DOUGLA emerges from a wider practice-as-research process that places Odissi in sustained conversation with Moko Jumbie practice. The film operates as a choreographic and cinematic artifact of this inquiry, distilling a larger process of ethnographic engagement, studio research, dialogue, and embodied negotiation into a filmic encounter.

Beginning in October 2025 through ethnographic work with Moko Jumbie communities in Trinidad, particularly Jaiso Mokos, Future Jumbies, and Little Jabs, the research attends to how movement vocabularies shift when distinct embodied traditions encounter one another. Working through a micro-choreographic process, the project studies the subtle negotiations through which bodies come into contact and find provisional ways of being in relation.

Situated within Afro–Indo Caribbean histories, racial and cultural politics, and the afterlives of the plantation, the project approaches creolization as an embodied process of negotiation: intimate, unstable, asymmetrical, and unfinished. It also questions the idea of purity in Indian classical dance by asking what becomes possible when Odissi is re-situated through the affects, textures, and sensorial pressures of the Caribbean.