Lessons on Love

 

Siddarth Puri (Art History, UC Los Angeles)

A Bride for a Night, A Widow for Life: Love, Marriage and Ritual Among Aravanis

While much attention has been given to the study of hijras and other sexual minority groups in India in regards to their marginality and employment as sex workers and beggars, there remains a lack of scholarship around the areas of their artistic expression and performance art. This paper explores a crucial yet overlooked hijra ritual that has not yet been fully documented or analyzed in academic writing. Centered on the Kuvvagum festival, an annual celebration held by Aravanis in the state of Tamil Nadu, where thousands of Indian and Southeast Asian hijras come to wed Lord Aravan, this paper considers the political and social meanings of artistic expressions structuring hijra weddings and subsequent widow rituals. These rituals use love as represented in a divine myth to confer humanity and belonging on a socially stigmatized and marginalized population marked only by ‘deviant’ performances of love and desire. It also challenges the ability of the institution of marriage to validate only heterosexual love.

Lord Aravan was sacrificed in the Mahabharata War to ensure a Pandava victory yet refused to be sacrificed as a bachelor; because no woman would marry a man destined to be killed, Lord Krishna assumed the form of Mohini and married Aravan the night before his sacrifice. The hijras replicate this ancient myth by performing the marriage ceremony to Lord Aravan at night and then the widowing ceremonies the following morning. This ritualized enactment of love with the divine links the group historically, socially and religiously to a Tamil and Hindu past, emphasizing the continuity between their community and mainstream Tamil Hindu society. Furthermore, hijras consider this celestial marriage to be a divine stamp of approval of their presence in Tamil Nadu and, more broadly, in India. While hijra communities have popularly been relegated to society’s margins, this festival represents an opportunity to underscore this very continuity and shared humanity with mainstream society.

 

 

Sara Wookey (World Arts and Culture, UC Los Angeles)

Love’s Geography: Revisited

Dearest,
If I told you I love this city, love the way it opens its dirty limbs to me, love the way it absorbs me without noticing me, love the way it gives rhythm to my walk, gives nuance to my skin, gives purpose to my plots, would you be jealous?

These are the opening lines of “Love’s Geography” by critical theorist and writer, Peggy Phelan. This four-page text is written as a love letter exposing, among many things, one’s relationship to two divergent cities (the city of the one writing the letter and the city of the long distant lover) and the tensions that exist in traveling between them. It is a text that addresses love across distance and is the script for my solo performance work, “Love’s Geography: Revisited”.

This performance is based on my personal reading and translation of Phelan’s text and has been touring Europe and North America since 2003. For this symposium, I will present the opening excerpt of this work.

Formally, this work juxtaposes sound, writing, projection and dance. Through a montage of materials it aims to locate a particular definition of love, one that focuses on an attachment to place.

The performance begins as a lecture where certain sections of the love letter are written out on an overhead projector, inviting the viewer to closely monitor the intimacies of a love letter by making visible the minute gestures of the hand that writes. At the same time, it asks the viewer to be a distant observer, a voyeur, in order to “learn” from this lesson on love.

By the end of the performance, after many acts of erasing, re-writing and repetitive movement--of turning and returning--all thoughts and ideas become an impossible conclusion; thus rendering this performance on love a contradiction. For, in this performance, there is fascination for being in-between: of desiring to be somewhere, with someone; at the same time, drawn to being nowhere, to being alone.

Concept and Performance: Sara Wookey
Text: Peggy Phelan
Dramaturgy: Guy Cools
Music: Seamus Cater
Music Performance: Roddy Schrock
Video: Roberta Shaw
Costume and Set: Sara Wookey
Production: Wookey Works
Funding: Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunsten/Amsterdam Funds for the Arts
With additional support from the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York
and a Hothouse Residency at The Department of World Arts and Cultures, UCLA.