​This Fall Equinox, I'm reflecting on the balance of fire & water — the Masculine & Feminine — that has been disrupted by way of our patriarchal history over the last 4,000 years. While the West Coast has literally been burning from an excess of heat, an excess of masculine energy, we can recognize these unbridled fires as one of the long-term consequences of settler colonial culture. Our collective rite of passage at this time then, asks for a radical re-balancing of Masculine & Feminine energies — of fire & water — within us and on our planet.

The effects of climate change are the earth's efforts to re-balance extremes that are the result of the man-ipulation of fire & water through fossil-fuel based industry, petro-chemical production, and damming & irrigation that maintains land-degrading mono-agriculture.  Now, we are being asked to honor and restore water, the Feminine, as a vital source of healing and knowledge that has been devalued, reduced to mere commodity in our era of "progress". We are asked to tame fire which has been hyper-monetized and harnessed for its destructive power through reactors, bombs, and industrial capitalism.

As humans, we are water beings, composed mostly of water. Indigenous cultures on the landmass we now call America — or Turtle Island — revere water as Feminine or female; a teacher who shows us the ways of dissolution, forgiveness, and surrender. She also guides us in the ways of power through persistence, patience, resilience and trust in the possibilities of renewal.

If we see fire & water as metaphors of our human experience, as the forces that fuel Life on planet earth, how then might we reframe our living, and the foundational principles of our society? Women leaders who are rooted in the Feminine are key to re-orienting society toward a paradigm of power-with & for all people. So it is that month we celebrate one of our Greats, as well as some of the core women at the helm of Rites of Passage 20/20 Vision.

This Equinox, with so much at stake now than ever before, let us remember that water is our lifeline, the interconnection between all things —past, present and future. May we have clear sight to see and honor the mysteries of water & fire, and to choose another way forward that is not our colonial history of power-over, but power-with, a path guided by the wisdom of the Feminine. Without water, we cannot live. May the waters come where they are most needed. May the fires within us and this world be quelled by the remembrance of balance— our true nature.

2020 is the YEAR of WOMANIFESTATION.

This photo was taken sometime back when my dear friend Heather Fisch asked me to be The High Priestess, an archetype close to my soul. To me The High Priestess, along with The Empress, are the archetypes of womanifestation. They create/ birth as extensions of the fecund earth, dancing in the non-dual union of dark + light - tending the compost and the garden, alive in the underworld womb as well as the topside world where we eventually (sometimes after years) harvest the flowers + fruits of our labors. Its good magic, whole magic, humble magic.

As i came upon this photo today, I remembered the long-ago story of the necklace I'm wearing in it. Its made of typewriter keys, and was given to me, wrapped in newspaper - by a grunge girl wearing all black, on a bus in Seattle around midnight when I was alone and lost; she had placed the bundle quickly into my hands before rushing out the door. She was my angel-witch; who'd been wearing it earlier when I had stepped onto the bus without enough money, feeling shakey and scared as I asked how to get where I needed to go and whether she and her friend could give me some change (they did). I had told her how beautiful the necklace was and did she make it (yes she had). The typewriter keys are metaphors of the Word, and of speaking one's truth. That gift gave me all the hope i needed, that I wasn't lost after all out in a big city alone at night. I found my way to where i needed to go. It remains with me as a symbol of Feminine power + resilience, crafted by the hands of an unknown woman.

THIS is womanifestation. Other women + femmes + people holding space for, cheering on, lifting each other up. It exists in contrast to the obsession that New Age white-washed culture has with "manifestation" - one that reeks of privilege, light-polarization and isolation: the idea that if we as individuals just think good thoughts, all will go our way. Womanifestaton is rather about honoring the mystery of life, of the Divine Feminine and inter-connectedness. Its being a conduit of sustenance and reciprocity. Because when she gave me the necklace, it was healing for me. But it was also healing for her to give it. It was an honorable giving and receiving.

As we approach the New Moon in Aquarius, its time to clear my desk, my mind, and set new intentions for this next cycle. The High Priestess has all she needs, not just within herself, but with the fruit and seeds of the Earth (held in the pomegranate), and with the Great Book of the World/ Her Life in her left arm. Wearing good witch magic around her neck.

There is a lot to become womanifest for me, for Rites of Passage in the coming months. For some folks, it seems like an impossible task. That's because it is. Its impossible for me to "make it all happen". The only way it can happen is through the union of sincere effort/ intention, magic + surrender, with a little (or a lot of) help from my friends (and kind strangers)! Reminding myself of this now as i prepare to step through the next portal.
​
Thank you Lisa Vollmer for this photo, to Heather for the invitation, and to Kifu Faruq for introducing me to womanifestation! Its an honor to womanifest with you, and with all the other incredible women, femmes + people in my life right now.
#womanifestation #2020vision #faith #resilience #sustenance

A 20/20 Anthem for 2020
This is the time that they'll speak of us in the future, saying:
"They Remembered".

We Re-member Ourselves Now
as whole-bodied, soft-fleshed water people.
We reclaim our hearts,
and our tender, round infant-faced memories,
from empty pre-packaged promises,
from the ache of isolation.
We steal back our freedom and our future from the numbed fists of black-oil gods,
from the digitized world we mistook for reality.

We breathe new life into the places we've ravaged in our relentless quest,
in our rest-less-ness.
We come Home, finally to Rest.
Right where we are
with the great weight of the Grief of the World.

We save the seeds that have been passed on to us for thousands of years,
And plant them, water them with our tears,
seeds that have kept their own wisdom of how to grow in places that've become thirsty.

We learn to speak again words of Beauty and of Kindness,
To value what's alive over what's dead,
in a world that's far slower,
where joy is commonplace,
and each of us is sovereign.
Where the land remembers itself green,
and our multiplicity begins to mend its way back from the edge of extinction.
​
Let these be our teachers now:
Flowers. Mycelium. the Forest underground + canopy.
The infinite family of our extended relations.
We are not alone.
We are the Once and Future Vision
Of Our Ancestors

https://www.ritesofpassageproject.org/2020vision
thank you to Janine Strong for this photo:)

​

It’s with a big deep breath, that I announce at long-last:
RITES OF PASSAGE: 20/20 VISION!!!!!!
is clear sight into our Collective past, our present and our potential future,
Revolutionary Art, Activism + Initiation for the New Century.
By Women + Femmes of Color
Live: August 14- 23, 2020
ritesofpassageproject.org/2020vision
For those of you who experienced the first Rites of Passage in 2013, this is the next evolution. 20/20 Vision was born out of my need to speak to a broader scope of the feminine experience in America, with a focus on the voices of WOC, with all NEW "Rooms of Cure".
Now is Our Time.
Creating this project involves learning how tp embody the radically beautiful values of this Project. How do we truly CO-CREATE a living village - to sew together our losses and our triumphs, our tender broken places with the bright red threads of healing that we each are carrying: You are my teacher. I am your teacher. Together, we are learning. And THIS is Rites of Passage 20/20 Vision: 80 women of color + allies from around the US. Creating a potent space for the stories that have gone unheard, and for the Medicine WE ALL NEED.
In the words of one of my personal heroines - with whom I share the same ancestral homeland, and love of eloquence + rebellion:
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.....Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
- Arundhati Roy
Ultimately Rites of Passage is meant to speak to all of us, regardless of our background or gender. We all need to nurture new cultures of remembrance on the Earth, and community containers for initiation.
This website is a work of art itself that I'm so excited to share with you. My hope is that it, and this project, can be space for us all to remember the Resilience we each carry.
Please feel free to share the project in your circles. 🙏🏽 We welcome all kinds of support: a HOUSE, artists, production folks, volunteers, MONEY, artist housing. It takes many webs of support to build this:)
Thank you for reading, for sharing, for breathing in this new world together.
#ritesofpassage #2020vision
#wearetheonceandfuturevisionofourancestors

​This photo’s caption should read: “woman with her hair on fire.” I have a big reveal coming…Its kind of like being pregnant (note kind-of, hence I am NOT pregnant) when you don’t tell anyone until the 2nd trimester, because you don’t want to jinx it. Can a woman be pregnant with something other than a child? Yes: alternate fertilities. Right around the time I finally felt ready to become a Mom to a person, the Universe said “no, we’ve got other plans for you kiddo, you know just what they are – so get to work.” I guess I’m pretty fertile, (though right now I feel unfit for either task). I haven’t been ready to share, or known how to, and so have been in a very prolonged early gestation. We say this is Leo rising: its never been done before in this way, she doesn't know how to do it, and doesn’t even try to obtain permission to do it. Add to this, she’s actually pretty shy and self-conscious about doing it at all. She just does it because she must and because she wants to. At best: trail-blazing. At worst: trial by fire. In Shamanic Astrology, we say that the true nature of Leo rising is “the playful 2-year old” – creating anything she desires because she can. A friend once wrote of me that I am “sort of like a woman with her hair on fire. She has no choice but to do what she does with her whole heart and as fast as she can. She is her work, and her work is her growth.” (I think this is part of the answer as to why my hair is so white! (maybe you were wondering;) But the REAL question for any such person as myself is: how do i be a channel that is continually nourished? How can I “do” while “be-ing”?

I can't afford to be so fast anymore. I need to learn to slow down, put out the fire out in my hair, but somehow keep it alive in my heart. Nature creates, and we are part of nature, and so must create. Yet that drive to create can suck the very life out of us, if its not also flowing back into us. Much like a woman making a baby, and then feeding that baby, its easy to become depleted. And being alive and creating life is a kind of long-term lease we have with the Universe. As a wise woman recently shared with me - we pay a price for wisdom, of which white hair and wrinkles are outward metaphors. We pay some of our youth, our innocence, so that we might know eternity and grace. Aging is a blessing. But what these last years have taught me, are teaching me - is that without my own sanity and well-being, without my own continuous prayer which is pleasure, which is rest, then the reason for "making" becomes obsolete. And without nurturing my own healing, what can I offer others? This beauty created outside of me, doesn't need to be. In all honesty, I haven’t mastered how to create my work and feed myself adequately in the process. The way I used to create wasn’t sustainable. I know I can’t do things the old way, but I don’t yet know the new way. Its too easy for me to stay up till 3am writing. And rest is foundational; I’m working on my foundation. My journey to Peru was one in search of soul-body-mind replenishment. As a pre-requisite, I had to relinquish my notions of a “self”, including as a maker, and just be in a long rite of passage. Much of that time wasn’t peaceful; it was often lonely and difficult, but immeasurably precious. Yet while it’s a blessing to have a moment of peace in a remote cave, one has eventually to enter fully back into the world of Samsara and remember what it is to be inside that cave in the middle of the crazyiness.​

So, its been nearly 7 years since I decided I would make ritual + theatre my primary avenues of service and craft. I've broken through, broken-down, burned bright, burnt-out and journied far beyond the edges of my “self”. I used up all the golden fuel of my 20s on a dozen different lifetimes lived in that decade alone, as an anti-establishment rebel with a cause: i.e. lover of Life, Beauty + Resurrection of the human heart, at-tempting solo bicycle tours and generally getting myself in a bunch of unwanted trouble. I don't have any money, awards or fame to show for all this. But I do have some beautiful memories of crafting Beauty out of my own and our shared grief. If so much is dying that’s worth grieving, then I needed to grieve it and create ways for us all to, as well as somehow lift up our hearts in a world that’s often times rather dissapointing and cruel. If we are so separated in this modern compartmentalized world, I needed to feel intimacy with others in that “village” way that only ritual + theatre provide me. If my heart could give birth, it would create art in adoration of the Erotic that refuses to die by capitalism, convention or fear (my own and that of the world.)
 
Now, I'm called once again to create; this time something more size-able than what I've attempted before. And even my Leo Rising is terrified at the thought of it; meaning I don't know if I have what it takes to do this. I seem to have lost the blessing of the care-free-ness of youth and a certain un-daunted-ness by what most people regard as “impossible” or at best “un-realistic”. I've always set out to create something, and trusted (more or less) that somehow it would happen, and it always has. So this must be another test of faith. In moments I doubt my capacity to be a channel for pure magic: like pulling rabbits out of hats and pushing babies out of vaginas. (Because we are talking about metaphoric babies really, not just rabbits.) I mean something that could possibly LAST beyond “me” or my lifetime. For this i will need abundant universal energies made manifest into 3D: i.e. grand hither-to unimagined sums of money + un-paralleled real-time support (and a lot of generous people have helped me over the years, I don’t forget you. And here it is, all over again: hit the refresh button.) I ask myself “Will I listen to the voices of fear and doubt, or will I go the way of faith again, because it’s the only real thing? Do I believe I’m worthy of abundance? Do I believe this creation is worthy of support? Do I believe its simply the future memory of my ancestors coming into form, and therefore, its fruition inevitable?”
 
I don’t feel ready, but like they say, you’re never fully prepared to have a baby. And its been calling me a while now, and I don't want to ignore it or postpone it forever until the moment years from now when I may actually be ready (because in that sense, tomorrow never comes, tomorrow is never promised.) Is this because I'm stubborn or because of destiny + dharma? The more I am alive, the more I get hip to the fact that I’m just an instrument through which my ancestors breath desires to flow. A good instrument though, requires care and re-tuning. My creations are best when I am in full communion. I become me. And who is me? But the ensemble, or the river, or the wind, or the full and empty rooms of a house overflowing with eloquence? 

​photo credit: Janine Strong

​This is my dancing, singing, seasonally-flowering uterus. It’s also my crying, raging, mourning uterus. It holds deep, almost unbearable, ancient pain – memories still surfacing from the wounding within my lineage, and of lives beyond this one – memories of the power to create life and countless births, memories of the losses of life and of countless failed and purposely aborted births, memories of babies taken from me against my will – memories never spoken yet never fully forgotten. Who else will remember these stories? Who else will bear/ liberate this pain? Who else but me remembers the agony of my mother’s uterus during our Cesarean Birth when she was numbed and unconscious? Not my mother who chose the necessity to stay numb. I remember. My womb, my uterus remembers. My uterus re-members itself from the fractured disaporic herstory of my peoples, of our shared peoples. These are the stories I carry. Such stories, we carry. Who else will bear/ liberate this pain than us – wombmen and womb-bearing beings? Who else will unknot the centuries of oppression? Who else will bear forth the future of the human species – to renew Creation again and again through the eye of a needle? Who else will reclaim our powers of creation and death? Who else will choose to dance and sing anyway – even in the face of great ignorance – because we have the privilege and the responsibility to – entrusted to us by generations of women who could not dance or sing at all? The challenges facing us as now are not new, yet we are closer to a Shared Liberation. Let us not forget in these times of Transition, that we are but the next generation in long lines of women and beings who worked to remember and who forgot their own power, and whose powers were repressed or manipulated. We are the ones our ancestors are praying for to wake up – we, the children of lineages seeking to remember our own origins within an inconceivably vast Cosmic Womb. Let us not forget that we are connected inseparably beyond the boundaries of contrived nation-states, in a Womb-Wide Web. That the majority of countries still find it acceptable to regulate the bodies of women: abortions are illegal (or illegal except in extreme situations) in much of the world. Let us not forget that the forces of ignorance are still present, that the last vestiges of a dying order are grasping for power. Yet, let us not forget that they will inevitably lose this false power. And that the only true power is beyond “us” – the Power that created my life, your life, all Life, and that we as womb-bearers are the perennial guardians of this Power within the human species, and that no man-made decree can change this. Let us not forget that the forces of ignorance and fear live within all of us, and that without compassion, liberation is not possible. Today as I bleed, cradled by mountains older than these struggles of our human species over creation and death, I remember that all is not lost. All is not a fight against, but rather a continual Collective Birthing towards Truth. We are the Earth and the Earth will always be victorious. In the words of Starhawk: “We are the rising of the Earth. We are the shifting of the ground. We are the seeds that take root, when we bring the fortress down.”

​http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-where-abortion-is-illegal/

I am learning to love, learning to say yes to love even if it hurts. It’s a lifelong learning of course, and those of us willing to learn to love fully must also be willing to experience much heartbreak and death. Its been a long hard winter and spring for me – as some of you know – and, though convinced as I was that it was the end, love eventually came back – like a boomerang. Love came back in the in the form of a human being – a man, and forced me to work at telling a more Whole Story. Not just my side, but the other’s side, and the larger archetypal stories. This play – Flowers Falling –  has everything to do with women and men – specifically how hard it is for us as women to trust men, and how hard it is for two people to love each other in the context of patriarchy – of hundreds, thousands of years of conditioning – of being taught who our enemy is. I believe that the origin of all war, all domination, exploitation and separation of any kind – finds its origin in patriarchy, in the split between genders and the false hierarchy constructed between them. It often feels almost impossible to me in partnership to “meet in the middle” as a man and woman. How can two his/er-stories so long-estranged from each other once again speak a common language – find coherence, resonance, peace? How do you make love with your enemy? I originally began writing this play from the place of my own heart-broken-ness, and over the months it remained a question: what IS this all about?! In the last couple weeks, the play has taken shape, has morphed, has surprised me and my own ignorance – into becoming a kind of elegy of hope for love and peace in our world. Hope – I don’t use that word lightly  I mean hope in the deepest and most profound dreams of my and our own souls – the longing for love, for peace, for remembrance, for joy. The longing to be fully human again. The longing for an end to the seemingly eternal conflicts, wars, and displacements. The longing to see in the other – whether man or woman or whoever – the beloved, and not the enemy. What began in winter with death, now blossoms in summer as a radical offering of myself. An offering that each day deepens and finds more truth in the words and gestures I’ve chosen to speak.  Words and gestures which I was not even ready to bring forth on opening night. Words which must be spoken though – both for my own healing, and because there’s so much more at stake. Because if I can’t make peace in my inner world, or with my beloved, how can there be peace in our larger world – between communities, nations, women and men? “How can I expect you – America –to make peace with the world, when – just like us – all you’ve ever known since your inception was war?”
 
I’m reminded again of that beautiful song that sings: “I ain’t gonna study war no more.” 
Instead, we study peace, we study love and compassion. But what does that mean really? Justin clarified for me yesterday how when Tibetan Tantric Buddhist traditions speak of “love and compassion”, its the union of the masculine and feminine pathways to liberation that they’re talking about. They’re talking about the same thing my lineage talked about – non-duality and Both/And – and that most all indigenous Nature-centric cultures practiced – the union of opposites, of polarities. We don’t get to peace through more separation. We create peace by seeing the other as a wounded lover, child, being – as wounded and estranged as we ourselves are. “Love and Compassion” is radical revolution, and its not always soft.  Its surely ruthless. Both in this play and in in all of life, flowers are to me the most heroic symbol of love and compassion – the union of both/and. I am learning give up my weapons, my armaments. This play teaches me everyday. This play lives inside me. In that same way, Love teaches me everyday. Love is that benevolent but ruthless force that wants to break me open into being fully human. Compassion is what allows it all to happen.

For two more nights (tonight Monday, and now Tuesday as well) I’m offering up my inner world for friends and strangers to come watch me be a fool for love, be radically vulnerable, be present with my own wounds and ignorance, and commit to my own longing. I invite you to come not only to watch, but to participate – to receive and commit to the same for yourself – for your life, for our shared world, for all the war that’s happening now and that’s been happening. This is ritual theatre: provocative, edgy, gentle, hard, soft, pungent, wild, tender, fierce, strange and familiar all at once. And like summer strawberries, its only alive for a short time.

7pm Sheffield Covered Bridge

​photo by Krysia Kurzyca

​Today I want to tell the story of how and why I began making the kind of theatre I do. My story begins with Jack Kerouac, tantra and hicthhiking alone around the country, and how I went back to India for the first time as a young woman and discovered the multi-colored world of ritual performance. What I found on those travels – and what found me – would change me, and put me on the path I’ve been on ever since.
 
When I was 17 years old, love confused me – much as it still does today – and I found myself restless with a devoted young farmer man, and needing an escape. In high school I had read On the Road, by Kerouac, and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins. I was living in Massachusetts after my freshman year at Simon’s Rock. The year was 2000. My closet friends and I imagined ourselves as the newest generation of beatnicks, and Inside my bones, secretly, I wanted to be just like Sissy Hawshank. In the summer of that year, I hitchiked around the country by myself – which was also sort-of an accident (I didn’t have enough money for a train ticket.) What I found as a 17 year-young woman – who didn’t know she was anything close to beautiful or remarkable – was a lot of stares (you can imagine) a lot of attention, from a very white blue collar America (many of whom had never come so close to an Indian woman in the flesh before). I met and made many unlikely friends, including a lot of truckers and a few hippies. Over and over, I was asked about my “Indian-ness” my ancestry (which I had all but tried to erase in the 13 years prior), with questions about “that red dot you wear on your forehead”, about tantric sex, and Hindu goddesses – questions to which I had no answer. Moreover, I ended up with dozens of stories so strange and beautiful and precious, that I felt completely unfit to tell them, unfit to do them justice. All this led me to decide that I needed to return to Kerala – to India – in order to learn how my people told stories. I needed to learn about and reclaim my roots and my language, and I needed to find ways to answer all those awkward, penetrating questions. The following year, I embarked on a 10-month quest dedicated to learning about all the ways my people told stories. Around this same time, I saw my first clown performance at college. It blew my mind and heart wide open, and I knew that there was something there I needed to know and embody: I wanted to become a clown!
 
Armed with an adoration for stories well told, clowns, traveling, and the mysterious and wild origins of my own ancestry, and equally loaded with ignorance, modern arrogance and a complete lack of skill in my own mother tongue, I went back to Kerala. I went back to a place whose language was impenetrable to me, nevermind it had been my first language. For months, I would hear sounds that had no meaning. I would look at the writing on the walls and on the buses, seeing an elaborately curled script that I was sure would never be known to me. I went back home to have my soul completely broken for the first time as a grown woman by the crude and hard ways development hinders the human heart. And would feel profound unbelonging in the one place I wanted more than anywhere else to belong to, while also not being willing to do what It would take to fit in. Everywhere I went, I was stared at. And rightfully so. I didn’t look like anyone else, even though my skin was brown. The world I first entered into was depressingly stale and flat – the world of my relatives. I knew there was more to Kerala – that I had come for – but how would I ever find it?!  I had only one contact into the world of performance to begin with, and that ultimately served me very well because It led to one thing, which then led to opening a door into many many things and people. It took months before those doors opened however, and when they did, I ran straight through them.
 
In 2001, televisions and electricity were still reaching the most rural parts of Kerala. There were no cell phones. But even then, the television was fast replacing the the role storytelling and performances once served. (Why spend 21 nights watching an archaically slow re-telling of the Ramayana, when you could watch it from the comfort of your own home on the T.V. with a lot more glitz and glamor?) But back then, one could still walk through paddy fields in the pitch dark without any light to find some ancient Devi (Goddess) temple where there was an all-night long ritual. One could still find a Kavu (sacred forest grove). One could still see an ancient snake ritual in tact. One could still find real magic, there were still performers who carried a spark of something beyond our comprehension. They performed for the Goddess in earnest, not just for show. I’ve been lucky enough to see the old ritual dramatic forms of Kerala before this present time when they’ve been bankrupted by modernity, florescent lights, loudspeakers, cell phones, and alcohol.
 
I – who had grown up with television as practically a surrogate mother, who learned English by watching cartoons and forgot Malayalam by the same – was now exposed to nearly ever kind of ritual drama/ storytelling form we had in Kerala at the time, of which there are over a dozen major ones (and hundreds of variations within them.) I was graciously let into the homes and lives of many elders who loved the arts, and many performers whose families had been dedicated to their art-forms for uncountable generations. I want to take this moment to thank especially Venuji and all the work he has done within his lifetime to save the last vestiges of the dying arts – Kudiyattam in particular – and to his wife and my teacher Nirmalaji, and to the Tolpavakoothu artists – Ramakrishnan and Lakshmanan, and to the Mudiyettu family – Murali and all, to the Padayani troupe in Kadamanita in the homeland of my father’s people and the late Vasudevan Pillai, to Rajagopalan for showing me my first Serpumthullals, I bow to the dozens of Theyyams I watched and give thanks to Jayaraj to who helped me see many of them, and to the late Kathakali master Ramakrishnan Ashan – the last of his kind, and his wife Narayanikutty who welcomed me and helped me begin my oddesy from the start. I also want to thank the late playwright and director Kavalam Naryana Pannikar, who saw in me what I did not yet see, and who like a mischievous wizard, pushed me onto the stage to dance in my utter embarrassment. Thank you. There are yet many more to be thanked (but names are no longer remembered). All these experiences over many months, showed me like layered ancient tapestries, what was stored in my lineage, and that the way my people told stories and transmitted magic and consciousness was still in tact.
 
Even after this journey, I came home to the U.S. with a greater love for stories and for ritual and my roots, but I didn’t imagine I would be making theatre. I did learn, slowly, how to be a clown. And I became more immersed into the performing arts, but not deliberately. Originally, in college (and still now) I became involved in “theatre” because of the things we did before we ever got on stage. These practices of exploring the body, mind, and nature of being were as close as I had to shaman tools. Indeed they are shaman tools (if properly understood and used), and the ritual traditions of Kerala, the archetype of the clown, and my own yearnings to liberate myself, brought me into the theatre through the back door so-to-say. I never wanted to be on stage. Never intended to direct. I was a shy awkward girl, and am still an introvert. Yet, some other part of my nature – along with forces beyond me – propelled me outward into cycling journeys and spotlights.
 
18 years later, my major inspiration and need to make theatre still comes from my roots in Kerala, and from my own lack of rooting. (Of course I’ve also been inspired and encouraged by modern artists who have deep vision like Lecoq and Pina Bausch, the legacy of Butoh, and many others, but my taproot is still the Indian theatre). Yet because the underlying context and intention of these ancient traditions (as well as my own work) is so different from that of the modern Western theatre, I often feel like an outsider artist. The former was born slowly like crystals over hundreds and thousands of years through intricate relationships between specific communities and tribes to their places and ecologies, while the latter is born of a disparate and displaced peoples disconnected from community, from place, and most certainly from Nature. Perhaps the most important distinction - ritual theatre revolves around the sacred.
 
The ritual dramatic traditions of my homeland were elaborate art-sciences of life-renewal and meaning-making – ways of re-membering the human being, the community and the village. Ritual performances were “whole works of art” that simultaneously and ingeniously incorporated dance, theatre, storytelling, music, and visual art. They constantly broke “the third wall” through their immediacy and intimacy which connected not only audience and performer, but the audience itself as one teeming mass of human aliveness. The ancient theatres were the original avante-gaurde. They were always based in the context of a community and the village and were “site-specific” – happening in temples, sacred groves and near agricultural fields – and on specific lunar and astrological dates throughout the performance season. As such, these performances served as annual communal rite of passages – not for individuals – but for a whole family, a community or village. And more than most theatre of our modern and Western realities, they possessed the rare and un-replicable ingredient of Soul. But such magic and liminality didn’t just serve the purpose of “entertainment” as most modern theatre does. It was the way a family, a people, an entire bio-region, stayed knit together – and not just for themselves, but for the welfare of their shared Ecology – the Devi, mother Earth. It was the way consciousness grew over time within each individual, because the stories told had within them the Big Picture, the larger blueprint. All of this I would come to understand in time, but the seeds were planted way back then by patient ritual performers and elders who explained what they could to me until those same seeds could take root within my own mind and heart, and body. In the Indian traditions, we say that the “form” of tradition holds within it the keys to consciousness. While I’m no master at any one form and was never immersed long within a guru-shishya relationship, I nevertheless feel blessed to have received transmission in a less direct way; I imbibed magic and storytelling wherever I could like a hungry orphan who was always asking, “Are you my mother?” After all, its those who were once orphaned who know most deeply the gift of family, the gift of art, the gift of place, and the longing to belong.
 
So, for the past 7 years I’ve dedicated my forces to creating “new ritual theatre” dedicated to place (often outdoors and usually never on a conventional “stage”) that speaks of Nature and our sacred relationship to it, that speaks of an essential erotic-ness of life, and of the politics of human delusions, industrial culture, capitalism, war and displacement, about women and men and love and grief, loss and renewal. Ritual and theatre have been the only ways I’ve experienced real authentic community, and that’s why I’ve continued to create and offer them – its kept my soul afloat and fed. Its also taxed me a lot on all levels, but I guess that’s the way it goes. I was never taught so much. Made it up as I went along with all the blunders and foibles of a young person- arrogance, fear, insecurity and exhaustion. I’ve made tons of mistakes, failed greatly, learned humility, contributed some good remembrances within my community, and succeeded at “making beauty out of my grief”.
 
Being in India again last year, the message was so clear to me, that things are ending there – the old ways, the old cultures are almost extinct. My once-wild jungle homeland is mostly covered over with concrete, even the snake groves, the Goddess groves. My people are numbed-out and lost. My heart grieves for us, even as they continue to feel nothing while the water turns blacker by the day and drought approaches massive proportions. So, here I am: holding a small heirloom seed, a spark, of that original wholesomeness, that magic – and my privilege and responsibility to my ancestors and to the future generations is to continue to nourish and cultivate that here – in this new old world – to craft new medicine and new ritual, to offer beauty and remembrance as I have been, in this strange dispossessed land of America, a place whose people have little roots and no ritual, their Soul substituted wholesale for stuff you can buy at the Dollar Store.
 
Often these days, I also wonder whether there’s any point to creating theatre/ sacred art/ ritual, without a village to honor it. Is it true that perhaps much of my work goes to ears and eyes who can’t hear or see it fully, can’t comprehend, can’t necessarily even feel because it may be too intimate, too real, and too threatening? Because the story I’m telling requires of them to sacrifice artificiality and the false safety of “first-world” numbness. And in the West, the world of theatre, just like the world of “art” in general, (aside from renegade theatres like Bread and Puppet and the like) is one that’s celebrated and reified the more its disconnected from Nature, place and community. The more packaged and glossy, the better its considered to be. The work I create doesn’t fit into the construct of the Western theatre – it doesn’t come from the same aesthetic and affect of disconnection or of the “whiteness” that sells, it can’t necessarily be contained within a building, and is not necessarily reliant on technology or the hyper-post-modern deconstruction of everything. And after it all, I am not white. In the end it is that very browness and “Indian-ness” which sets me apart form America, and which sets America apart from me. While all of this can feel lonely, its also a blessing. It’s a blessing to known one’s roots, to be proud of them, and to come from a place and a people who revered a well told story – through the language of the body and voice. In the end, the theatre I make adores love, and stories and the simplicity of human being in relationship to place.
 
So for now I continue making the art I do, driven like a woman with her hair on fire, to save my own sanity in this lost world, and for my own healing, and also for the memory of my ancestors, as an ambassador of heirloom seeds that may soon no longer be so viable back home. My path has surprised me, and looking back the entire story makes so much sense- is so perfectly choreographed, to make me into who I am.
 
Ironically, my next play talks about tantra (among other things like war and peace), seeking to answer some of the questions posed to me when I was 17!
If you want to support this kind of new old world theatre, if you want to support a brown-skinned woman creating original performance in America, and If you want to support grassroots over gloss, then I invite you to come see my next play. I took a hiatus last season, and now I’m back, with something simple, something brave, and hopefully elegant and nourishing, offered up from my soul to yours and Ours.
 
Flowers Falling From My Mouth
Sheffield Covered Bridge, Sheffield MA
Solstice weekend, June 21.22.23.24.   7pm
All shows $20 suggested donation
 
Pls no children, no dogs
(you’re welcome to bring a blanket or chair.)
(The show will go on as long as its not raining at 7!)