zikr

zikr in Urdu means remembrance. The dance is about the ecology of women together, shaped by each other’s hungers, silences, and returns. The weight of being seen. The grace of being held by those who understand the distance you’ve traveled.

We remember the body of womanhood: its softness, its grace, its rage, the quiet enormity of its power. Tenderness and fury in the same breath, the same gesture, the same woman. The work traces individual desire as rupture not failure, not transgression, but a necessary tearing open of the ecosystem from which we come and to which we are always returning. In its second iteration, the work asks: what does it mean for a body to want something, to move toward it? How does a system of women moving in space respond to each other’s choices? What do the bodies that remain absorb, adjust, grieve, release? And when the returning comes, as it always does, how do we witness it? How do we hold space for another person’s homecoming without erasing what made them leave? – barkha patel

Commissioning of this work has been made possible with funds from the NYS DanceForce, a partnership program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. The Dance Alliance Inc. also supported the artist’s time spent in the Capital Region.