https://leiadevadason.cargo.site made, making, and to-make Tue, 02 Jun 2020 06:49:40 +0000 https://leiadevadason.cargo.site en https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/Homepage Tue, 02 Jun 2020 06:49:40 +0000 made, making, and to-make https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/Homepage L. D https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/Music Tue, 02 Jun 2020 06:49:38 +0000 made, making, and to-make https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/Music my compositions Cartography (2015) Performers: Rui Xinwei (piano), Adam Lim (guitar), Wong Yong En (claves), and Leia Devadason (glockenspiel) is the practice of making maps, that which we all do, we who are desperate to perfect the daily compromise of preserving and relinquishing in the face of change.  Impressions on Valensi (2016) Performers: Elizabeth Goh (piano), Cao Yi Lan (violin), Ronan Lim (violin), Ramu Thiruyanam (vibraphone) a walk through Henry Valensi's landscape: circles and lines, etc. elipse (2016) Performers: Elizabeth Goh (piano), Shermaine Lim (flute), Nadene Law (cello)lightness and weight in ternary form. Occam’s Razor (2017)  Performers: Shiva Ramkumar, Anirvin Narayan, Leia Devadason (voices), and Shermaine Lim (metronome)  is the principle of favouring simplicity, which was suggested to me in relation to my writing at the time I composed this. Here I experimented taking this principle to the limits of semantic meaning by cutting, deconstructing and re-assembling language. The text used is from the poem Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath. & the voice of god... (2018)  Performers: New Music Ensemble Opus Novus, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory  the failure of rituals produces a recognition of their absurdity. Disturb The Bread Now It’s Flat (2019) Performer: myself (harpsichord)These Are The Words We Have Read (2020) Readers: Tricia, Nadia, Ashley, Gerald, Megan, Hanae, Farizi, Shiva, and myself (voices)from a small session known as ‘wordtupat’, wherein a few friends read the words we had written in isolation (March 2020---). our voices were selectively spotlighted by Zoom. Maju-lah (2020) [see video] Performers: Shiva Ramkumar, Wong Yong En, and Leia Devadason; Videographer: Megan Lim En achieve your ideals quickly, oh youth / so that we may have worth in the eyes of the world.  Wordtupat (2021) from the second session known as ‘wordtupat’, wherein a few friends read the words we had written in 2021. our voices were selectively spotlighted by Zoom. tuning in & out (2021) written for SONCITIES x EMPRES’s showcase ‘The Art of Noises’ at Modern Art Oxford. Peace Funeral Home (2023) [see film] film soundtrack written and performed for Megan Lim En’s short film, supported by SCAPE Singapore. https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/Writing Tue, 02 Jun 2020 06:49:39 +0000 made, making, and to-make https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/Writing     Published Writing:     (Other) Creative Non-Fiction:     Poetry:     What does an Indian Dancer and a Flight Stewardess have in Common? [in Pulse Connects, 2024] Disidentifying with Odissi: Toward a Queer Phenomenology of Indian Classical Dance [in Oxford Public Philosophy, 2023] trans-generational full stop [in GASPP (A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose), ed. Ng Yi-Sheng (2020)] Kirwani Pallavi and What it is Trying to Tell Medancing odissi queer/ dancing queer odissi [in What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian, AWARE x Ethos Books, 2021]Subjects of Listening [in Now & Again: Sound, ed. Chen Yi An (2019)] Essays on Singaporean Composer Leong Yoon Pin [commissioned and published by Composers Society of Singapore (CSS)] Perfection is Terrible; It Cannot Have Children what is perfection in music, and why do we bleed for it? The Crisis of Symbol-ic Femininity in the Late Works of Sylvia Plath positing a teleology of style within ‘Ariel’ based on gendered symbols  https://currentsofgold.wordpress.com/ https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/Video-Media Tue, 02 Jun 2020 06:49:39 +0000 made, making, and to-make https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/Video-Media Jani (there is nothing empty) (2024)MASTER (2023) SG500 (2021)  上海滩 ：Shanghai Beach (2021)with Emma Elkington, special thanks to Lim Yuhua and Leonard Goh Maju-lah (2020) with Megan Lim, Shiva Ramkumar, and Wong Yong En Restricted Harpsichord Acces (2020) with Dominic Carrington logun .newst{position:relative;text-align:right;height:420px;width:520px;} #gmap_canvas img{max-width:none!important;background:none!important} Quarantine in Flux (2020) with event-scores by Fluxus artists Anderson, Brecht, Bozzi, Friedman. logun .newst{position:relative;text-align:right;height:420px;width:520px;} #gmap_canvas img{max-width:none!important;background:none!important} logIf We Twin Too Long In The Dream Cinema (2020)  A commission by The Substation; in collaboration with Wong Yong En Mary Had A Little Lamb (Bowl Variations) (2020) https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/Research Tue, 02 Jun 2020 06:49:40 +0000 made, making, and to-make https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/Research Dance Studies: Namami: Performative Translations (2019, presentation) Presented at Telling Stories: Performer(’)s Present symposium at Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (2019) With this project, I centre the empirical in artistic analysis by experimenting an analytical method that began and ended in performance. In doing so, I elaborate upon the generative potential of analysis and question the implicit antagonism between ‘drastic’ and ‘gnostic’ (from Carolyn Abbate) forms of knowledge in artistic epistemology. To this end, I present five analysis-texts I created of a dance item in the Odissi (Indian Classical Dance) tradition, which use different notational languages and prioritise difference aspects of the ‘dance’. Four of these were performed by a dancer who had not seen the source piece. In this presentation, I used the dancer’s ‘re-performances’ to reflect more broadly upon the role of analysis in dance and music, and the forms analysis could potentially take beyond the text. Gendered Beings in Indian Classical Dance (2019, essay) This paper explores the articulation of gender in Odissi, giving special attention to Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra’s performances of ashtapadis from the canonical cycle Gita Govinda, by poet Jayadeva, in Odissi dance repertoire.  Pursuing Theological and Aesthestic Interests in Devotional Indian Dance (2021, essay)  I trace the intersection and “conflicts of ‘interests’” given by rasa aesthetic theory and bhakti philosophy in performing devotional Indian dance. As aesthetic and religious philosophies respectively, both rasa and bhakti act upon Odissi; however, while rasa theory values aesthetic distance, depersonalisation and abstraction, the devotional attitude/practice of bhakti requires a devotee to identify fully with religious figures in order to attain transcendence. I elucidate the problem of conflicting interests from the  perspective of a performer of Odissi, and speculate upon philosophy’s role - as well as its limitations - in resolving it.Toward a Queer Phenomenology of Dancing Odissi (2022, Master’s dissertation) This academic paper, inspired by years of dancing and fragments of personal writing about dance over the years, is an auto-ethnographic queer phenomenology (Sara Ahmed) of the Indian Classical Dance form Odissi. My exploration begins from points of ‘disorientation’ – when I fail to perform in the way that Odissi demands through its agents. How can moments of queer failure offer alternative interpretations of what goes on in Odissi? And how do these interpretations relate to theoretical prescriptions of meaning? In bringing from within my body to the surface of the page felt queer meanings in the social experience of learning Odissi which are foreclosed by mainstream readings informed by compulsory heterosexuality, I attempt to clear space for queer life within Indian Classical Dance (from my own little corner), just as so many queer lives have so lovingly made space for it.   Forming Form in the Brandenburg Concertos (2021, essay and multimedia) Situating itself within music analysis and choreomusicology, this essay analyses Concerto 1 within the production The Six Brandenburg Concertos (2018) by choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. I argue that the element of dance offers an alternative structural argument to pitch-based methods of ritornello form analysis (e.g., Dreyfus’s Vordersatz-Fortspinnung-Epilog model) rooted in ‘under-heard’ aspects of rhythm and energy expenditure. Building upon Joseph Swain’s technique of dimensional rhythmic analysis, I further show how the dance performs the malleability of form, and, by evoking image schemata, provides a pathway to a three- dimensional understanding of musical form in both single-media and multimedia contexts. What does an Indian Dancer and a Flight Stewardess have in Common? This pulse.connects article is a critical look at Air India’s 2024 safety video “Safety Mudras”, adapted from a longer essay on the Indian dancer’s multifaceted role as a labourer and fetishised commodity within the global economy. Using Maxist categories of analysis, I speculate upon the flexibility of labour, bodies, aesthetics, in the construction of the iconic Indian dancer today - and question the agendas she is being recruited for today.  Musicology: The Role of History in Theories of Sonata Form: Negotiating the Gendered Interpretation (2019, dissertation) A. B Marx’s inaugural theory of Sonata Form (1845) spearheaded a mode of interpretation which ascribed gender to musical gestures. Although currently deemed anachronistic by musicological standards, Marx’s approach left a lasting legacy on, conceptions of Sonata Form through the centuries. Premised upon Susan McClary’s claim that scrutinising the gendered dimensions of ‘absolute’ music is relevant to uncovering prevailing values within systems of power, I contrast historical interpretations of Sonata Form with James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s contemporary view (2011), which disavows its gender-ideological connotations - but does so at the risk of erasing the ideological baggage of composers and music theorists alike. The conflict between the analytical agendas of contemporary theory and the cultural-historical agendas of musicology as revealed by the contrasting attitudes to historical baggage compels us to ask: what actually is the function of historical context in the analysis of music? Western Classical Music in Singapore: Between Ideology and Pragmatism (2020, essay) Imported by British colonisers and other European travellers in the 19th Century, Western Classical Music is now a common practice in Singapore. With the formation of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in 1998 and the implementation of compulsory nation-wide music education, the local government has reinforced WCM’s social and ideological significance in the context of nationalism and cultural reproduction. However, as the arts in Singapore occupy the status of “luxury”, in contrast to the more practical “bread-and-butter issues” in political discourse, the pursuit of WCM as a means of social mobility can ironically be fraught with anxiety when it has to compete with notions of economic rationality. Taking the competition between idealism and materialism as my starting point, I examine the tensions between the projected symbolic meanings of Western Classical Music, as construed by state institutions, and the lived reality of its practitioners. Thinking in Music(king) about Music (2020, dissertation) There has been significant overlap between performance and analysis in recent years, but a systematic practice of using the ‘performative epistemology’ (Nicholas Cook) of Performance Studies to investigate canonical knowledge in analysis has not yet been developed. I crafted an experiment in which I treated analytical texts as performative statements which compel realisation to demonstrate how performance can act as a form of bodily criticism for analysis. Pianist Churen Li performed Mozart’s K310 followed by Hans Keller and Heinrich Schenker’s analyses of the piece, and then evaluated the analyses in relation to her physical experience. With this project, I advocate the inclusion of the body into the traditionally cerebreal discipline of analysis in order to produce new terms upon which one can engage with analytical propositions and encourage an attitude of playful exploration in the understanding of music.Is the Body a Machine? Electronic Music as Posthumanist PraxisPosthumanist and cyborg theories assert that the body is the “original prosthesis” which humans learn to manipulate from birth; thus, it is a naturalised machine. I analyse ways in which the multimedia songs “O Superman” (1982) by Laurie Anderson and “FACESHOPPING” (2018) by SOPHIE evaluate the viability of the proposition “The Body is a Machine” in sonic/performative dimensions, and in doing so shape narratives and symbolic tropes (topics) of technology in mainstream culture. Thus, I appraise electronic music-making as a crucial interface between bodies and machines that continuously changes these very concepts.  An Ethics of (Musical) Care for Unprecedented Times (2021, Undergraduate dissertation) While “performativity” is a concept in linguistics and gender studies claiming that performances constitute reality, it has since the COVID-19 pandemic and reginited #BlackLivesMatter movement become a pejorative term, being used by social media users to designate empty gestures that fail to effect ethics. Thus far, the nature of musical performativity - which acts music is capable of performing and how - has not been a focus of musical ethics; I suggest that this has hindered understandings of music’s ethical value and effects. I conceptualise a way of analysing the ethical significance of three instances of “musicking” (Small): Clap for our Carers (UK), Sing Together Singapore (SG), and Concierto para el Bioceno (SP), predicated on their common intention to give care and the affordances of musical performativity. Situating these within Care Ethics, I outline how musical performances form performances of care and then evaluate them according to criteria adapted from Stephanie Collins. Finally, I propose care as an artistic value with concrete ramifications for musical praxis. Essays on Leong Yoon Pin’s Choral Works (2021-2, paid work) (here) In 2021, I was hired by Pow Jun Kai and the Composers Society of Singapore (CSS) to write a series of essays on the Singaporean composer Leong Yoon Pin as part of the project “Composing Monumentality”. I analysed Leong’s choral works “Street Calls” and “Love Quatrains” in the context of Leong’s life and oeuvre, with a focus on themes of soundscape, aesthetics of appraisal and ethnolinguistic politics.  Remixing Nationalism: Internet Music and State-Society Relations in Singapore (2022, Master’s Dissertation) Since the 1990s, appropriating and re-signifying nationalist state artifacts through music has been a form of self-expression for Singaporeans; thus, they validate the cultural relevance of the Singapore government and state in society while appropriating their works as raw material for vernacular discourse. Using two music videos derived from the national broadcast by Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsieng Loong on 12 March 2020, I explicate the social, political and aesthetic dynamics of remixing nationalism and its relationships to state-sanctioned nationalism in specific cases. I then analyse “institutional remixes” by state actors on TikTok which incorporate aesthetics, trends and input from Singaporean netizens in a bid to “build trust” with younger Singaporeans (Lawrence Wong, 2020). Bringing the two together, I show that vernacular remixing is influencing the form and aesthetics of political communication in Singapore and engendering a collaborative yet fundamentally asymmetrical relationship between citizens and the state online. Other Projects/ Activism: Grassroot Level Party: General Elections in Singapore (2020, website) https://grassrootslvlparty.wixsite.com/generalelections : a website made with my friend Megan Lim En, consolidating information on electoral politics and an overview of the election process in Singapore.Saving Spaces (2021, website and position paper) http://savingspacessg.cargo.site/ : A collaborative response to the closure/impending closure or loss of space faced by four independent art spaces in Singapore. This is a multi-dimensional project consisting of a website and position paper (to come).  https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/About Tue, 02 Jun 2020 06:49:40 +0000 made, making, and to-make https://leiadevadason.cargo.site/About Hello! My name is Leia.  I am a writer, composer, and Odissi dance-learner from Singapore. Now a PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, my research forms a web between classicised Indian dance, theories of queerness and sexuality, and aesthetics under capitalism; in my artistic practice, I explore the ways life and its labours impress upon bodies. My writing has been published by Ethos Books and Oxford Public Philosophy, and I was recently awarded the Voices of Bhakti fellowship and Unrehearsed Artist Residency, both of which have allowed me the time, space, and energy to continue the artist-scholar dance!  If you care to, you will find threads of what has occupied me in the last 10 or so years on this website. I have been writing creatively for most of my life. Since going to University, the project of integrating my poetic and academic registers of writing have been my main vocation. If my writing interests you, I would  be happy to research and write with or for you. I am also a composer and a musician. I have composed concert music, as well as music for/with dance, film, theatre, and visual art, in collaborations which tend to be even more exciting than working in solitude. I have also been commissioned to create interdiscplinary work, and am increasingly branching out into video media. Finally, I try to be a jack-of-some-trades musician, having played piano, harpsichord (Articulations with King’s College Music Society, 2019), percussion (The Prismatic Harpsichord with SOTA, 2019), and sung (The Experimental Man by Chowk Productions, 2019) in concerts and artistic projects. Please enjoy the pieces on this site, and don’t hesitate to contact me at rachelleiadevadason@gmail.com if you’d like to use anything, collaborate with me or hire me.