Real value comes with madness...
Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief
disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises.
-Rumi
Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief
disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises.
-Rumi
Ritual Theatre
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Pooja Prema creates and performs "New Ritual Theatre"- restoring a sense of the sacred to the performing arts with tenderness, precision, and a focus on place. Her work is grounded in the desire to re-member and re-connect the threads between humanity, nature, and our shared liberation in homage to the cycles of love, loss and renewal that make us human.
Pooja's work echos a lineage of ritual theatre behind her, yet is shaped by a modern global context, buoyed by radical decolonial eco-feminist discourse, and inspired by the natural world and our universal human predicament. It has been deeply informed by the living lineages of South Indian Abhinaya, Mohiniyattam, Butoh and Body Ritual Movement, modern dance-theatre, Lecoq Clown, Buffon and Mask, along with various folk ritual-dramatic traditions from South India. Since 2006, Pooja has been creating original site-specific solo performances and interactive rituals. As a community ritual artist, she's also inspired by global celebratory street cultures including temple festivals, block-parties, carnivals, circuses and parades which continue to maintain a heart of liminal magic wherever they happen. Pooja has been the recipient of numerous grants including from The Jane & Jack Fitzpatrick Foundation, the David Rockefeller Foundation, Wyomissing Foundation, V-Day Foundation, and The Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, and of generous private patron funding. To date she has created four full-length original solo performances- Solidão (featuring hand-made masks), Endure (a river show), A Lot to Ask, and Flowers Falling From My Mouth, and a solo clown tour on a bicycle in India; and has produced and directed multiple ensemble works through her company The Ritual Theatre since 2012. Most recently in 2021, she created Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision - a living house of collaborative art, healing justice and embodied activism co-created by dozens of women artists of Color from around the US. |
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Roots...
My vision and need for ritual is drawn as much from my cultural roots as from my lack of rooting...
In the theatre, those roots travel deep into the fertile red soil of the ritual dramatic traditions of Kerala, South India, where there is no separation between art, healing & spiritual experience, just as there is no separation between ritual dance, theatre & visual art. Theatre in the global South is a multi-dimensional experience; a communal experience. A community without ritual does not, and cannot exist...
In India, whole communities and families went to the theatre - outside, and in or near a sacred grove or temple - to find meaning to their lives, experience communal healing, and to celebrate & reconnect to the cosmos. In village traditions throughout the non-Western world, the experience still involves all five sense & beyond. As an audience member, you become transformed into one mass of humanity- warmed and held, absorbed in the sounds, sights and smells of the otherworld.
While such ritual traditions are atrophying in Kerala as elsewhere due to the globalization and commodification of modern life and culture, I had the privilege of seeing many of these ritual art forms during my first solo journey back to Kerala in 2002; and later performing for audiences of entire families & villages (parents, grandparents & children) during my "Kerala Cycle Yathra" in 2006 - a mostly solo journey I took for 2 months through central Kerala on a bicycle, performing a one-woman buffon-clown show and a fire dance in the middle of fields, family courtyards and village commons. I would never have imagined - now 20 years ago - that my first trip as a shy teenager would set the course for the wild, winding, often surprising path that my life has taken.
In the theatre, those roots travel deep into the fertile red soil of the ritual dramatic traditions of Kerala, South India, where there is no separation between art, healing & spiritual experience, just as there is no separation between ritual dance, theatre & visual art. Theatre in the global South is a multi-dimensional experience; a communal experience. A community without ritual does not, and cannot exist...
In India, whole communities and families went to the theatre - outside, and in or near a sacred grove or temple - to find meaning to their lives, experience communal healing, and to celebrate & reconnect to the cosmos. In village traditions throughout the non-Western world, the experience still involves all five sense & beyond. As an audience member, you become transformed into one mass of humanity- warmed and held, absorbed in the sounds, sights and smells of the otherworld.
While such ritual traditions are atrophying in Kerala as elsewhere due to the globalization and commodification of modern life and culture, I had the privilege of seeing many of these ritual art forms during my first solo journey back to Kerala in 2002; and later performing for audiences of entire families & villages (parents, grandparents & children) during my "Kerala Cycle Yathra" in 2006 - a mostly solo journey I took for 2 months through central Kerala on a bicycle, performing a one-woman buffon-clown show and a fire dance in the middle of fields, family courtyards and village commons. I would never have imagined - now 20 years ago - that my first trip as a shy teenager would set the course for the wild, winding, often surprising path that my life has taken.
First trip back to Kerala, 2002: age 19
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Kerala Cycle Yathra, 2006: age 23
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Ultimately, my work as a modern ritual performer elaborates on what the old role once was...
Without a village, we often think our aloneness & grief is only our own, but our longing to love and be loved unconditionally is deeply universal. Because of this, ritual theatre still speaks to us - to the part of us that still longs to be at home in the village of our ancestors.
New forms of ritual theatre seek to rediscover and make new pathways home, with a fragility and honesty demanded by the chaos and collective rootlessness of our present times. We may not yet be ready or able to resuscitate "The Village Heart" as MartÍn Prechtel so eloquently writes, but the village nonetheless lives in us - waiting to be given a place of honor within our hearts and that of our communities.
Flowers Falling From My Mouth
of women, men, love, war & peace
premiered June 2018, The Sheffield Covered Bridge, MA An original solo performance about love, heartbreak and the origin of the Universe - using dance, spoken word, a cello, a bridge and an old-fashioned crankie box. |
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A Lot to Ask
a new poem of politics, love & resistance
premiered July 2016, Housatonic MA
Prema’s third full-length solo work, premiered in July 2016 in Housatonic MA, delves into the personal as political on a global scale, featuring an overhead projector, shadow puppetry, storytelling, spoken word and dance. A Lot to Ask, pushes the boundaries of theatre to find out what’s truly at risk - weaving narrative through terrain as vast as neo-colonialism, immigration law, Black Lives Matter and racial division, the pollution of water bodies, and why love may be the most pragmatic gesture in reclaiming our shared humanity.
premiered July 2016, Housatonic MA
Prema’s third full-length solo work, premiered in July 2016 in Housatonic MA, delves into the personal as political on a global scale, featuring an overhead projector, shadow puppetry, storytelling, spoken word and dance. A Lot to Ask, pushes the boundaries of theatre to find out what’s truly at risk - weaving narrative through terrain as vast as neo-colonialism, immigration law, Black Lives Matter and racial division, the pollution of water bodies, and why love may be the most pragmatic gesture in reclaiming our shared humanity.
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Endurea river show
premiered May 2014, The Green River, Great Barrington MA Endure explores the fundamental impermanence of life, and the enduring strength of fragile vessels- human hearts and paper boats. Endure is inspired by water, images from distant lands, and Japanese Butoh. Within this work I offer my adaptation of a traditional Kudiyattam storyelling segment wherein a single actor plays both a man and a woman. Kudiyattam is a 10,000 year-old Sanskrit drama form from my native Kerala, India. Also, in Asia , there is a custom of making ritual offerings for departed ones along a river; sometimes this is done in a paper boat. |
Solidão
an endless war, an isolated island, 3 dreams, 3 deaths & the Flower of the Universe...
A Tale for Our Times Told Through Masks & Dance
premiered January 2012, Great Barrington MA
Solidão means "Solitude" in Portuguese. Inspired by the origin myth of Portuguese Fado music, the Neutral Mask canon, and the modern legacy of Japanese Butoh, this play is an offering of and for our internal passage from Isolation to Surrender, a homage to death and the desire to live. It is a story in honor of anyone who has experienced a deep personal loss, abandonment or exile in the present time, as well as for our ancestors. Both geographically and historically nebulous, it is also an offering to all any one who has been, and is, subject to war, natural disasters, and various forms of displacement.
A Tale for Our Times Told Through Masks & Dance
premiered January 2012, Great Barrington MA
Solidão means "Solitude" in Portuguese. Inspired by the origin myth of Portuguese Fado music, the Neutral Mask canon, and the modern legacy of Japanese Butoh, this play is an offering of and for our internal passage from Isolation to Surrender, a homage to death and the desire to live. It is a story in honor of anyone who has experienced a deep personal loss, abandonment or exile in the present time, as well as for our ancestors. Both geographically and historically nebulous, it is also an offering to all any one who has been, and is, subject to war, natural disasters, and various forms of displacement.
Feedback...
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"
I have watched with astonishment and pleasure the creations of the gifted choreographer, performance artist, musician and writer Pooja. Her events – part theatre, part meditation, part visual poetry – are stunning, evocative, and like all great art, leave you a changed person after witnessing them . She is a true original, and I find her capacious creative spirit and remarkable productions, appearing like magic in fields, neighborhoods, alleyways, and industrial tunnels, to be in.” -David Scribner editor, The Berkshire Edge "
I have been consistently impressed with the work of Pooja Prema... Her performances entertain, yes, but sometimes that's not enough. Sometimes we need to be challenged as an audience. Pooja's works deliver. Attending one of Pooja's performances demands more from the viewer. Whether it's physically moving from scene to scene or engaging directly with the performers, no one is passive. The audience becomes part of the production. There's an unspoken agreement between the artists and the audience to meet as equals; to share in a deeper experience. We are challenged to look more closely at ourselves and at the world around us; to acknowledge both the universal things we all share as humans and to marvel at the profound uniqueness of each of our experiences. And nobody who truly participates in her performances leaves unchanged." -MVB printmaker |
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I was taken to another dimension last night...one of beauty, grief, aloneness, joy, life and death. So very powerful. Thank you from my heart." -Gail Ryan actor "
Pooja challenges her audiences to take a risk, to step into the unfamiliar and unexpected, and to intimately engage. She is a creative force of nature. She leaves you with a sense of awe, always." -Amber Chand visionary coach, writer, performer "
Enchanted by the masks, how they were animated by the way you moved. Trickster, magician, crone. The gift of a seed...what kind of seed? Pouring water as a mythic act, with such presence, intention. Water, fresh and salt, the ocean itself... the fire, the door... The whispering of secrets.... your body, gestures, masks all spoke so eloquently. I felt that I was admitted to another world. " -B. Chernicoff poet |
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Pooja is a weaver of ritual and magic; she has an ineffable way of combining color, tastes, smells and sensations which take us out of this reality, to a place that is sweeter, more vibrant and so beautiful that you wonder if what was swirling all around you was real or if it was a dream. As a performer, she juggles the sacred and the profane with the delicacy of a true craftsman." -Heather Fisch artistic director, Theatre Opera Nouveau "
Pooja's highly original and ongoing work here in the Berkshires is a point of pride for our community, and a source of joy. And joy is important. It is a reason to live. Pooja has the benefit of several traits, not often combined in an artist: great courage, stout heart, great humor, and great backbone. She falls into my personal category of 'life artist, which is to say, someone whose way of living is intrinsically linked to their way of making art, making impact, making feedback in the world. -B. Houston writer, performer, film-maker |
Header photo by Peggy Reeves
Flowers Falling photos by Krysia Kurzyca & Peggy Reeves
A Lot to Ask photos by Beau Bernatchez & Emma Kate Rothenberg-Ware
Endure photos by Peggy Reeves
Solidão photos by Karen Andrews