfully with iconographic narrative and a surfeit of coded meaning, whereas the later work, perhaps the aging artist’s farewell to art, has levels of darkness and disenchantment that lie beyond narration and explanation. To talk meaningfully about these pictures, Agamben seems to say, a philosopher does not need to follow the conventions of art history – illustrations are not required. Reading about Titian can be sensual in its own right. The sonorous body in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening is one model for how this type of sensuality might work8. The kind of resonant « sensing » we need to have in mind is simultaneously emitted and received, it is both « an example and a differencing » which is experienced in the body as it leaves and returns (bounces back)9. Even a « sense of meaning » can be described in this way, as a kind of vibration that echoes back and forth between interlocutors. Thus sensuality becomes the shape of intellectual activity. Philosophers surely make « gestures » and take « positions » in relation to each other just as dancers do, and the resonant juxtaposition of one thought against another seems very like physically placing one painting alongside another. Certainly Agamben’s writing about Titian operates in this way. Had illustrations been used, the reader would have seen an azure expanse of sky in the Three Ages and the darkness closing-in around the Nymph and Shepherd. Instead, sensually written words provoke comparable feelings. The later picture, claims the philosopher, « recants » the earlier one10. This is such a synaesthetic term – the Latin root of recant is « re-sing ». Surely Agamben wants us to somehow hear both the darkness deny the light and the couple renounce their idyll. It is these tangibly dialectics of disillusionment that guide the philosopher’s words as he describes an extraordinary post-lapsarian condition. It is worth quoting him at length:

The two figures are represented in the foreground, immersed in a dark country landscape; the shepherd, seated facing us, holds a flute in his hands as if he had just taken it from his lips. The nymph, nude and represented from the back, lies stretched next to him on a leopard’s skin, a traditional symbol for wantonness and libido, showing her full and luminous hips. With a studied gesture she turns her pensive face towards the viewers, and with her left hand lightly touches her other arm in a sort of caress11.

6Within the eroticism of this passage the function of the flute turns out to be highly significant. The instrument first appears unused in the hands of the nymph and then, as Agamben says, with the shepherd, who has clearly now made full use of his musical powers. Without a doubt, once played, the flute would have produced sad music of overwhelming intensity. This emotive exchange between the woman and the man is why our video cross-fades the two Titians in sync with the Mitra-Rahman soundtrack. Once Titian’s late technique and Rahman’s improvisation are put together, they seem to share an « exhausted sensuality and subdued melancholy »12.

7In the same way that the Three Ages prefigures the Nymph and Shepherd, Tagore’s lyrics anticipate the « anxious light » that will surround and disconcert the listener as Idris Rahman’s clarinet fills the air. Certainly our video has him fulfilling the prediction made in Mitra’s singing. The narrative that differentiates « earlier » and « later » becomes apparent in the audio and visual cross-fades. The states of being before and after are distinguished only to the degree that they are united. To maintain the tension between unity and separation is stock in trade for our practice-based experiments, but to raise this dialectic as a theoretical issue, gives the many conjunctions that shape our research a paradigmatic role. As Agamben suggests, adding a grammatical « and » does not simply result in the joining of two terms, it also undermines the unity of the joining you wish to achieve – the word has a « simultaneously destructive and creative character »13. Accordingly, when we use a conjunction to combine our terms of reference (British and Indian, sculpture and dance) we not only build emergent properties but also engender interpretive anxiety. It is as if all our attempts at collaboration conceal a terrifying schism. Like the hare, we might well panic and think that the very ground on which we stand is breaking apart.

8Indeed, Agamben’s juxtaposing of the early and late stages of Titian’s career is frighteningly schismatic. It occurs in the context of The Open’s disconcerting exploration of humanness as a fatal disease of creaturely existence. At the « end of history » (a concept derived from Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel) the « anthropological machine » that maintained our speciel domination, starts to « idle » (Agamben’s language almost creates a homonym with a lost pastoral « idyll »)14. Once the otherness of animals has gone, humanity either returns to paradise or suffers, following Hegel’s logic, a nightmarish relocation of dialectical negation. The oppositional forces that coalesced for millennia as historical narrative now devolve devastatingly: that is, with nothing left to do. The human talent for dialectic contradiction survives, but a negative idling becomes the texture of existence after all teleological momentum has been lost. Thus, the Nymph and Shepherd suffer the consequences of their idle idyll and their disenchanted postures render the erotic promise of the Three Ages « perfectly inoperative »15. Similarly, the despondent clarinet in Rahman’s version of Hriday aamaar prakash holo empties Mitra’s voice of the portentousness of Tagore’s lyrics:

My soul reveals in endless depth of the sky.
Air fills with the trills of depressed flute.
This anxiousness of light
Reflects my very own emotions,
And renders me dejected on its return16.

9In the song there seems to be a possibility of reflective recovery but with the jazz improvisation we have probably reached a point of no-return. The flute has left the lips and, as a result, Agamben starts using the Latin term otium, meaning to withdraw from an active working life, to describe the « workless » condition of Titian’s symbols17. The shepherd has finished playing the flute and the nymph’s left hand has idly fallen onto her other arm « in a sort of caress » that condenses her erotic disenchantment in a single « studied gesture »18. The character of this movement (simultaneously communicative and indecipherable) represents the despondency she feels at the end of history. This is where the skill and knowledge of a trained Kathakali dancer becomes unexpectedly relevant. The lexicon of hand gestures or mudra at the disposal of an Indian performer provides a powerful focal point to traditional forms of theatre. The stories that can be told with the hands are as present in Kathakali dancing as a choreographed body movement and emotive facial expression. For that reason, the correspondence of mudras to units of verbal communication is of great interest in our theoretical explorations. For example, the lyrics of Hriday aamaar prakash holo can be signed word-by-word, making it possible for anyone competent in semiotics to study the movement of a dancer’s hands as if they functioned semantically.

10However, if Agamben is right, the nymph’s gesture is what a mudra would look like when language is no longer present – there is no story left to tell. Without words, a dancer’s mudras become emphatically sensual and, because semantic analysis will not do the job, we need a theoretical position that gives priority to wordless sensuality. The work of Michel Serres comes to the rescue here. He challenges the assumption that the separate actions of hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting the environment around us actually represent our true sensual encounters with the world19. Instead, Serres proposes a « philosophy of mingled bodies » that, for a mudra-making dancer, attaches an appropriate depth of meaning to the body’s motor systems at work within each hand gesture. Each movement is grounded in what Indian dancers have learnt what to do with their hands. As a result, mudras can be shaped, not by unreflectively using a dictionary of meanings, but by self-perceiving reactions to what specific gestures should feel like. There will be, it follows, mingled somato-sensory aspects to practiced gestures that, after years of training, confirm the right feeling of specific mudra-like movements. It is possible, we would claim, to think of a dancer’s body as a kind of sensory lexicon, a repository of tried and tested actions that can only be articulated through practice-led writing.

11Thus, it seems reasonable to say that the hand gesture of Agamben’s version of Titian’s nymph, caught at the end of history with no more stories to tell, involves a tacit rightness that a Kathakali dancer would recognise. To entertain such an idea is to respect the wordless experience of bodily actions on the part of both the actor and the audience. Here meaningfulness and significance can accumulate around habit and reflex. What looks like language can rely almost entirely on adaptive habitual practices. Perhaps this is like Karl von Frisch’s famous research into dancing bees, where the direction and timing of an abdomen-waggling walk conveys information to other bees about the distance and location of pollen and nectar20. Is it helpful to call this behaviour linguistic? We think not. From our point of view the semiotics of mudra are not automatically the semiotics of language. For example, the hand gesture known as dola hasta is used by Indian dancers as a waiting position before a sequence of mudras begins. It carries no meaning in itself even though, for the performer, it embodies and signals a significant degree of readiness. The nymph’s conjunction of hand and arm culminating in « a sort of caress » may be, following Agamben’s interpretation, the mirror equivallent of a pre-mudra position in which the dancer’s audience waits for semiotic fulfilment. Titian gives his viewers not an anticipatory beginning but an inoperative end-point. The hand may not be signaling but it still manages to wave at us with the most charged level of significance conceivable – it is, after all, the end of human history.

12And so is the end-point of our essay a non-signifying gesture like this? Perhaps it has to be. The sensual beauty of Hriday aamaar prakash holo that prompted our research can certainly be communicated – it does not seem to matter whether the song is heard as a dislocated piece of jazz music or as a valued addition to the large body of songs written by Tagore. But for this sense of beauty to be shared we have to recognise a non-signifying significance within the conjunction of our different backgrounds: that is, a sculptor whose skills reflect the open-ended, experimental approach of UK art schools and a Kathakali dancer immersed in guru-based Indian teaching practices. As a consequence of that contested « and », this piece of writing has sought to understand how a complex interplay of connections can disconnect and yet still generate aesthetic cohesiveness. At the conjunction of our experimental and traditional practices we find a kind of unity that draws attention to the power of difference. These differences excite and motivate the integrating dynamic of our collaboration. Following Agamben, we have defined and theorised this essentially practice-based experience as a practice-led dialectic. At the very least, our essay demonstrates, as a kind of instructive reminder, how the latter concept might be approached by artists who want to add un-illustrated theoretical writing to their exhibition-making and performance practices. As Agamben explains on the last page of The Open, we must not seek more effective or authentic articulations, but rather risk ourselves in the emptiness that separates man and animal21. In relation to Agamben’s ambitions, we hope this essay offers truly mingled conjunctions of a jātaka narrative, a Tagore song, two Titian paintings and a Kathakali mudra – paraphrasing the title of a famous poem by Stevie Smith, itself a wonderfully bleak engagement with non-verbal communication, the notion of both waving and drowning comes to mind22.