# Sádé Budhlall - Dance Artist | Scholar > Sádé Budhlall is a Trinidad and Tobago-based Odissi dance artist, scholar, and facilitator exploring performance, pedagogy, diasporic embodiment, and decolonial movement practice through Trinbagonian and Caribbean ways of knowing. ## Posts - [Intimacies of Institutional Embodiment: Dancing In The Limbo between Pleasure and Discipline. ](https://sadebudhlall.com/intimacies-of-institutional-embodiment-dancing-in-the-limbo-between-pleasure-and-discipline/): What does it mean to love a dance form you are also in tension with? This essay lingers in that uneasy intimacy. Writing from inside that friction, I reflect on what it means to stay in relation to a 'classical' form without surrendering complexity, and to let contradiction become a way of listening more truthfully to what the body resists and cannot easily let go of. - [Running from “the Contemporary” Inside the Living Body of Odissi](https://sadebudhlall.com/running-from-the-contemporary-inside-the-living-body-of-odissi/): Alongside my research project, Disobedient Bodies, my work has become increasingly concerned with how “the contemporary” operates not simply as a marker of time, but as a set of attitudes and permissions within Indian ‘classical’ dance. This essay explores who defines what counts as contemporary, how such definitions are upheld or contested, and how they are positioned in relation to the ‘classical’ across Western and Indian dance lineages. ## Pages - [IN THE MEDIA](https://sadebudhlall.com/in-the-media/): IN THE MEDIA An archive of events, projects and performances. - [MOVEMENT WORKS](https://sadebudhlall.com/movement-works/): MOVEMENT WORKS A selection of current and past works. - [DOUGLA](https://sadebudhlall.com/dougla/): A screendance that explores Afro–Indo relational politics through a choreographic encounter between Odissi and Moko Jumbie practice. It follows two figures as they search for connection across unfamiliar movement worlds. How do our personal histories show up when we move together, and what do they make visible and possible between us? 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 […] - [LAND LINES](https://sadebudhlall.com/land-lines/): Land Lines An international movement collaboration by Sádé Budhlall (Trinidad & Tobago) and Bronwen Wilson Rashad (United Kingdom)  How do we create home when so many forces disconnect us from land, from each other, and from ourselves? Land Lines is an international collaboration with Bronwen Wilson Rashad exploring how we build a sense of home through movement, land-based practice and collective presence. Working simultaneously from two forested sites—Caura Valley in Trinidad and the Forest of Dean in the UK—the work invited participants into a shared inquiry around belonging, place, and our relationship with the more-than-human world. Through somatic practice, improvisation, walking, […] - [CARNIVAL](https://sadebudhlall.com/carnival/): MAS RITUALS: A PERSONAL REFLECTION My relationship with Carnival is grounded in an understanding of Mas as both a sacred practice and choreography of resistance.  Carnival is the political arena where my body wrestles with questions of ancestrality, identity, collective agency and power. Photograph: Lime Life Media. I am interested in understanding presence, performance, and embodiment in Mas, particularly within Bat, Dragon, Jab, Moko Jumbie, and Blue Devil traditions. My curiosity around these forms revolves around their full-bodied immersion into presence, chaos, unpredictability, and spiritual  transcendence.  I am particularly drawn to how dark archetypes operate at the edge of presence and […] - [REFLECTIONS](https://sadebudhlall.com/reflections/): REFLECTIONS - [DISOBEDIENT BODIES](https://sadebudhlall.com/disobedient-bodies/): DISOBEDIENT BODIES An ongoing investigation into how diasporic bodies inhabit, negotiate, and reworld Odissi through lived experience. WHAT IS DISOBEDIENT BODIES? Disobedient Bodies is an ongoing practice-based research project that examines how reconstructed Indian ‘classical’ dance forms—specifically Odissi—come into being through their encounter with lived bodies, histories, and place. Rather than approaching Odissi as a static inheritance to be preserved, or as a form to be transcended or replaced, the project understands Odissi as a living technique that is continually produced through relation. Every act of practice and performance is contingent, situated, and irreproducible, even when it adheres to codified form. […] - [ABOUT](https://sadebudhlall.com/about/): ABOUT Sádé Budhlall is a Trinbagonian anti-disciplinary Odissi artist who engages movement as a site of political inquiry. Working across practice-led research, performance, and pedagogy, she investigates how reconstructed ‘classical’ forms discipline bodies, and how those bodies negotiate, resist, and reconfigure those logics through situated, felt knowledge. Her work unfolds across studio, film, stage, and public space, using movement to intervene in questions of power, discipline, and collective agency.  Her work approaches dance as a dynamic, relational practice situated in embodied knowledge, phenomenology, and social inquiry.  Her pedagogy centres disobedient bodies as anti-disciplinary practice moving beyond technical form toward practices that […] - [Home](https://sadebudhlall.com/): DANCE ARTIST, SCHOLAR, AGITATOR. decolonial, democratic, abolitionist praxis.  I believe in the power of movement to resist the logics that render our bodies docile, to reorient us toward relational liberation, and to name agency as a lived political practice.  My work brings together people who wouldn’t ordinarily meet, inviting them to engage their lived experience as a site of knowledge, while navigating complex shared realities. Learn More PROJECTS DOUGLA Read More A screendance that explores Afro–Indo relational politics through a choreographic encounter between Odissi and Moko Jumbie practice. It follows two figures as they search for connection across unfamiliar movement worlds. […] - [Coming Soon](https://sadebudhlall.com/coming-soon/): IN MOTION, COMING SOON… ## Optional - [Agent (MCP protocol)](websites-agents.hostinger.com/sadebudhlall.com/mcp) [comment]: # (Generated by Hostinger Tools Plugin)