DEAR DEAD DOCTOR
Essay-Performance (in-progress)
The many blank pages at the end of a personal diary of my paternal grandfather, A.M. Śivarāman (1902-1976), call out to me to reach out to him for the first time. He was the first doctor of allopathic medicine in his family; an identity which breaks with me, a dancer. But what if this is not the first rupture here? In order to study western medicine, what if the doctor had had to disinherit Indogenous knowledge of the human body-mind? What if his progeny were to re-inherit these knowledges through an artistic-scientific engagement with traditions of yoga and/as dance? What if his great-great-grandchild was conceived as a parthenogenetic-proto-progenic-being? Spanning across a better part of the twentieth century, the life and time of the doctor offer a surface upon which to ask and answer questions that at once unpack personal histories and planetary futures.