Events

Ache Lhamo Demonstration: This presentation, facilitated by Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy, aims at introducing the audience to the core elements of the art of singing Tibetan opera. After a short overview of Tibetan opera and its musical features, Tenzin Kalsang, Namgyal Dolma, Tenzin Nyeden, and Pema Tenzin will give a demonstration of the main vocal and melodic features of the opera. They will then invite the audience to practice basic skills of namthar (opera singing) and teach one song of the repertoire usually taught to beginners.

Text & Performance Panel

The Play of the Text: Rhythmic Bodily Movement and the Experience of Religious Meaning

Kimerer LaMothe

Within the study of religion, a tendency to privilege textual forms of religious expression and inward forms of religious experience has resulted in a paucity of conceptual resources for acknowledging the agency of human bodies in the production of religious meaning. In this panel, LaMothe shares her ecokinetic phenomenological approach to the study of religion. This approach understands religious systems and symbols, texts and rituals, as patterns of bodily movement, or “movement potentials,” which educate human senses to ranges of possible meaning and action. An ecokinetic approach offers myriad opportunities for revealing the originary and constitutive role that dancing in particular, and bodily movement in general, play in the world’s religions.

Incomplete Choreographies: Authorizing & Activating the Absent Body in Tibetan Buddhist Dance-Writing

Constantine Lignos

Beginning as early as the 16th century in Europe, the word choreography came to mask a certain anxiety around the two activities it brings together. Dancing (choreo-) is fluid, embodied, and ephemeral, whereas writing (-graphy) is fixed, disembodied, and symbolic.  Without recourse to written documentation, without the ability to "capture" the body on the page, dance, it was feared, would forever be lost.  This anxiety, however, is absent from Tibetan Buddhist dance texts dating back to at least the 13th century.  Rather than attempting to preserve the entirety of a performance, these texts assume that the dance already lives in the body—or “in the bones”—of trained practitioners. Drawing on an archive of some 60 Tibetan Buddhist dance texts, I show how these writers created living texts that reside in the space between the body and the page. They do not record every step but rather authorize ritual lineage and activate embodied knowledge through cosmological framings, cues, and mnemonic prompts.  By taking on performative functions, these texts do not merely document performance, but project ritual action forward, preserving memory even as they shape the future, summoning bodies, gestures, and worlds into being.

Gender, Ritual & Performance Panel

The Sound that is Heard Without Ears: Silence, Muteness and Mantra in the Songs of Khandro Tsulsang

Kati Fitzgerald

Khandro Tsulsang was a female Buddhist master who lived before, during and after the tumultuous period of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. She was ordained as a nun, undertook a program of rigorous study and meditation, took a vow of silence, was imprisoned and targeted for struggle sessions, fled and was lost to her family members, teachers and students. After decades, she was rediscovered as a mute nun living in Lhasa. She composed a number of songs of realization during her periods of retreat, imprisonment and exile. These songs tell us important information about the kinds of meditative practices she was engaging, the female lineages she was upholding, as well as the poetic repertoire she had access to while in retreat. These songs also suggest an experiential knowledge of sound emptiness, which is evidenced through her own decades-long muteness, as well as her use of specific tonal vocabularies. Placing her poetic soundscapes in the broader context of her life and studies, I will consider Khandro Tsulsang’s extreme sensory deprivation in dark retreat, her refusal to speak, and her recitation of mantra and composition of songs of realization as an extension of her understanding of sound emptiness.

It Felt Like My Heart Was Torn Open: Masculinity and the Performance of Affect in the Autobiography of Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé

Joshua Brallier

This paper proceeds from the question: what if we think about autobiographical writing as an act of performing the self? When we read autobiography as performance, in the J. L. Austin sense, we discover a rich trove of information about a subject’s gendered life. In this paper, I offer a translation and close reading of two affectively charged scenes in the autobiography of the famed nineteenth century master Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé as a way of gaining insight into the gendered expression of emotion in the life writings of one of the most famous and enigmatic masters of nineteenth century eastern Tibet. The two scenes that I trace in this paper are the (re)union and (re)parting with Do Khyentsé’s tsawai lama, the first Dodrupchen Trinlé Öser. By tending to Do Khyentsé’s emotional language when remembering his first and last encounters with Dodrupchen in this life, we discover a gendered relationship to emotion that resists the dominant narrative circulating in Anglophone scholarship on men and masculinities, namely, that powerful men must restrain their emotion. In the case of Do Khyentsé, we discover a masculinity that enfolds emotional fluency within structures of power.

Performance & Identity Panel

Gorshay: Dancing Tibetan Identities in Tibet and Among the Diaspora

Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy

Circle dances (gorshay) are staple elements of Tibetan community celebrations. These traditional folk dances are known in all Tibetan communities in one form or another, with a great regional diversity in singing, musical instruments or dance movements. A new form of gorshay, on recorded pop music, emerged in Tibet at the end of the 20th century, became amplified through social media in the 2010s, and has taken by storm exile communities in South Asia and in the West in the early 2020s, to the point of replacing other performance traditions at major community gatherings. It has also been associated in exile with the White Wednesday (lhakar) movement.
While the widespread practice of gorshay among exiles has raised concerns about cultural authenticity, Chinese cultural influence, fragmentation along regional lines and transmission of Tibetan culture to the youth, in Tibet gorshay point more towards overcoming isolation in large urban centers and developing sophisticated social media strategies. On both sides, gorshay is seen as positive for both physical health (daily exercise) and mental health (cultivating joy), and as a way to preserve some form of Tibetan identity in difficult conditions.

Dance Workshop: This workshop, facilitated by Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy, aims at getting the audience on their feet and get an embodied sense of Tibetan movement at the end of this two-day conference. Within the vast and diverse corpus of Tibetan dance traditions, Tenzin Kalsang, Namgyal Dolma, Tenzin Nyeden, and Pema Tenzin will introduce one stylized dance, from the repertoire of Tibetan opera (the slow dance, dal thab) and one popular circle dance from the Stod region (toeshay, gorshay). Get into the groove and stamp the floor!