Indent: The Body & The Performative

Last-ing

An edition accrues over time. The etymological underpinnings of the term ‘edition’ gesture at acts of ‘giving’, ‘producing’, or ‘bringing forth’, doing so ‘out of’ or ‘from within’ bodies and repositories of people, ideas and images. Last-ing has been several years in the making, starting from murmurs in 2020, to a proposal in 2021, and finally, an edition with 12 works spanning writing, video, and photographs in 2022. What it has meant to us has changed constantly; imagined in a shaky post-pandemic moment, it now manifests as the intention to endure, to remain, to leave traces. To last, leakily.

Indent originated as a project of Gati Dance Forum, a dance organization in New Delhi. It was set up with the intention of exploring the relationship between the body and performance, with its mapping of this performative body expanding across space, time, and disciplinary boundaries with each edition. In 2022, Indent is imagined with collaborators working across time zones. Besides furthering an engagement with a performative and embodied imagination, it has also allowed us to consider what it means to edit and publish a ‘journal’. In making space for various textures of ‘writing’, from the diaristic to the academic to the visual, it can no longer rely on uniformity as harmonizing force, in using the same citation system, or models of ‘blind’ peer review. Journals are messy, leaky affairs, and Last-ing stays true to this confusion.

Moving away from a more conventional system of peer review that we implemented in previous editions, where external reviewers responded to contributors, this year, we set up peer review groups with contributors from the present edition, where they responded to each other’s work. This allowed long conversations to unfold between contributors, who then took some of that feedback into revised drafts of their work.

Instead of being released in a single drop of 10-12 works, this year, Indent releases 2-3 works per week, to allow readers to spend dedicated time with each of the works. This means that there is a shift in how the editors introduce the issue. Instead of doing a single introductory note, we write episodic texts each week.

How does a journal constitute itself? ‘Mapping’ how the 12 works speak to each other has been a large part of this year’s editing process. This included working with illustrator Alia Sinha to visualize a mind-map of the edition. The map takes many forms, appearing as a GIF and a series of still images that are further broken down into detailed segments as we release each work.

 

Last(ing): Week 3

RANJANA DAVE

 

Have you ever listened to the silences between your breaths? Specifically, the gap between an exhalation and preparing to inhale again, before the body starts reorganising itself to make space for a new breath. Those few seconds have a void-like quality to them; full of emptiness, and thus, strangely, of possibility. Nothing is happening, because the body has ended a cycle of breath. Yet, this is a charged silence. Something can happen, and I sense every pore and cell in the body relinquishing its hold on breath, steady in the belief that new breaths will return. When I listen with care, I am awed by how the body does two things at once – basking in the void, and crackling in anticipation of its return to breath. I am moved by its faith: that breath will come. Breath, which will return me to lists of things I must do, the thought of breakfast, taps that need fixing, and lists of things I think I should do. After breath, there is that charged silence again, a sensation of the body being in two states at once, which I later yearn to find (and hold on to) as I see to the fixing of taps. 

Let’s try this together. Breathe in for four counts, breathe out for four, and then listen to the void for four counts. How does your body occupy the void?

In: 1 2 3 4

Out: 1 2 3 4

Listen: 1 2 3 4

How does your body prepare for breath? 

 
 

Week three of Last(ing) opens with a post-human exchange staged by Anish Cherian and Vidur Sethi, where two metamorphosing figures, Zoe and Whippersnapper, engage in a ‘last conversation’. As I write this note, I paste stray lines from their letters to each other into an AI chatbot. Who are the players in this ‘post-human’ conversation? How does the leaky body persist in its incoherence? 

 
 

Snippets of text by Anish Cherian and Vidur Sethi, in conversation with an AI chatbot on https://chat.openai.com/chat

 
 

In another work, puppeteer and arts practitioner Kapil Paharia creates an intimate conversation around his peers’ memories of their last performance, their last engagement with the tools of their practice. They discuss the materiality of this last moment, the objects they brought into spaces and removed from others, and the nostalgia of leaving moments and ideas behind. That moment of invoking the last performance/ rehearsal into being is not unlike the void between breaths: tinged as it is with the need to keep doing in the present, and the imminent loss of not having to do anymore. . 

Listening is an action, Tanima insists, not something that passively happens in the gaps between action. She writes from her position as one voice among an evolving ensemble of performers in Mallika Taneja’s Zanana ka Zamana, performed during the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in New Delhi in 2020. She talks of the countless harmonies and polyphonies that hold us together, voices and people. Singing together requires fresh calibrations of what it means to be ‘in tune’, to hold a note, or to reach up for another in the reassuring company of other voices. Breath makes voice, Tanima reminds us, resonating, with different intensities, in different parts of the body. 

In: 1 2 3 4

Out: 1 2 3 4

Listen: 1 2 3 4

How does your body prepare for breath?

 
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