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 dreams, ancestral currents, and liberatory politics, she is a gestator and mother of beautiful impossible visions and living spaces of belonging. As a ritual facilitator, writer, storyteller and performing 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 found belonging in ignored and feral spaces: the narrow space of our courtyard in Kerala, the miniature suburban jungles of Long Island New York, and now, the forests of New England. Because belonging was never a given for me - whether in family, language, culture 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 in Her wild places.
After an immigrant childhood in exile from my Brown-ness, a solo hitchhiking trip around the US at the age of 17 propelled me back to Kerala in 2001 to search for the ways in which my people told stories. There, I began re-learning my native tongue (lost at age 5); and was slowly admitted into the numinous world of traditional folk ritual arts. In an era before the ubiquity of cellphones, televisions or internet, I journeyed to remote temples and through star-blanketed paddy fields to witness all-night 'Naden-Kalas' (Arts of the Land); taken under wing by master ritual artists and folklorists. I learned to discern the ways that 'High' (caste) culture borrowed, pilfered and benefitted from Common (or 'low' caste) cultures; and how land & ecological intimacy were at the heart of these contestations of power. I came to understand that unless we tell our own stories, our Story would be told for us by the homogenizing forces of globalization and Empire.
Ten years later, these experiences would become the foundation for the creation of my theatre company - The Ritual Theatre - a way to tend the precious heirloom seeds that had been shared with me, via contemporary language and media, and as a means for personal and collective transformation: to nurture a village culture for a village that doesn't exist...
Following my first devised ensemble play, Isis-Chernobyl in 2012, I created Rites of Passage - a house of healing with 60 women ages 3 to 89. Inspired by Dagara wisdom-keeper Malidoma Somé's autobiography, the Rites of Passage Project sought to reclaim and reimagine women's initiation through large-scale collaborative ritual arts. A second iteration - 20/20 Vision - later took place in 2021, honoring the lives and legacies of Women of Color .
I had entered the live arts from the back-door— more interested in the soul-work done behind the stage than what transpired on it. Meanwhile, immersions into studying traditional Kalaripayattu (the martial art of Kerala), women's folk dance & classical Mohiniyattam; and direct encounters with nondual wisdom traditions—would sprout years and decades later as embodied understandings.
Gradually, I began offering transformational rituals 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 theater training, expanded family constellations, (BRM) Body Ritual Movement, pholyphonic sound, and an intuitive sense for guiding liminal ritual containers.
Informed by spiritual ecology, radical feminism and anarchist politics, my work as a storyteller, multidisciplinary artist and ritual facilitator began increasingly to speak to the dissolution of systems of colonialism, racism and imperialism, while simultaneously recovering a deeper, older relationality with the Earth, elements and all living beings. Through ritual, I found that beyond just talking about concepts, I could facilitate people's direct experiencing of them—in real time.
MOST oF MY "TRAINING" will never be 'certified' or instagrammed - it is my own Perfect-imperfect path - moored in Guru-Shishya Parambara (across distances & adapted for a modern world), and following in the traditions of solo practitioners who courted The Wild. I share this to say that teachers, training and slow cultivation can't be easily understood in an era of certifications and modern programatic thinking, even and especially where it claims to be "decolonial".
August Rose Photo
THUS, some of my most foundational (and also least glamorous) initiations include:
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the 2006 Kerala Cycle Yathra - a 2-month solo tour on a bicycle through central Kerala in search of the Soul of the Village: in which I performed as old lady bouffon 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 in Kerala, learning to carry water on my head
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apprenticing with women in their kitchens throughout India—learning to cook traditional foods with village technologies
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hitchhiking as a spiritual practice across the USA and Canada
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jungle, forest and mountain sojourns in India, Nepal, Peru, Mexico, Italy, Ireland and the US
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encounters with indigenous grandmothers in India and Peru
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periodic and ongoing solo retreats of multiple weeks or months duration
My offerings in the world are a mosaic work in-process—a fluid, living transmission of this journey of ancestral-elemental re-membering.
photo: Irina Aha