Project Overview
The Body Remembers the Mountain Project focuses on how to activate a form of ecological imagination of and for the mountains. In particular, it investigates how performing bodies experience the mountains and re-orient our sensorialities toward more-than-human. Unless we tap into such sensibilities that open up our ecological togetherness towards a new horizon of understanding, it is impossible to be responsive to the threatening climatic changes we encounter globally.
BRM Project 2023
The project, part research and part art, cuts across the study of Kutiyattam’s Kailasodharanam (Lifting of Mount Kailash); to stories about Kerala and US mountains, to the creative work of building an intercultural performance project with Indian artists from the Kutiyattam, Poothan Thira, Kalariapayatt, and contemporary performance communities; and to the gathering community stories through an outreach program. Through this work we discover new practices of embodying the ‘mountain,’ and our processes entail the weaving together of materials, geologies, images, sounds, human-land stories, and a study of climate change. We generated a synesthetic and collective space for this work. In this context, we are invited to recalibrate how we experience our own bodies-in-motion across a range of socio-cultural settings, including disability communities, and the related ecologies.
*Disclaimer: The BRM Project 2023 took place under the umbrella of Kanta Kochhar’s Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar Award (2022-2023). Please note although this project was made possible under the USIEF, it does not reflect the official opinions of the Fulbright-Nehru Program.
BRM Project 2024
The BRM project—as a theatrical performance, scholarship, and a series of workshops—examines Mt Rainier and others as focal and inclusive sites for sacred storytelling, art-making, and ecological reimaginings of our relations to the earth.
