Of Being in Sur

In a documentary noted vocalists from the Gwalior gharana Rajan Sajan Mishra mention of one question their father used to ask them: 

"What is the opposite of sur?" 

Sur, in common parlance - is a note - an established harmonic frequency of sound between which the musician glides to produce delightful experience. 

"A quick answer to this question,"  Mishra brothers elaborate, "is besur meaning, off-note. However, we don't believe that is so. The opposite of sur is silence. Music is the play between sur and silence. If we dont allow silence, we cannot appreciate sur." 

The generosity of such a definition of sur certainly needs discussion. Now, sur is often understood as to be in sur. So the opposite of it could mean to not be in sur. One could approach the understanding of sur from speech too: For example, why is speech not considered music? Why is speaking not singing? In this line of thought, singing or music is that experience of hearing that glides between or through particular frequencies of sound. These frequencies are ascertained as harmonics of a base note in ascending or descending order, clearly distinguishable as different from the previous. We thus have 12 key notes - including harmonics and intermediate sharp/flat notes. A more trained ear would be able to decipher 23 - which demands immense hearing acuity. At a simply level then, to be in sur means to glide from one identified note to another through an aesthetic rule. Any sung or heard note, off the aesthetic register shall be deemed off-note or besur. Speech does not follow musical rules thus, but is not bereft of sur thus. We all speak in some pitch - however, our subsequent words are not uttered in complimenting musical pitches. Speech my have lyricality, but still, it ceases to be called musical, or surail (surila). 

To think of sur held in conjunction with silence rather than be-sur offers a fundamentally insightful way of thinking about music, people and the world at large. For music, it calls to identify each utterance as a musical frequency - in some scale. If not identifiable, it coaxes the listener and the musician to rethink their own knowledge so as to locate the sound in an appropriate scale. In such an understanding, Pt. Rajan-Sajan Mishra not only go past the binaries of sur-besur, but they suggest, in fact that every uttered word in a part of the world, in some sur - that exists in some scale - identified or unidentified. Such a reading speaks of the emancipatory potential of musical knowledge in its abstraction, making it inclusive through the transcendence of spoken language.  

What is there in enjoying (Hindustani Classical) music? Sometimes, I feel it's so simple - dwell on the glides and transitions between the different notes and what they make you feel. You suspend yourself in a pure abstract space - you are free to make your meaning out of it. A free wheeling journey that you can totally indulge in. Sometimes, it answers the internal questions in bypassing jargon of verbalism completely. If you are able to decipher, the tone, texture, quality, ingenuity of moving between the notes  will reveal to you the emotions that speech carries in its intonations, instead of words. And at times, the economy of words that dot the intonational will upen up multiple words between speech and silence. It is perhaps this interplay of sound and silence that defines the world of sur in the musico-philosophical conception of Pt. Rajan-Sajan Mishra.

Freedom Park, Lagos 2023

 

Notes on Play

Before Sunrise / Good Will Hunting

Two films I saw in the recent past:

Before Sunrise

The story of a boy who meets a girl on a train and convinces her to spend a night with her in an altogether new city to both of them. They do a lot of things together, in which their friendship and affection grows for each other, until they want to wonder if they have, what they say, fallen in love. Yet in hesitation, they decide to be pragmatic and not believe that such infatuation can indeed be called so. In an era with no quick contacts and the decision to not exchange each others' addresses, they still decide to see each other one more time - because they must - and fix a date for exactly an year later at the same train station. "I will wait." 

Good Will Hunting

An exceptionally mathematically gifted orphan boy grows up to believe no one else except him can understand himself, and makes an illusory defensive world for himself in the proto-rationalisation of every and any good that could even happen to him. His cynicism is challenged by an compassionate counsellor who helps him acknowledge his vulnerability while setting him on the path to find what could possibly give an experience of fullness - in acceptance and finding love.

Maps and Power

Maps and Power

JNAF

21/06/2024

Maps and their powerlessness. when many maps come together, they create an impermeable matrix where one cancels the other, and eventurally, the available space becomes redundant for any meaningful upgradation and /or occupation. Maps also become a way to соmpete, escape or obstruct an opportunity. Most of the times, maps lie with the powerful, power-holding bodies, and not with the people who оссuру ground, who live the life of map in reality. How do we give charge of the place and its maintenance to the actual inhabitant rather than getting lost in the multiple overlapping and conflicting bodes that wantingly or unwantingly lay claim or parcels of land that seem to have produced or arrived at a different social change?

How does time play a role in producing such incongruencis? (How) is planning (the practice of planning) related, complicit in such misalignments? Are such misalignments themselves ways of asserting producing power. Is such power a way to create political dialogue that feeds political interest? whom does such dialogue benefit? In other words, what is the "economy" of such misalignments, such conflicting maps? How is responsibility deflected through such maps, and how are delays produced- whom do delays like these benefit?

--

Does a forest become a forest in its unfamiliarity? (as compared to a garden) One knows all plants and species one brings to a garden.

A Plastic Parody

Full Essay Published here
https://serendipityarts.org/writing_initiatives/a-plastic-parody

A Plastic Parody

author: Anuj Daga

On a warm July evening in the Oworonshoki suburb of Lagos, residents from the nearby slum neighbourhood gather around a rather worn-out community hall in the corner of a large open ground beside a massive community water tank built during the previous election, that lay dry for the last five years. Two young men walk past the onlookers, urging them to pick up discarded plastic bottles collected from the neighbourhood streets in large polypropylene sacks, for what will emerge into a communal orchestra. The music beaten out through these empty bottles of purchased water along with other locally made instruments marked the opening of the Slumparty 2023 event. Originally started by Obiajulu Ozegbe or ‘Valu’ and his collaborators in 2019 as a way of mobilising the youth in the underprivileged areas of Lagos to alleviate the tension and violence within the community; Slumparty has morphed into an annual event that brings movement artists from across the world in their pursuit of redefining the perception of slums and overlooked sites in Lagos, through performance.

Slumparty became a serious affair soon after its first iteration when a performance of the local youth, who were otherwise turning to crime and divergent social activities due to inadequate access to infrastructure or issues of unemployment, compelled the local authorities to repair the street where they performed. Realising the potency of performance as a transformative tool, several performing artists, musicians, and visual artists gather annually thereafter to address socio-political and environmental issues through the festival, while training the youth in experimenting with contemporary forms of expression. In its edition for 2023, themed “Village of Dreamers”, artists from Tanzania, India, South Africa, New York, Cameroon, Ghana, and various parts of Nigeria were invited for a workshop to channelize latent insecurities into productive desires amongst the youth. This essay shall focus on one such performance conceptualised and executed during the event by the Ennovate Dance House the day after Slumparty’s inauguration.

Amongst the several collaborative and experimental acts lined up to take place on the street-turned-stage on the following day within the Oworo neighbourhood, the one that stood out was ‘Afro Communal Offering’ that addressed various social, political and environmental concerns. In this performance, a beastly creature completely clad in colourful plastic bottles creeps up from around a garbage bin, invading the street-stage with its jubilant dance. Soon taking over the space, the creature exerts a ferocious yet seductive appeal, swinging and jumping to engulf the audience in its being. Alarmed by its unusual advances, a few young men enter the scene, beating the masqueraded beast with wooden sticks. As its plastic skin begins to splinter, the creature slows down, finding its way out of the site/sight. Subsequently, a body covered in white emerges from the same garbage bin, and by demonstrating complex dis-entanglements, the body brings a certain calm to the otherwise volatile site.

Given the cultural context of Africa, the history of Lagos, and its contemporary challenges, ‘Afro Communal Offering’ is a particularly layered performance. In the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, masqueraded performances have long been a symbolic way to communicate a spirit’s message to the community through dance and other forms of expression. In a contemporary interpretation, the masquerade here is a costume constructed by stitching an abundance of empty and leftover plastic bottles into the colourful tentacles of the beastly body - simultaneously attractive and repulsive - much like the ghostly and inevitable presence of plastic in Nigeria’s everyday life today. The dance of the plastic beast on the street speaks to the spectacular presence of undesired waste suffocating the life of its people. Enveloping oneself thus, in plastic waste produced through the inevitable consumption of an everyday essential commodity like water, in itself makes a compelling political statement.

Water woes are historic for Nigeria. One recalls Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti - the principal innovator of Afrobeat - singing Omi o l'ota o in Yoruba, which is loosely translated in Pidgin English as ‘Water No Get Enemy’. Fela is not only calling out the corrupt postcolonial regime’s apathy towards the struggle for water as a resource , but also suggesting how its provision would assure success for anyone who attended to it within the system. Fela’s lament, from 1975, fifteen years after Nigeria’s independence, holds relevance until today. In several of Nigeria’s neighbourhoods, including Oworonshoki, accessing everyday drinking water is still a struggle, as it often has to be purchased from departmental stores or local suppliers for the lack of functional water-supply lines. Water is traded and exchanged in plastic gallons and bottles replacing the need for the traditional earthen calabash in Nigerian households. Valu, the choreographer of the performance elaborates: “Whether we buy or the government supplies, it is general practice now to use plastics to store water, it’s part of the reason why some parts of Lagos are very dirty as plastics have blocked the drainage system.”[1]

The beating up of this masqueraded beast by young men of the community therefore gestures towards the beating out of not only the damaging aspects of plastic from the environment and Nigerian everyday life but also the bane of bottled water. In another view, it is a demand for sustainable supply of potable water that will prevent the dependence on petty plastics. The white spirit emerging out of the garbage bin further references several local practices. The spirit is clouded in white powder which is rather significant for Nigerians. In Yoruba culture, when a person gives birth, the friends and family smear white powder on their face to celebrate and bring the new child into the world. Striking irregular poses, wrapped in a cloud thus, the other-worldly spirit speaks of both water and youth to lay tender ground for a healthy future. The appearance of the white spirit followed by the young men beating the plastic beast with a stick is also reminiscent of the Eyo festival celebrated by the Yoruba people. During this festival, the streets of Lagos are lined with performers clad entirely in white holding a palm stick, to ward off evil spirits and purify the city. In many ways, the act invites the youth to take up some purpose against these environmental evils that seem to be politically rooted.

Performed consciously and consistently on the dust-laden, yet-to-be-finished streets of one of the poorer neighbourhoods, Slumparty has brought significant change in the perception of Oworonshoki that was seen as a dark district in Lagos until 2019, into a place of celebration and political action. It is the condensation of multiple histories and futures through their embodiment in sound, space, materiality that (re)produces the everyday environment and social reality for public imagination. Dancing on the streets makes them safer, mobilising opportunities for the youth to express and assert their presence in the city. As new acts are performed, residents peep out of their rusted tin-roof houses, transforming the site into a theatre of possibilities. Professor of sociology and urbanism Abdoumaliq Simone, in his book For the City Yet to Come articulates: “Urban Africans have long made lives that have worked. There has been an astute capacity to use thickening fields of social relations, however disordered they may be, to make city life viable.”[2] In this vein, ‘Afro Communal Offering’ thus entangles the body and the city, reincarnating traditional tropes of African culture into the proliferating toxicity of plastic that not only becomes the material to produce music and masquerades but also eventually turns into a dark metaphor for the state of transforming ecosystems, unequal access, and asymmetrical modernity in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital.


Inputs by Ennovate Dance House
All images and videos by the author.



[1] Valu, founder of Ennovate Dance House in a conversation with the author.


[2] Simone, AbdouMaliq. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822386247

Sum up note / Shanghai Other Other Conference May 2024

on ethnographic practice

It has been a wonderful two days. And I must put a disclaimer - I dont know what to think about it but I'm probably the only person who is not a PhD person. But still and also I'm an architect, I've not done much ethnographic work, really, but still I mean, I want to say that from what I could learn from all the presentations, that it's a lot about negotiation of meaning. And what I was thinking throughout is: ‘is or isn't meaning provisional? and you know, and does meaning operate temporally in experience? Because how do we understand ethnography which is inscribed in the meaning that is the changing locus of both the subject and the object? Like what I understand today is not what I understand of this object tomorrow, and what this object is today will not be the same object tomorrow? So, you know, if the meaning of an event is continually changing with the evolving lives of the subject and object, then what do we make of a given ethnographic process or product? and this was the thought that, you know, was running in my mind.

And the second is my engagement in this, in, like, my closest association with ethnographic kind of practice, is to kind of coordinate with many kinds of people. In the sense that you know, my or even my context of other other coordinating with many others in curating. Or when i'm kind of bringing many people together to kind of understand what are the vulnerabilities they are experiencing or assuming or foreseeing in getting somewhere, doing something, and as a curator, I'm always kind of trying to help them mediate that - sometimes effectively, sometimes not, sometimes Getting into many fights, and because of lack of, you know, conversation, and I wonder if this can itself be an ethographic reflection. 

[...] and as an architect, I am trained to read spaces. And so I kind of do ethnography of spaces and objects, and I kind of like to think through Appadurai's Social life of Things or Kopytoff’s Cultural Biography of Objects, because we feel that people because we think of people as embodiment of spaces; or embodiment of spatialities and therefore I'm interested, or I also think of it as archaeology of space, or in some sense, reading space to excavate behaviors of people. So in that it is in that sense that I kind of think of ethnography and ethnographic practice. And so, you know, in that sense, i've been thinking that what other qualities than an ethnographer must possess. And what, after all, is the ambition of ethnography, you know, because we all were kind of discussing some time ago that, you know what jobs we'll do, or whether we should do academic practice, or whether or not we should join corporate spaces and stuff like that. But what do we really want to do as ethnographers? And I think in the least it can be, of whatever we want to do, it could be about culling out of concepts of space and living. You know, rather than creating regimes of control because you've seen that colonial ethnography has mostly been about controlling, and I've also been very skeptical about these Area Studies Departments that come in many Western universities, because they have, primarily, it's the historic force behind. Kind of a new colonization. So i'm always skeptical of these Area Department or area department studies, so I don't know how to think about it. But also I mean, therefore, how do we produce frameworks of alternative practice through our new ethnographic context?

So with that, I kind of invite you all to think and linger through these thoughts and bring this Bring this two day intensive workshop to conclusion and invite you for dinner.

Bumbling Conversations / On Loudspeakers

I write this as I feel gently irritated through my quiet and unproductive day, forced to overhear the loudspeakers shouting off crass bhajans on the corner of my street junction. This street junction is always made and remade with sets for political campaigning and speeches, festival celebration, public events, street theatre - all this while it doubles up for the everyday as a katta for old people, a reading station, eatery, bus stop, hawking, and so on. But that for another day. 

Speaking back to the loudspeakers, I had quite an insight towards the insanely loud music that our festival farewells are accompanied with. Yesterday was the immersion day for those who bring Ganpati for five days during the Ganesh Chathurthi festival in Mumbai. This ritualistic procession towards the immersion is often jubiliant while people ironically chant "Ganpati gela gaavaala, chein pade na aamhaala" literally translated as "The Ganpati goes back to his place, making its people restless." To this thought one questions what precisely holds the sentiment as people organize for orchestras that can play the most upbeat songs from films when seemingly they chant of sorrow. A unique mixture of celebration and catharsis, these processions are full of people dancing, drinking in the blindness of disco lights in the no-place of the street. To a large extent, Ganesha and the festival thereof is a proxy. Much like during its inception by Lokmanya Tilak to bypass authoritarian control over public conversation, the bringing of Ganesha and the festival is an opportunity to do many other things: businessmen network in bringing partners home under the pretext of darshan of the deity, political parties campaign through posters put up around respectively funded street corners, local mandals organise youth to collect money and put together a structure, women socialise and organise their own programmes - all in all, the event is the onset for the festive season in India.  

Still drowned into the numerous discordant sounds coming from the diverse directions from the window into my years - which I certainly cannot avoid - all sounds of some form of celebration, I present this short conversation with a stranger that helped me put all of the above in perspective. 

"Its bursting loudspeakers here. Midway time visarjan. Ugh. Can't tolerate!"

"I dont like but I can tolerate."

":)  You can like it too. [just that] Its decibels should not exceed the max human beings can hear"

"Yes. Wonder what people like about it and they pay for it"

"What have these songs got to do with visarjan? All disco."

"It's become a fest / disco / all nighter for those who cannot afford / or are allowed such things.  Such things that are everyday and accessible for many of us bout for some it is luxury or rarity both. Hence I tolerate. But noise pollution yes! That's a downer."

"Ok. That's a very good perspective. You mean to say it's cathartic release for the lower classes?"

"Celebration... also and it is quite an ultimate equaliser for this city. Brings all classes together"

"I am not sure it equalizes class"

"Sab ganpati laate hain...sab visarjan karte hain. A businessman and rikshawala both at Juhu Beach with their families...feeling the same thing"

"Very interesting. Sure. I buy that!"

Spirograph

Pushpakanthan, Bhise at Experimenter