PART HUMAN, PART ANIMAL/BIRD, PART MOSS....
Pooja is a hybrid being. With English as her second language and a childhood spent estranged from her mother tongue, Malayalam, she crafts a migratory home between these two disparate languages and cultures. Guided by subterranean visions, nondual transmissions, and liberatory politics, she is a gestator and mother of strange & impossible ideas and living spaces of belonging. As a facilitator, writer, speaker and ritual artist, she has been in a multi-decade courtship with the Liminal, the Unseen and the Perfect imperfect. Her work - through each incarnation it takes - is to tell a 'Whole Story' of where we've come from and where we might choose to go.
Poorna: Whole
There the Whole; Here the Whole.
From Wholeness emerges the Whole.
Take away from the Whole—what remains is still Whole.
Growing up like a weed - uprooted between continents and caregivers - I learned to find belonging in wild and ignored spaces: the narrow space of our courtyard in Kerala, the miniature suburban jungles of New York, and now, the forests of New England. Because belonging was never a given for me - whether in family, culture, language or place - I learned to exist in the In-Between. The gift of being a wanderer has been the discovery of Home in any place on Earth, especially Her wild places.
After an immigrant childhood exiled from my Brown-ness, a solo hitchhiking trip around the US at the age of 17 would propel me back to Kerala in 2001 to discover the ways in which my people told stories. There, I began re-learning my native tongue - Malayalam - (lost in the process of learning English). And was gradually admitted into the numinous world of traditional folk ritual arts, after finding G. Venu's book about lesser known artforms of Kerala in the Thrissur library. In an era before the ubiquity of cellphones, televisions or internet, I journeyed to remote temples and across star-blanketed paddy fields to witness fast-dying animist live arts; taken under wing by master ritual artists, and legends like theatre director Kavalam Narayana Panniker. I learned to discern the ways that 'high' (caste) culture borrowed, pilfered and benefitted from Common (or 'low' caste) cultures; and how land and ecological intimacy were at the heart of these contestations of power.
Ten years later, these experiences would form the foundation for the creation of my theatre company - "The Ritual Theatre - a way to nurture the precious hierloom seeds of culture and cosmology that had been shared with me. Hence much of work has been to attempt to create a village-culture for a village that doesn't exist.​​
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Following my first devised play Isis-Chernobyl in 2012, which took place in an underpass with an ensemble of 7, I created the Rites of Passage Project. Inspired by Dagara wisdom-keeper Malidoma Somé's autobiography, it sought to reclaim and reimagine women's initiation through large-scale collaborative multimedia ritual arts.
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Always a dancer yet not keen for the stage, I had entered the live arts from the back-door - more interested in the Spirit-work done behind the stage and what transpired on it. Immersions into studying traditional Kalaripayattu (the martial art of Kerala), women's folk dance & classical Mohiniyattam, and basic Carnatic scales planted seeds that would sprout decades later as embodied understandings from within the Dark.
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​​Gradually, I began offering ritual processes to more than just actors - eventually leading workshops for up to 150 people at a time. This signature ritual work grew organically - a synthesis of diverse somatic theatre training, expanded family constellations, Body Ritual Movement, and an intuitive sense for holding liminal ritual containers.
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Informed by anarchist politics, radical feminism and sacred ecologies, my work as a storyteller, theatre-maker and a facilitator began increasingly to speak to the dissolution of systems of colonialism, racism, imperialism and capitalism, while simultaneously re-membering a wider relationality with the Earth, elements and all living beings - in real time. Through ritual I learned that beyond just talking about concepts, I could facilitate people's direct experiencing of them. ​​
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MOST oF MY "TRAINING" will never be able to be 'certified' or instagrammed - moored in Guru-Shishya Parambara (across distances & adapted for a modern world), and in the tradition of solo practitioners who courted The Wild. I share this to say that teachers, training & slow cultivation cannot be easily understood in an era of certifications and colonial
programatic thinking - even and especially where it claims to be "decolonial".
Thus, some of my most formative and least glamorous initiations have included:
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the 2006 Kerala Cycle Yathra - a month-long solo-tour on a bicycle through central Kerala in search of the 'village heart'; in which I performed as old lady buffon clown and also fire-danced - in village commons, fields and children's schools.​​
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9-months traveling barefoot through South India
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living without running water or electricity for 3-months on a mountaintop, learning to carry water on my head
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apprenticing with women in their kitchens- learning to cook traditional Indian food with village technologies
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hitchhiking as a spiritual path across the USA and Canada
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jungle, forest and mountain adventures in India, Nepal, Peru, Mexico, Italy, Ireland and the US
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periodic and ongoing solo retreats of multiple weeks or months duration
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