Excerpt from Training Day - a cabaret natok sketch featuring Boy Baret

Boy Baret (holding up a tiny bra): Didi! maato toke ei diyeche – eta ki?Didi (sudden recognition): Boy, it’s our first training bra – isn’t it cute?Boy (frowning bemusedly): bujhte parchi naa … what are we training for?

performance gender queer

cabaret spoken word

movement costume

script writing

Abhinaya Compromised: The Flat Affect of the Perverse Educational Body - video performance APR 2011 ~ Educational Body Conference * Cambridge, MA

0:00 - 0:20

painting, writing, singing,

dancing, staging production,

blackface, minstrelsy,

graphic design

0:20 - 2:08

"Joplin & Josephine" - an afterschool productionOCT 2013 ~ Street Pianos Festival * Boston, MA

"Decolonize Our Museums" JUN 2015 ~ Museum of Fine Arts * Boston, MA

yellowface, #decolonizeourmuseums, radical museum studies, sign holding as

performance, social media, organizing, open letters,

orientalism, model minority myth, sexual/ violence against AAPI,

iconography

"Jataka Tales"OCT 2014 ~ R Visions for Chinatown * Boston, MA

Three fables performed with banners depicting stories. Presented in movement, narration, music and song.

Photo by host Chinese Progresssive Association. Performing with Chien-Hwe Hong of 1000 Virtues Dance (narrator + performance director), Kramer Gibson (music), Iris Cutler (dance) of East Meets West Bookstore, and Loreto Paz Ansaldo (logistics).

Sketch from "The Boar and The Fish" story board - Boar comes to the water's edge to receive a kiss from Fish

illustration, painting, kalari martial arts, story-telling, movement, choreography, live instrumentals, dance theater, gentrification, #right2remain, chinatown, costuming

2:08 - 3:52

Collage of B/W Images from Site Visit for Franklin Park Art Grove performance and Color Image from performance day-of

puppetry, costume, song writing, music, story-telling, movement, community theater facilitation,

painting, installation

"Jataka Tales"AUG 2015 ~ Franklin Park Art Grove * Boston, MA

"Parrot and the Burning Tree" first performed, then audiences in the form of other forest creatures (aided by masks) facilitated through community theater to help problem solve the situation presented by the fable. One of three tales.

Tabla: Michael Dwan SinghVideo by producer Loreto Paz Ansaldo

3:52 - 5:07

digital illustration, collage, sculpting, painting, canvas, acrylic, dye, installation, dough

"Pop Fertility Goddess" SeriesMAY 2012 ~ Divine Femme Installation * Somerville, MA

"I am a Universe" Healing Arts Workshop JUN 2016 ~ Allied Media Conference * Detroit, MI

How might we apply the expressive arts as tools to make visible, hold space for, and transform embodied experiences of systemic policing, violence and racism? In community we will explore a guided multimedia performance experience that releases the metamorphosing potential of drawing, song, storytelling and movement to heal beyond wounds and vision beyond surviving.

Part 1We warmed up with small exercises rooting the body and connecting breath with its alignment and ending in song-writing

Part 2Here’s we engage guided facilitation “I am a Universe” with performance, singing (the songs we wrote earlier), oral storytelling, and meditative drawing

meditative drawing, story-telling, song writing, singing, meditation, warmup, theater, therapeutic performance of care in community

5:07 - 6:25

WORK-IN-PROGRESSIn Divine Company's Sculpted Guardian Illumined MAY 2012 - current

An interactive projection installation deconstructing Michelangelo’s David, Rodin’s Kiss, and Venus de Milo through 13 mini choreographies translating community issues and featuring video art, interactive camera vision technology, live shadow puppetry and sound art.

Video showing "Venus Garden" + "Return to Sea" 2 of 13 choreographies

story telling, found footage, remix, mashup, sound art, installation, camera vision technology, shadow puppetry, choreography, lighting, projection mapping, research, tech rehearsal, costuming, props, production logistics, video art

6:25 - 8:11

WORK-IN-PROGRESS"Precious Body" Spring '14 Athletic | Dance Wear CollectionMAY 2014 ~ Wearable Arts Fashion Show * Somerville, MA

Video editing "Precious Body" debut choreography Fall 2013

fabric, pattern making, jewelry making, spray painting, sewing, origami play, animal studies, found materials, choreography, runway plan, 3D notions

prototyping, new materials research, slow manufacturing research, cottage industry research, workers cooperative research

WORK-IN-PROGRESS Excerpt from Adventures of the Lotus Brothers - a musical adaptation + reclamation of a genocidal folktale OCT 2016 ~ Bengali Association of Greater Hartford's Durga Puja * Hartford, CT

illustration, iconography, puppetry, musical theater, song writing,

#dalitwomenfight, anti-black, anti-indigenous, caste analysis, race, class,

genocide, eco-genocide

Sketch of storyboard setting up shadow puppet scene and choreography blocking

Tweet from social media campaign #donteraseourhistory to draw attention to the problematic plan by conservative Hindu American groups and their supporters to erase caste from US textbooks when discussing South Asia

8:11 - 10:00