ramti aave - her playful arrival
What happens to a woman’s unspoken desires? Where do they live, and can they be danced back into the world?
Capture from an excerpt presentation at Ragas In Motion at The Egg, Albany, March 2025.
Capture from an excerpt presentation at Ragas In Motion at Chelsea Factory, October 2023.
Production Credits List:
Choreography: barkha patel
Music Composition: Shweta Pandya
Costume: Nikita Shah
Set Design (Harlem Stage): barkha patel, Nikita Shah, Punita Patel
Ramti Aave – Her Playful Arrival is an interdisciplinary dance work that invokes Goddess Kali as an embodied archetype to excavate and reclaim female desire buried across generations. Drawing from traditional kathak and Gujarati folk dance vocabulary, contemporary choreography practice, oral memory work, and Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, the project explores how Gujarati Indian women, have betrayed their longings not out of weakness, but as necessary strategies for survival. This betrayal, inherited and internalized, becomes the terrain through which the body is both the site and source of resistance, memory, and reawakening.
This work has been and continues to develop in an iterative process. Starting as a solo exploration, it has now invited ensemble dancers as well as barkha’s mother in the most recent iteration at Harlem Stage.
This work was a finalist for the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project 2024 and a 2025 recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation Special Projects Grant.
The full evening work will premiere in NYC in Fall 2026.
Capture from an excerpt presentation at Rajiv Menon’s Contemporary Gallery Show in Los Angeles called Item Number, November 2023.
Capture from an ensemble iteration of Ramti Aave for the WaterWorks Fellowship with Harlem Stage. In frame (left to right): barkha patel, Punita Patel, Nikita Shah, Neelja Bhagat, Anisha Ogale, Juhi Desai.