My name is Bhumi. I am Gujarati and a first-generation US citizen. I was raised on the ancestral lands of the Seminole and Timucua people. I am the daughter of Mala and granddaughter of Malti and Lalitaben.
No matter where I go, I am a woman of color.
It is literally written on my body.
Very often, I am drowning. I cannot find my space in academia or artmaking, one always asking the other why I’m not there instead.
It seems like water is always calling to me. Water comes to and through me in all of my movement practices. As humans we often stand upon earth, perhaps we even feel bound to the earth, but yet, most of earth’s surface is water. Water is in the air, in ice, in the ground, and makes up a large percentage of our very bodies. We are of the water, even if we do not live within it. The watery, aqueous-ness is inextricable from my movement practice. I consider myself an improviser and I think of my improvisational practice as finding tiny freedoms.
I believe that improvising is a way to center the mover (me) as an expert on my own experiences. It is a mode of embodying the pursuits of activism to which I commit my life. Improvising can shift power, invite collaboration, reveal our connections, and respond to our circumstances. When I improvise, I am tracing the evolving and changing definitions of decolonization through the body. I often ask myself: Can improvising lead to freer futures? Can improvising allow us to future new freedoms?
bell hooks wrote that “dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” The patterns in my body learned through movement practice, learned through code-switching, learned through a desire to belong are unlearned, retraced, grieved when I improvise.
As a queer, artist of color, I find my work constantly foregrounding these identities, and so often from western colonial hegemonic academic perspectives, this is considered navel gazing. But rather than navel gazing, I want to think about identity as expansive and life-giving. Carolien Hermans writes of oceanic feeling as a means of engaging with improvisational practice. This feeling is ever-present in my improvisational practice – it is one of malleable boundaries between human and more-than-human kin; interconnectedness; multiplicity of touch (“touching-the-world as well as being-touched-by-the-world”). Oceanic feeling challenges the boundaries of the linear progression of time and instead embraces an inseparability between internal and external.
As a performance-maker, I work primarily with artists that identify in the spectrum of queerness, as expansive and generous as it is. I think often of bell hooks when I think of queerness. In a talk at The New School in 2014, she offered that queerness is a place and a space that requires invention and innovation. She said, “‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” Queerness transcends gender and sexuality (and encompasses them) to embrace the othered. To do queer on the land, as I do in improvisational practices, is to hold generous curiosity with generous imagination, affording a space that can language the un-languageable into being. The queerness of the portal reveals for us a space made for queerness to speak and thrive and live. More than that, I believe queerness allows us to time travel.
As an Asian American artist, I have struggled with a desire to be legible and accepted. Even in 2024, Asian American artists continue to be forced into assimilation, told (like many others of the diaspora) that we are too much. Sara Ahmed suggests that when we are made invisible, “we experience the world as all the more sensational; what is ordinarily overlooked or looked over appears striking.” Nothing has been discovered or rediscovered, the feeling is not new. It is just there, constant and churning.
I often think that the amalgamation of the identities I carry into my practice requires me to dream, conjure, and imagine otherwise. I follow Ashon Crawley’s thinking that “Otherwise conveys that ‘It does not have to be this way. This can change. We can be something other than this.’” Instead of set outcomes, otherwise, like improvisation, makes space to free ourselves of false utopias. This otherwise feels like an entry into the decolonial futures that I dream through movement.
But decoloniality can be rife with complication. Decolonization as a political movement is ongoing and action-based. It is divesting from the colonial in a way that cultivates liberated relationships through ongoing practices of care. In spaces where we improvise, I work toward an understanding that to decolonize is to center marginalized voices and experiences, to practice empathy and listening, to be available to dream a new future, to value the people over the product. Decolonial acts are not easy, but they are sacred and necessary. Because of this, I find belonging through improvisation that allows me to explore the sweet and delicious waters of movement, which in turn let me imagine worlds that do not yet exist.
Actionable Creative Responses to Planetary Conditions
Offering 1:
Walking With:
Give yourself 45-60 minutes to walk in a crowded place that you frequent often without urgency.
Choose any direction to travel but try to slow to a pace at which you wouldn’t normally travel. Mentally track what new things you notice about this place, new sensations that you feel, and the impacts of slowness on your body/mind. Be with the weather, land, trees, other beings.
What did you notice about this place that you frequent when you moved at a slower pace? How did your pace change your experience of the place?
Reflect on your experiences: perhaps you write something down, record yourself speaking, or share your experience with a friend.
Offering 2:
Remembering:
Read or listen to Joy Harjo’s poem “Remember”
Write down, record your voice, or simply imagine in your mind’s eye everything you can remember
