ABOUT
Sádé Budhlall is an Indian Classical Odissi dance artist working at the intersection of performance and social transformation.
Her work approaches dance pedagogy as a dynamic and relational practice rooted in social inquiry and embodied knowledge. Grounded in phenomenological approaches and Caribbean epistemologies, it engages movement as a site for critical reflection, cultural memory, and collective becoming, drawing from Trinbagonian ritual, land, mythology, and oral traditions to reimagine how we teach, learn, and relate through the body.
Focused on the holistic development of dance artists and educators, her emerging pedagogy nurtures relational learning environments that center process, dialogue, and embodied inquiry. She is committed to supporting artists in creating work that is grounded in cultural specificity and lived experience, work that engages with urgent social realities while moving beyond technical form toward deeper modes of reflection, resistance, and expression.
At the core of her practice is a sustained interrogation and agitation of colonial inheritances that continue to structure artistic practices, institutional systems, and cultural spaces in post-colonial contexts such as Trinidad and Tobago.
Sádé’s work is grounded in a deep inquiry into how colonialism shapes relationships to self, community, and land. Through a critical reimagining of Trinbagonian-inspired Indian classical dance, she explores the resonances between Odissi vocabulary and the musical, oral, and literary traditions of Trinidad & Tobago, expanding the expressive possibilities of the form while reclaiming it as a tool for cultural authorship and embodied critique.
Her practice engages the body as a site for both the enactment and pre-enactment of historical and ancestral memory, using movement to inhabit legacies of resistance while gesturing toward futures not yet realized. This embodied political imagination resists the codified hierarchies and purist frameworks that have historically constrained access and narrative control within inherited forms.
By drawing on moments of collective defiance—such as the 1884 Hosay massacre and the solidarities between Indo and Afro-Trinbagonians—her pedagogy invites a reanimation of radical memory, not as static history, but as a generative force for relationality, consciousness, and cultural becoming.
For Sádé, dance is a site of relational practice, where movement becomes a medium for cultural understanding, personal and collective healing, and social critique. She engages with communities both within and beyond the Indian classical dance space, creating held spaces where individual and shared narratives can be embodied, witnessed, and reimagined.
Her creative work is deeply rooted in her lived experience as an Indo-Afro Caribbean, queer Indian classical dancer navigating the layered cultural, racial, and spiritual landscapes of Trinidad & Tobago. This positionality informs her commitment to embodied inquiry, relational practice, and the radical potential of movement to hold complexity, challenge erasure, and affirm multiplicity.
EDUCATION:
MA. Dance: Participation, Communities and Activism
London Contemporary Dance School (University of the Arts London) 2024-2026
MA Artistic Placement
Parul Shah Dance Company (New York)
BY