The CUNY Dance Initiative (CDI), an expansive program providing New York City choreographers and dance companies with creative residencies on CUNY college campuses, announces the premiere of barkha patel’s new solo work icchā at Tribeca Performing Arts Center (199 Chambers Street, New York, NY 10007) on Friday and Saturday, September 25 and 26, 2026, at 7:30PM. General admission is $40, with student tickets available for $30. To purchase, visit https://tickets.tribecapac.org/barkha-patel-dance-company-presents-icch%C4%81.

icchā is a 60-minute solo dance work by Princess Grace Award-winning artist barkha patel that explores the body as a vessel for ancestral memory and inherited longing. Often, the things we desire are not entirely our own. Matrilineal histories are frequently unnamed or absorbed into patriarchal narratives; icchā asks: who do we carry within us?

Drawing on the Hindu concept of vasanas—unfulfilled longings that survive physical death and are passed through bloodlines as living icchā, or desires—the work centers on barkha, who is visited in a dream by her maternal ancestors. They choose her to give form to the desires they were unable to express or fulfill: desires shaped by survival, loss, intimacy, violence, and the denial of dance and embodied selfhood.

Weaving original music and set design with traditional and contemporary kathak and the Gujarati folk form garba, icchā imagines movement as a means of remembrance, release, and return.

icchā is choreographed and performed by barkha patel, with original music composed by Sushma Soma and Samiullah Khan.