icchā

Often the things we desire are not ours. In Hindu philosophy, vasanas are unfulfilled longings that survive the death of the physical body, passed down through bloodlines as living, present icchā / desire. icchā is contemporary kathak work weaving original music, set design, a communal Gujarati folk form called garba. Barkha is visited by her maternal ancestors in a dream. They choose her to express, release, and fulfill their desires: born from survival, loss, intimacy, violence, the denial of dance and embodied selfhood. Matrilineages are most often the unnamed, interrupted, and absorbed into the histories of patriarchs. The work confronts the body as a site of ancestral history asking: who do we carry within us? This work allows these ancestors to breathe again and ask what in your body might be their unfinished reaching? icchā is meant to be a somatic shraadh, an ancestral reverence of many secret tragedies that have dissolved with passing time.