Concept: Rajele Jain
Dancer: Kalpana Raghuraman
Analogium: Gerd Peun
Video: Rajele Jain

First performance: 2nd / 3rd of October, 2004
Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon/Portugal,
invited by the European festival "Temps d'Images" - Portugal
24th September 2004, Sta. Maria da Feira, Portugal

--> watch videos in youtube

The project consists of three main parts which are here called player 1 - 3:


Player 1 - the video

Film making is about human feelings, emotions, dreams, actings, society. In order to communicate these in film various dramaturgical methods were developed which leads to most efficiency in transferring the ideas of the filmmaker to the spectators. The created images are not universal but are very much related to their cultural background. The video will show a story consisting of images showing human feelings and expressions which are related to the Western cultural codes.

According to the Indian "rasas", which were analyzed in the old vedic literature from India, there are 9 different main states of human mind. There is no actual counterpart to Rasa in the English language. Rasa means that which is being tasted or enjoyed, it means the full flavour of aesthetic experience.The nearest in meaning, in this context, is human feelings, or emotions. There are nine rasas:

Shringara Rasa - erotic
Hasya - humorous
Karuna - pathetic
Raudra - terrible
Vira - heroic
Bhayanaka - fearful
Bibhatsa - odious
Adbhuta - wondrous
Shanta - peaceful

The dancer will translate the story shown in the video into the language of bharata natyam.

Bharata Natyam is a classical dance from India. It consists mainly of two alternating elements - pure dance and storytelling dance. Both contain certain codes, that means prescribed movements which can be read like a language. The vedic literature has analyzed all human states of mind, related them to specific movements of the body or parts of the body and therefore established a way of communication as a combination of movements and rhythm.

This dance seems to be a real example of an "analogue sampler" because there are no algorithms found but an incredible number of different states.. It is a readable language into which the images of the video are going to be translated.

Analogue sound synthezisers, developed since the 60ths, can be used as musical instruments. But, in distinction to violins or pianos for example, they don't have one specific sound but allow the composer to create any possible sound, hearable or unhearable for human ear. The "reason" of sound is, roughly said, oscillation of material which causes movement of air, the creation of waves in a carrier like air, leaving "prints" at the perception elements like the human ear. Analogue sound synthezisers create this process by the use of electro-mechanical ways - so they are the first "virtual realities" which are worth to be named like this.

Because of this, analogue sound synthezisers are often used by film music composers. Beside that their characteristics are similar to live dance performance or concerts with other analogue musical instrument players:
- no event can be exactly reproduced, so it is always unique
- there are patterns of the machine like you have patterns in choreography
- there are dependencies and interactivities between the instrument and the player.

For this project the analogium (which is an unique model of an analogue sound syntheziser) contains also a space control interface by which the machine can be controlled through movements which means at the same time: the sound is a "print" of the movements, an analogue transformation of the dance.