icchā by barkha patel dance co.

icchā is an interdisciplinary solo kathak work by barkha patel dance co, presented by Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

icchā weaves original music, film, and set design with the Gujarati folk form garba to explore a question that many carry quietly: who do we hold within us, and what do we owe them?

In Hindu philosophy, vasanas (unfulfilled longings) are believed to survive the body and pass through bloodlines as living desire, or icchā. In this work, barkha is visited by her maternal ancestors in a dream, women shaped by survival, loss, intimacy, and the denial of dance and embodied selfhood. She becomes the vessel to express what they could not.

It’s a rare, embodied meditation on matrilineal memory that honors the women whose stories often go unrecorded and untold. It reclaims dance and the body as sites of cultural inheritance, at a moment when many South Asian diaspora communities are actively reckoning with what’s been lost and what’s worth reclaiming. It also offers a shared language, ancestral reverence, for audiences to process their own family histories together.