iLOGY advanced online workshop

Advanced Program for iLOGY: memory, transcendence & futurity mediated through story performance

Date

June 28, July 5, 12, 19, 26 & August 2 from 3.30 pm – 5.30 pm (IST)

One extra day of orientation for those who were not part of the iLOGY basic module.

Entering the Cosmic Tale

The basic workshop challenged our perception of self and the difficulty of accessing personal memories beyond the daily, digital, transactional and epochal. Then of course was the sweet little challenge of performing – of changing the bhavas into rasas. Caught between the rawness of concepts and the lure of poetics, we move, re frame, reflect and find that how in the month or so everything around us has changed at a pace which leaves us totally vulnerable, agitated, hollowed.. maybe. Yet the yearning of the story about us yet untold of the us yet to be born didn’t quite die on the tramlines – like a virus in our head it tickles and irritates and tells us that there is another way.

We can imagine for the moment, suspending our logical conditioning, that the path to the ultimate reality is a story and that this experience of telling and experiencing a story is spiritual drama. It is the in this workshop that we develop the sensory and expressive modes to do so.

We continue with the practice of embodying the story: Action engaging emotions, allowing the teller to penetrate the inner world of the story. Stanislavski says, “It is with our bodies that we transmit to others our inner experience”. The physical expression of an inner experience is termed as anubhava by Bharata in the Natya Shastra.

The performance is a ritual process formulated in terms of aesthetic experience similar to Raganuga Bhakti Sadhana. In Raganuga Bhakti Sadhana, Rupa states that the inner perfected emotions of the characters from the story of Bhagavata were physically expressed as anubhavas and the only door of access to the inner emotions of these characters is through these physical expressions or anubhavas. Hence, Rupa suggests that if the seeker or devotee could “somehow take on or imitate the anubhavas of one of the exemplary character,” one could obtain the emotions of that character and come to inhabit the world in which the character resides. iLOGY advanced workshop attempts to inhabit the truth of the stories that one explores and thus stumble upon the identity of the self.