ABOUT
Sádé Budhlall is an Indian Classical Odissi dance artist working at the intersection of performance and social transformation.
Her work seeks to advance dance pedagogy through a universal teaching framework rooted in social practice, drawing on somatic and embodied practices guided by phenomenological inquiry. This framework explores connection, transformational leadership, and national identity, threading together Trinbagonian and Caribbean cultural forms such as performance, land, mythology, rituals, and oral history traditions.
Focused on the holistic development of dance artists and educators, Sádé’s pedagogy optimizes classroom dynamics and enhances the teaching and learning experience across various dance forms. Ultimately, she is interested in cultivating transformational leadership qualities in students, enabling them to create choreographic works that transcend technical skill by addressing contemporary social issues through culturally informed perspectives and their own unique lenses.
At the core of her practice is the challenge to colonial frameworks that continue to shape artistic practices, systems, and spaces in post-colonial societies like Trinidad and Tobago.
Driven by curiosity about how colonialism impacts relationships with self, community, and land, Sádé seeks to redefine Trinbagonian-inspired Indian classical dance. Her recent work explores the intersections between Odissi vocabulary and the musical and literary traditions of Trinidad & Tobago, expanding the expressive potential of the art form. Through this, she embraces the richness of her heritage while offering new avenues for storytelling and performance. As a result, her work critically opposes neocolonial and neoliberal forces that influence access to artistic spaces and the narratives surrounding inherited art forms. By challenging and reimagining codifications and disrupting purist notions of Indian classical dance, she aims to move towards a more inclusive, decolonized, and socially conscious practice reflective of diverse national and cultural realities.
To achieve this, she integrates movement practices that foster leadership, deep cultural and self-connection, and personal and collective growth. These practices challenge segregation, elitism, classism, and systemic inequalities. As a result, intercultural bonding forms a key aspect of her pedagogy, drawing on historical connections between peoples, such as the solidarity demonstrated between Indo and Afro-Trinbagonians during the 1884 Hosay massacre.
For her, dance is a powerful tool for creating social transformation, fostering cultural understanding, and facilitating personal and collective healing through embodied movement and storytelling. She engages with communities both within and beyond the Indian classical dance space, creating platforms for sharing individual and collective stories. This relational approach reflects the lived experiences and cultural landscapes of those she connects with and is deeply supported by her community, collaborators, friends, and family.
EDUCATION:
MA. Dance: Participation, Communities and Activism,
London Contemporary Dance School (University of the Arts London)
2024-2026
Her creative practice is shaped by her lived experience as a mixed, queer woman growing up in Trinidad & Tobago. It is largely informed by somatic and embodied practices, enabling encounters between the individual and the collective and offering a space to explore, disrupt, decolonize, and reimagine narratives across space and time.
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