Two Screendance Films
Sumedha Bhattacharyya
6' mins
Choreography and execution: Sumedha Bhattacharyya
Sound Design: sound.codes
This one take solo screendance film is based on hysterical realism experienced during the pandemic . The dancer uses facial choreography to share the experiences of in-between emotions through the Navarasa or the Nine emotional states in Indian drama treatise: love (shringaara), laughter (haasya), kind-heartedness or compassion (karuna), anger (roudra), courage (veera), fear (bhayaanaka), disgust (bheebhatsya), wonder or surprise (adbhutha) and peace or tranquility (shaantha). How did the camera become an extension of herself? How can the camera subvert the gaze of the viewer? Who sees who? The sound design emerged with custom electronics, modular synth, and the expressive facial choreography.
6'20 sec
Concept, Choreography and Performance: Sumedha Bhattacharyya
Live Editing. Remote Live editing and camera switching: Rana Ghose, Reproduce artists
Sound design and edit, Live Musical Score: Sound.codes
Project Producer: Gia Singh Arora
This screendance film is an excerpt from a 30 mins live experimental performance based on the mythological confrontation of a female dancer allocating the camera as a character of New God. This was born out of my own exploration of surveillance as a Kathak dancer, having a female body dancing the male Gods. I was curious to explore the gaze and subversion of gaze that follows this experiment. The performance happened live including edit and sound on the digital platform with Reproduce Artists and Rana Ghose, geographically in two cities in India during the isolation of the pandemic and lockdown in India. I negotiated the idea of space and spectatorship using the notion of observer and the observed in the Panopticon, and confronted a new reality where the five temperamental Indian male God proxies (Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh, Krishna and Ram). As a choreographer of the piece, I wanted this performance to be controlled by an editor and a sound designer, however at the same time I wanted the viewer to feel intimate, vulnerable and discomforted from the fact of being looked at.
» Sumedha Bhattacharyya is an India-based interdisciplinary dance artist, researcher, educator, dance filmmaker and a primary caregiver, experimenting with camera, tradition and gender. As a Screendance practitioner, her artistic practice brings a fresh viewership of the camera as an artistic process for caring and contemplation; an enabling space for intergenerational bonding; and a narrative tool for dance pedagogy which challenges the existing formal qualities of "seeing" dance. She is a faculty at Jindal School of Liberal arts and Humanities, O.P Jindal University, currently pursuing her PhD in Spatial Arts at Jindal School of Art and Architecture. Her research interests include surveillance, memory, space and spectatorship , architecture and choreography, female gaze , mythology, and technology. She is also the founder of an evolving research-creation lab Duet with Camera.
For more on her work: sumedhabhattacharyya.com and duetwithcamera.com.
