Mea Culpa (2007-2019)
Inspired by a vintage photograph of American dance pioneer Ted Shawn’s 1926 work, “The Cosmic Dance of Siva”, Mea Culpa is a solo ‘twisted comment’ on re-appropriating the misappropriated.
Ted Shawn’s fascination with India and its dance traditions is clearly seen in the elaborate, painstaking way he has imagined and staged “The Cosmic Dance of Shiva.” Set amidst visuals drawing from medieval Indian bronze sculpture – such as the massive “ring of flames” (replete with a lotus-pedestal) and the incense filled environment – this piece is an early twentieth century Western representation of the “Hindu dancing god” Shiva’s dance of cyclical cosmic creation and dissolution. In the first years of the twentieth century, this iconic image of the dancing Shiva becomes a crucial visual representation of Indian civilization at large, driven in part by the textual work of art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who in 1912 published an essay called “The Dance of Siva” which in part seems to have inspired Ted Shawn’s dance more than a decade later. This emphasis in text and Western modern dance on the figure of the dancing Shiva also deeply impacted the nationalist reinvention of “classical” Indian dance traditions in India itself, particularly with reference to the urban, middle-class reconstitution of the dance called Bharatanatyam today. Ted Shawn’s choreographic language, which really has little to do with Indian dance, is an early example of what we might want to consider Asian-inspired modern dance, albeit couched in the interpretive space of Western Orientalism, and the political spaces of colonialism and imperialism. The Orientalist movement vocabulary and Asian-inspired piano score speak to Shawn’s visualization of modern mythic pasts based on highly mediated Indian textual and ethnographic artifacts.
For this 2019 version of Mea Culpa, Hari Krishnan had set the work in the context of an Indian wedding where the nervous (closeted) groom at his heteronormative wedding in Chennai city (India) is unsure about going ahead with the ceremony. He goes through a surreal journey during the course of the dance, discovering who he really his, thanks to the ghosts of Ted Shawn and the God Shiva!
Dates:
April 26-27, 2019, CFA Theater, Wesleyan University, Connecticut
May 11 and 12, 2019 in New York City as part of La MaMa Moves! Festival.
Choreography: Hari Krishnan
Dancer: Spenser Stroud
Music: Rossini & Gowri Shankar (with due apologies to both!)
Lighting Design: Jack Carr
Costume Design: Rex (Rajavairan Rajendran)
Premiere: Winchester Street Theater, Toronto, May 2007
