upcoming
for a moment, earthbound / ghosts of camille
ODC Theater
December 2025
In December 2025, pateldanceworks will premiere two new works at ODC Theater. for a moment, earthbound and ghosts of camille explore environment, interstitial spaces, and home-seeking through tumultuous times. More information coming soon.
past performances
ghosts of camille (excerpt)
- Yerba Buena Gardens ChoreoFest 2024
July 2024
pateldanceworks presented ghosts of camille at the Yerba Buena Gardens ChoreoFest 2024. ghosts of camille is a quartet work with PDW company dancers inspired by Donna Haraway’s speculative fiction work “The Camille Stories: Children of Compost.” This story traces five generations of humanoids called Camille from 2025 to 2425, a period in which the human population, having at first risen from eight billion to ten billion, has dropped to three billion and only half of the species alive in 2015 still exist. The performance is haunted by the queerness of this imagined otherwise, where our identities as queer artists of color are central to the art and dance we create. Queerness transcends and encompasses gender and sexuality to embrace being othered. Donna Haraway writes, “Camille is a keeper of memories in the flesh of worlds that may become habitable again. Camille is one of the children of compost who ripen in the earth to say no to the posthuman of every time.”
Co-Dreaming: Improvisation toward Liberatory Worlding
October 2023
San Francisco Bay Area
Organized by Petra Kuppers and Bhumi B Patel
Participants: Stephanie Heit, Petra Kuppers, Bhumi B Patel, and additional local participations
Virtual Screening of fault lines: the edge of the continent
September 2023
On September 17, 2023, pateldanceworks presented a virtual screening of fault lines: edge of the continent, a live site specific performance presented at Fort Funston in San Francisco, California in May 2023.
fault lines is a multidisciplinary collaboration with queer and Asian performance artists, experimental composers, and a visual artist. In this unprecedented moment, we witness the ongoing pandemics entrench inequality and erode the already brittle infrastructure we stand upon. As seismologist Nicholas van der Elst explains “seen from above, [faults] appear as broad zones of deformation, with many faults braided together.” The tectonic forces of xenophobia, orientalism, homophobia and transphobia collide with climate catastrophe - leaving us dancing on unstable ground. Fort Funston is uniquely positioned upon a bluff that is made up of sedimentary rocks that formed along the San Andreas fault line over the last two million years.
fault lines: witness
August 2023
fault lines: witness is the second of several ongoing iterative, multidisciplinary performances and experiential activations. Each offering emerges from its last evolution and includes different constellations of members involved with pateldanceworks. In witness, we journey with water memory, like the path of a river’s serpentine flowing through wide valleys or flat planes to loop and curve making an exploration of the in-between spaces of identity and geography, with Patel exploring her own Asian-American identity and queerness as in-between. In this piece, Patel brings together lineages of displacement, alienation, transnationalism, and hybridity in her existence, reconciling through the river’s haunting in the body.
fault lines: edge of the continent
May 2023
pateldanceworks presented fault lines, a site specific performance at Fort Funston in San Francisco, California. fault lines is a multidisciplinary collaboration with queer and Asian performance artists, experimental composers, and a visual artist. In this unprecedented moment, we witness the ongoing pandemics entrench inequality and erode the already brittle infrastructure we stand upon. As seismologist Nicholas van der Elst explains “seen from above, [faults] appear as broad zones of deformation, with many faults braided together.” The tectonic forces of xenophobia, orientalism, homophobia and transphobia collide with climate catastrophe - leaving us dancing on unstable ground. Fort Funston is uniquely positioned upon a bluff that is made up of sedimentary rocks that formed along the San Andreas fault line over the last two million years.
pateldanceworks
and
Byb Chanel Bibene/Kiandanda Dance Theater
divisions the empire has sown: to leave the land
June 3-5 and 10-12, 2021
performance as part of the Performing Diaspora Residency program at CounterPulse
