Welcome to Unstuck in Space, the blog that will document my time in Nepal as a US Student Fulbright Researcher. Through this blog, I hope to give you a glimpse of the fascinating, challenging, complex, and ever-changing place that is Nepal. There are many, many things about Nepal that cannot be reproduced in a blog (the smell of a freshly-slaughtered goat head comes to mind), and so of course I encourage you all to visit me during this trip, or the next (and there will always be a next). In the meantime, I welcome you to join me through the words and pictures that I will share here - I hope that you too can come to learn about and perhaps love this very special place.
Throughout the ten months of my research grant, I will be exploring two traditional Nepali dance-drama forms and their relationship to contemporary urban Nepali theatre. The first part of my work will involve spending a few months this spring staying in villages in the Annapurna region to study ghatu, an ethnic Gurung dance that tells the tragic love story of an ancient king and queen. Later in the fall, I will spend a few months in villages in the Everest region, looking at a Tibetan Buddhist dance called mani rimdu that takes place during an annual festival in a remote, high-altitude monastery. In the interim periods, I will be back in Kathmandu, exploring these traditional forms with contemporary Nepali theatre-makers. I am fascinated by the potential relationships between traditional and contemporary art-forms, and I hope to express this process of exploration and discovery in a final showcase piece.
I will be sharing pictures, stories, and perhaps videos of my experiences along the way. You will be witness to research findings, (mis)adventures in cultural exchange, and many pictures of prayer flags and mountains.
And so begins a long-awaited, much-anticipated, thoroughly-complicated chapter of my life.
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