Creating Rites of Passage for a New Generation

How do you create a movement to reclaim and celebrate the journey to and through womanhood? Is such a thing even possible in an evermore pluralistic society? Pooja Prema’s ‘Rites of Passage’ project has been working on creating these concepts over the last decade.

“I first created the 2013 Rites of Passage production with 60 people (mostly women) from the Berkshires ages 3 to 89. It was a large-scale installation-performance with the intention to use art and theater to bring awareness to and celebrate all the rites of passage women experience from birth to death,” Prema explained. “We don’t talk about it - we don’t have a language with which to understand these experiences in our lives,  and we don’t have cultural containers to recognize them. So, I envisioned a literal house with many, many rooms, to express these life changes in a visceral way so the viewer would see and hear and experience each rite of passage.”

“The community that was created was so extraordinary, like nothing any of us had  experienced before. I started to create a book about that experience, but I realized it wasn’t complete because there weren’t very many Women of Color involved and there aren’t many Women of Color in the Berkshires - being a 92% majority white region.

So I moved forward and created Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision, where the participants' ethnicities included African-American, Asian-American (Japanese, Taiwanese), Indigenous from North, Central and South America (Mestizo, Colombian, and more), European (French, German), and mixed heritage. It was a rite of passage for the Project itself.”

“The most powerful thing was the communities we created each time. It changed who we were on a fundamental level - changed the way we live our lives. And audience feedback showed that people were very deeply touched and profoundly changed. They found that attending the show was a rite of passage in itself.

It wasn’t a normal ‘museum’ or a theater performance in the way people think of it; you were entering a very intimate space where real people were exposing themselves in a very vulnerable way, expressing what it means to them to be a woman - and in 20/20 Vision - a Woman of Color.”

For the past decade Prema has been very focused on her work through The Ritual Theatre and has created more than a dozen site-specific ensemble & solo works, but theater is just one of her passions. “I am a ‘weaver’ in that I weave many art forms - dance, ritual, music, writing, playwriting, the visual arts - together into each work. Separating these art forms is a very colonial concept, and I am deeply influenced by the traditions of South India in which all these aspects are synthesized to produce “a whole work of art”.

So far Prema has held “day jobs” as diverse as working on a flower farm and being a flower arranger and designer; being a caterer of Indian food and teaching cooking classes in Indian cuisine; and been a chocolate maker and running a small chocolate company.  “I’m glad I've had all these diverse experiences to inform my artwork moving forward. 

And seeking a home for her work, a field in which to plant her dreams, is on the horizon.  “I have visions and dreams of what I want to create next, but I need the right conditions so the seeds can take root. I want to find a permanent home for my work, where I can create theater, offer workshops, build community and healing”.

“All of my work so far has been site-specific,” she added, “but we haven’t been based in any one location. I don’t want a theater building, but rather I need land, a nest for the work, a long term rooted connection. I’m not actively looking right now, but I’m open. Ideally the right place will come to me or be brought to my attention.”

To finance the post-sabbatical phase of her work Prema has started a non-profit called Living Culture that can receive tax-deductible donations. She encourages those interested in her work to visit RitesofPassageProject.org/2020Vision and watch the Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision film which is a 60-minute walk through of that live event.

“We had a screening of that film at The Kennedy Center in Washington DC in November 2021, and that was such an honor,” Prema said. “We welcome inquiries about screenings at festivals, at museums, universities, and other venues. People can also check out the last ten years of work of The Ritual Theatre online and read about our origins and mission. I’m excited to see what this next decade will bring!”