Initiate, Transform, Sustain, Reach Out

Post Natyam Collective Members Reflect on Long-Distance Collaboration

IV. Reach Out: Building Community

Cynthia: What is in store for our long-distance process in the future? We would love to more fully leverage the possibilities of internet tools and new media to create grassroots artistic community by expanding our creative process beyond the collective.

Our new dream project is Blogging Choreography, a unique, collaborative new-media project that will invite guest artists, peer choreographers, and audiences into an interactive, networked exchange surrounding contemporary South Asian dance. Using dance, video, blogging, and creative mentorship, the project will strive to democratize artistic practice by rendering choreography into a community-based participatory practice.

Sandra: We are hoping to start the Blogging Choreography project in 2013. Every two months, we will invite a different contemporary South Asian artist or committed connoisseur to give a creative assignment that reveals her or his creative methodology and philosophy. Post Natyam members and peers outside the collective will have several weeks to complete the assignment and upload it onto the blog. The guest artist and larger community will then participate in a supportive feedback process to influence a revised draft and possible mixing or layering of different people’s creative responses.

Cynthia: We hope that this project may be a small step towards creating a global network of contemporary South Asian dance artists engaged in wildly creative, deeply respectful, and lovingly critical exchange.

Cynthia Ling Lee, Sandra Chatterjee ( 2012): Initiate, Transform, Sustain, Reach Out. Post Natyam Collective Members Reflect on Long-Distance Collaboration. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 01 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/initiate-transform-sustain-reach-out-post-natyam-collective-members-reflect-on-long-distance-collaboration/