Underneath
the upturned, under-nourished topsoil
of our modern colonized life,
a much older, and more fertile story
is alive,
waiting to be remembered and tended...
Nondual earth-based
cosmo-POLITIC
for the post- anthropocene
For twenty years, Pooja Prema has been cultivating the soil of Ecos & Eros with the rich compost of grief: tending visionary eco-feminism, decolonial somatic ritual practice, experimental live-arts, and village-making at the untamed edges. In recovering layers of displaced spiritual and ancestral memory, her work is a search for an intractable sense of belonging and a slow re-enmeshment in abandoned ecologies. Dancing in the liminal 'In-Between' of ecological embeddedness & estrangement, intergenerational fracture & healing, samsara & nirvana— it is a lyrical offering to broken origins... an imperfectly re-membered cosmology for a world on the edge of extinction.
Born OF
dry Zambian desert, nourished by the rainforest clays of the coastal Western Ghats, and schooled by weeds growing amidst the cracks of suburban American concrete, Pooja is a hybrid being - part human, part bird, part moss: a poly-lingual storyteller, bridger of Beauty and Grief, devotee of Water and Fire, and a catalyst of latent potentialities and radical futures.
Charged with a name that means "to offer", and descended from Dravidian storytellers, orators, farmers and warriors, She is working to re-member the transmission of her ancestors in ways that can gently but clearly illuminate a world dimmed by forgetting.
With English as a second language and a childhood spent estranged from her mother tongue, Malayalam, she crafts a migratory home between these two disparate languages and cultures. Ultimately she speaks, sings, writes, dances as acts of resistance to the Machine, in offering to Life.
"Big universal truths as well as the benevolence of ordinary things converge in her delicate frame and big visions.
Never afraid to go deeper, she is a conduit for powerful messages ​longing to manifest themselves in a​ shared experience that invites us to feel our own human urgency: to be as alive as possible in all states of being."
-L. Geilen
FOUNDATIONS
SOMA: a NONDUAL EMBODIED LIBERATION
POLITIC for watering seeds in the Dark
As the world around us decays and 'falls apart', the old coordinates - those set by the Colonial Mind - no longer work to offer us direction, as they relentlessly attempt to seize our apertures of freedom. But like wild weeds that sprout through the concrete, our true natures live perennially underneath the pavement of our collective amnesia... sustained by invisible nourishment - or Soma. Waiting patiently in the fecund Dark, and possessed of inimitable courage to break through the impossible, they are our ultimate teachers of 'Skillful Means': showing us how to gestate our liberation, and water it with our tears. A real revolution must be able to hold both the precariousness & preciousness of these times, while awakening in us the wisdom to discern between Freedom and Capture— the Whole from the fracture.
PRAKRITI: PROTECTING NATURE /
RETURNING to the REAL
Our entire modern world is predicated on the extraction of Prakriti or Yin
- the Feminine nature of all things. From Water to Soil, to Mineral and Fossil reserves deep in the Earth - to data centers and 'smart' tech, to the bodies & labor of women and melanated peoples of the Global South & Indigenous North, ours is an era of Fire, speed and restlessness—of hyper-Yang or deranged-Purusha. Yet it is Water that will continue to erode human societies and mountains alike - to create new life out of the ruins. By listening to our inner and outer ecologies, we return to the Body of Earth and relational time cycles of Rest & chthonic Re-Membering; and begin to protect the 'Rights' already inherent to Nature.
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in the era of extraction
VACHA: WITTEN, SPOKEN & SUNG WORD
In Sanskrit, Vacha translates to 'that which is spoken/sung, the word, or sacred speech'. Vac is also the Vedic goddess of speech and reminds us that despite the dominance of men and the patriarchal mind in more recent history, the origins of our wisdom traditions have far more ancient, Feminine roots. Breathing life back into this displaced ancestral memory and lost eloquence is the work of any modern day word weaver. She knows that words & sound can either illuminate or distort the world; and that rather than merely pointing to something—they're meant to invoke the very thing itself.
KALA: ART of THE LAND
As a multidisciplinary & performing artist, Pooja is inspired at a core level by the folk ritual theatre traditions of her homeland - Kerala, India - in which all artforms are known as "Naden-Kala": 'Arts of the Land'. Also meaning 'to play', kalas arise from the play of eco-cultural symbiosis. Multiple kalas are woven together to create a whole work of art—at once healing &connective, transcendent & liberatory.
For 10 years, Pooja nurtured The Ritual Theatre - a experimental site-specific theatre/dance company in the northeast US; and in 2013 created the Rites of Passage Project - a multimedia art project reclaiming initiation for modern women.
RITU: CYCLIC RITUAL RE-MEMBERING
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People bereft of community ritual and rites of passage, forget who they are and where they came from. Far from a meaningless set of repetitions, true ritual is alive, liminal and ever-adaptive. Ritual is as ancient and as fugitive a technology as Fire— it too transforms, purifies, and warms at a soul-level. Without it, we look to other bright lights for satiation they can never provide. Its root, 'Ritu', means 'season', as well as rhythm, rhyme, and cycle. Ritual is the means by which all our ancient ancestors gave back to that which gives Life, and cultivated deep intimacy with cycles of death, loss and re-birth.​ Emerging in relationship to seasonal and collective cycles of change, and in kinship with Elementals, Ancestors and beings of Place, to be in ritual is to return from exile —to come home to ourselves, each other and Earth.
Offerings...
RESISTING THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION
A body of work devoted to freeing the personal and collective imagination from the Colonial Mind - through talks, workshops and multi-media artworks of resistance. We unflinchingly examine both subtle & overt ways our intellectual, spiritual and ecological commons are at threat - whether via the modern logics and weapons of Enclosure and Efficiency, Artificial Intelligence, or Hyper-Reality; and nurture the still-fugitive terrain of the Dreamscape as a place where we can learn - both alone and together - how to resist 'the War Against the Imagination', and to reclaim futures beyond Capture.
MORE THAN HUMAN TONGUES
Is an ancestral-ecological memoir & durational ritual-theatre work that seeks to reanimate the tactile languages shared between human and more-than-human kin. It explores the ground - a layer of red earth - as a page: a place where words, letters, symbols and footsteps are all inscribed. In Malayalam the words for earth/soil (manu), human (manshyan), mind (manas), and chanting (mantra) all arise from the root word—manu / soil. In recognizing that all things - including human beings and thought - come from the soil, this work is an explicit conversation with this shared ground & those closest to it.
'KUDUMBA': RITUALS OF RADICAL
RE-MEMBERING / nondual
anti-racist ancestral healing
Racism, colonialism & patriarchy - and the culture of disconnection that underlie them, are persistent forces at work to suppress our true natures - their effects cumulative over generations. This multi-layered hierarchy unfolds onto every level our Kudumba - our shared Human Family—shaping our personal and collective stories, grief & suffering. Whether we play out our roles as oppressed, or oppressor (or both), we each have the responsibility of healing and transforming our ancestral legacies. Rooted in a non-dual framework and through guided somatic ritual, this workshop allows us come into a radical empathy, compassion and connection with our selves and others wherever we exist on the spectrum.
SEARCHING FOR THE INDIGENOUS ROOTS OF YOGA
In this talk, Pooja sources the roots of yoga back to ancient fem-centered tantric & indigenous wisdom traditions throughout the Indian Subcontinent. Here, meditative and ritual sadhanas were cultivated in wild and unorthodox places that are a far cry from the sleek yoga studios where yoga asana is currently housed. Most often sky-clad or wearing a regional version of sari or dhoti, there were no Lululemon pants, no mats, no props. There was no instruction booklet, no certifications, no teacher trainings, and no ™ 'trademarks'. Instead of worshipping the finite body, these were radical practices devoted to deconstructing the separate self through deep communion with Nature/ Prakriti and Her cycles of death, decay and rebirth.
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HOLY EROTIC: LIBERATING SELF - LIBERATING WORLD
Stri is 'woman', and Sri is 'Holy One'. A wombman, as she discovers the elements living within her, becomes a vessel for Holy Remembering. Both human and beyond-human, she becomes a channel for primordial potencies; watery rivers of ancestral gnosis; an estuary for life, death and the In-between. Such a being is unwilling to either capture or be captured; devoted to vast compassion and fierce, impeccable honesty. Friendly with the Dark and its accompanying rites of loss, dissolution and surrender, she learns that the Receptive holds the greatest powers of erotic vitality and regeneration. That by allowing Her to move through as She choses, she experiences the ecstatic and ordinary simplicity of embodied being, allowing this healing force to move through her into the world.
HOLY GROUND
Currently on the ancestral lands of the Mahican Nation,
on the soft weathering Taghonik mountains -
now NE Turtle Island (USA) /
by way of the southern coast of the Western Ghats -
born of volcanic rupture, Keralam India.