From Traditional to contemporary expressions: negotiating identity through the creative process of exploration of body, mind, and emotional memory

Abstract

Panel Discussion Description:

This panel will discuss the process of negotiating identity through the exploration of memories embedded in the traditional stories/poetry, lullabies and body vocabularies during the creative process of WDAAP’s 2019 Choreolab in Cox’s Bazzar including the experience of creation, production and performance of the dance work, Chaand (moon): the reflection of a wish. This panel discussion features three accomplished young performing artists/art practitioners specialized in dance, music, and dance-movement therapy. The Chair of the Panel and the artistic director of the Choreolab Sashar Zarif is a process oriented dance maker and creative facilitator who has developed his own creative approach, Moving Memories, that is based on memory studies in three folds; body memory through dance, emotional memory through music and mind memories through words. The mandate of this choreolab was to foster the development of dance practice through research, education and creation in order to support a group of 19 young dance and music artists from across Asia Pacific in their journey of professional development: The project focused on traditional material in order to explore how contemporary creations can be true to cultural integrity. Utilizing visual examples from creation, production and performance of Chaand – an ethno-contemporary dance performance – this panel highlights the creative possibilities and challenges in a process of negotiating identity through contemporization of traditional-cultural material. This paper also examines how the notions of preservation and modernisation are articulated, by whom and for what purposes, to reveal in what circumstances contemporization could lead to positive transformation and empowerment.

 

Participants:

Srabasti Ghosh

Dancing Words

This paper will focus on the psycho-somatic experience of the creation process of Chaand: The Reflection of a Wish, a dance work devised by Sashar Zarif as part of the fifteen days choreolab in WDAAAP 2019. In this paper I will discuss how the theme and the language of the performance has been generated through a continuous process of negotiation and settlement in an unknown space and amongst nineteen artists. This paper will also highlight the usage of mother tongue, Bangali poetry, lullabies and songs in the making of a universal performative expression that goes beyond language barriers.

Tanushree Chatterjee

From emotional memories to lullabies

In this paper I will discuss how Sashar Zarif’s choreolab presentation Chaand: The reflection of a wish and its creative process focused on authenticity and personalized experiences in order to develop an original musical composition that was made to accompany the dance in the performance. I will discuss how instead of using preexisting tracks or even tunes, we composed the music as we created the dance. In this paper, as a musician and vocalist, I will also discuss the process of contemporarizing traditional lullabies and national songs though a negotiation of our identity, our relationship to the songs.

Durga Madhar

Transformation through dance

This paper is a reflection of my experience as a dance therapist and performer during the fifteen days of WDAAP’s choreolab in Bangladesh. The outcome of this choreolab, Chaand, The Reflection of a Wish by Sashar Zarif, is an organic process of venturing memory and transformation through body, mind and emotion. In this paper I will explores how memory could be used as the key element in the process of dance making. From seashore to rehearsal space, from breeze to shared room in fifteen days, personal memory becomes shared memory that has rejuvenated through the performance. This paper will also focus on the process of releasing emotional memory through body and channeling it into performative mode.