Mud Pies
Working with land is asking context and relation.
Stories of land // gems
Myth woven into place through observation
Understand that we tend the land, mold the land
even in urban spaces.
What are the weeds that we reject as the landscapes we occupy
in cities?
“Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared.”
We take to land
Mend within nature -
Emotional knowledge of land and memory
To be one with //
How do we create visions?
Mud and dance are imprints of spirit.
Sit in it, I pray,
Invite you,
Taunt you.
**
I remember sitting in the dirt stained lawn of my suburban childhood home
Mixing water and dirt together with my sweat
to create little mud pies.
My mother would yell at me
because I would come back dripping in dirt.
But, I sat under the orange tree, in bliss
Building.
**
Cry, don’t cry.
Listen to the other voices in the room,
Not those…
Refract.
It is about perspective.
It is about a shift.
We play to build in resistance.
1. “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” by Tupac Shakur, November 1, 1999
CENTRAL QUESTION: If we define cities as bodies in space and we as people hold specific emotions and experiences at a time, how do the specific emotions and experiences show up in the spaces we inhabit?
CONTEXT: The Natyashastra, seminal text of Bharatanataym, an ancient South Asian, Hindu dance form, details eight rasas (emotions) which are used for communicating through gesture, movement, and narrative.
Rasaboxes is a tool developed by Richard Schechner in the 1980s and 90s for dancers where each rasa is explored within the confines of a square in a grid. Beginning first with words of association, moving through static poses, and ultimately through dynamic movements, this exercise was used to understand and ground connections between movement and emotion. This tool served as a framework for the design of this experiment, namely in the physical organization of space and also practice of isolating emotions for further analysis.
EXPERIMENT: Eight performances using Bharatanatyam movements about the eight rasas onto 3’ x 3’ x 3” blocks of mud to document the impact of emotions in the “spaces”.
SO WHAT: Reframing how cities are built by different categories, in this case emotion, can provide a different approach to building our environments. This project approaches this visioning work by studying philosophies and foundational practices of non-western, embodied artforms. As a community of immigrants, refugees, and othered people, visioning through play can democratize the process of designing plural, antiracist cities.
Photos by Ani Prasad