The Body Writes Back – Exploring the Intersections of Poetry

by RUPINDER KAUR WARAICH

Writing poetry is a dance of words on the page, but poetry can also extend beyond the page and inhabit the body through movement. Dance offers a physicality to the process of writing, bringing new dimensions to the ways poetry can be experienced and embodied. Poets such as Tishani Doshi and Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa demonstrate the interplay between choreography and poetic form, where the body becomes an instrument of storytelling—reflected both on the page and in performance.

In my own artistic journey, I’ve been exploring the relationship between movement and poetry primarily through solo practice, though I’ve recently begun to perform the two together. In my abstract short film The Search, I weave poetry and movement to create a lyrical, almost meditative narrative. The work unfolds as both an internal and expressive quest, ultimately revealing that true freedom lies in embracing every facet of oneself. I’m drawn to how rhythm, gesture, and breath can deepen the emotional texture of a poem—how silence, stillness, and repetition become part of the verse. The body doesn’t merely interpret the poetry—it becomes part of its structure and meaning.

What comes first: the movement or the first word to lay a poem?

In-betweenness: the translation of words, the translation of the body, the rhythm of the words, the rhythm of the body. Words on the page aren’t still, and neither is the body. To breathe, to find movement in the everyday, this is what I feel I am trying to do. Still curious, still finding my way in this movement, bringing worlds together, coming from the origin: the spirit, the soul.

Trying to find my way back into my body is why I started to dance, to move and with poetry, it has taken me to another state of performance: truth. My truth to feel true autonomy within my body and my words. When dancing, we are reminded to feel connected to our bodies, to our soul – the life force within us that comes alive in a moment of surrender. And the same applies to writing—to immerse yourself so completely in words that they begin gliding, dancing around you.

Classical Indian dance forms possess a strong musicality rooted in poetry. In styles such as Kathak and Bharatanatyam, however, it is rare for the dancer to recite the text while performing. Typically, a musician sits to the side and provides vocal accompaniment, or the dancer may offer a brief narration of the sangram at the start.

Tishani Doshi’s performance of Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods at the TEDx event in Chennai in March 2018 showcases a fusion of worlds: language and movement not only coexist but completely merge and become one.

Doshi’s repetitive triangular movement motifs echo her mentor Chandralekha—the pioneering Indian choreographer and dancer known for bridging classical Indian dance with modern sensibilities and political commentary. She draws on Chandralekha’s choreographic vocabulary, which often employed geometric forms and yogic stillness to challenge conventional aesthetics and evoke meditative resistance. The triangular patterns in Doshi’s dance invoke strength, stability, and dynamic tension—core elements in Chandralekha’s work, where the body becomes both a site of ancient memory and contemporary dissent. Here, the body becomes a site of resistance, sensuality, and sacredness, weaving movement and language into a shared medium of expression and provocation.

The intertwining of dance and poetry is as old as human civilisation. Since the beginning of time, literary works have inspired choreographic expression, just as movement has ignited the creation of verse. Across cultures, rituals and oral storytelling traditions have long included dance as an embodied form of narrative and emotional resonance. The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro, a prehistoric bronze sculpture from the Indus Valley, dated to around 2300–1750 BCE—reveals the deep cultural presence of dance in early human society. Similarly, the Rig Veda, composed between c. 1500 and 1000 BCE in what is now northern India, stands as one of the earliest known poetic texts, rich with rhythm, incantation, and gesture. These ancient artefacts remind us that the body and the word have long coexisted in expressive practice.

In contemporary settings, this synthesis continues to evolve—in spoken word performance and interdisciplinary live art, culminating in the formation of the choreopoem. A choreopoem is a performance form that combines poetry, dance, music, and drama to convey emotional and political narratives through both language and movement.

Ntozake Shange created the choreopoem in 1974 at the women’s club Bacchanal in Berkeley, California, where she was part of a collective of poets, dancers, and musicians. During this period, she studied dance under Sawyer, Mock, and Halifu Osumare, who encouraged her to pursue her passion for movement. Shange’s innovative, linguistic, and cultural configuration of the choreopoem emerged not only as a tribute to her African heritage but also from her engagement with feminist thought, dance, and poetry – elements that merged to form a multidisciplinary Black American and Atlantic art form. She developed a genre rooted in personal, familiar, yet deliberately constructed language. Her choreopoem created and exploratory and significant space for expressing the diverse and complex experiences of Black women.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf is one of the earliest renditions of a choreopoem—it fuses poetry, dance, music, and song to create a transcendent theatrical experience:

dark phrases of womanhood / of never havin been a girl / half-notes scattered / without rhythm / no tune /
distraught laughter fallin / over a black girl’s shoulder / it’s funny / it’s hysterical / the melody-less-ness of her
dance / don’t tell nobody don’t tell a soul / she’s dancin on beer cans & shingles (Shange)

Returning to folk traditions from my own heritage, Panjabi Giddha exemplifies the deep-rooted connection between dance, poetry, and storytelling. In Giddha, women dance in circular formations while singing boliyan—short, improvisational folk verses that often recount personal anecdotes or shared experiences. These oral poems, shaped by rhythm and repetition, are intimately linked with the movements that accompany them. The gestures mimic everyday activities—sweeping, grinding, fetching water—transforming labour into artful expression. Through this performative language, women preserve and reinvent memory, negotiating the boundary between the personal and the collective.

Giddha not only serves as a site of embodied storytelling but also as a form of social commentary. In vocalising their experiences, desires, and frustrations, women resist dominant, often patriarchal, narratives. They articulate a sense of self and belonging that transcends geographic boundaries, engaging with an imagined global Panjabi identity. In this way, Giddha stands as a contemporary manifestation of the folk interplay between poetry and dance—rooted in ritual, shaped by lived experience, and continually remade in performance.

How do we retell and reclaim folk tales through our words and bodies?

I often rewrite Panjabi folk tales from a female perspective. But I am not doing anything revolutionary, am I? I am just writing the truth—but I suppose that is sometimes the hardest thing. I am thinking of desire. I am thinking of what it means to love. I am thinking of what it means to be truthful to your words and movement. I hope to continue exploring this curiosity in my flow.

Sassi: do not wander into the desert / mountains will open to consume you.
Sohni: do not try to cross river Chenab / you will drown, no one will save you. (Kaur Waraich)

The idea of language being held in the body positions the body as a container not only of language, but also of time and breath—two central concerns shared by both dance and writing. Movement becomes a form of communication; dance is, inherently, a language of its own. In Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa’s poetry collection Cane, Corn & Gully, she writes:

Sometimes when I danced, I inhaled the language of my ancestors’ captors, and they became mine… (Kinshasa)

Writing oneself back through the body is an act of reclaiming full autonomy—of taking back the gaze and cutting through the layered oppressions of both patriarchy and colonialism.

Poetry, dance, and oral history intersect to form a unified and immersive practice that transcends traditional artistic boundaries. This merging offers a dynamic space where movement, voice, and narrative fuse – challenging a rigid separation between art forms and cultural expressions. By drawing on the embodied nature of dance, the spoken rhythms of oral history, and the textual richness of poetry, artists are able to disrupt conventional storytelling and forge new pathways for creative expression. In doing so, they not only blur the lines between disciplines but also unsettle established borders—linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical.

This intersectional approach reimagines the role of poetry in contemporary art, positioning it as an active, living form—felt as much as it is read or heard—and capable of engaging audiences in deeply sensory, participatory ways.

Further Watching:

The Search by Rupinder Kaur Waraich
Mushaira 3.0 by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods by Tishani Doshi

The image of the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro is taken from https://smarthistory.org/dancing-girl-mohenjodaro/.

Author Bio:

Rupinder Kaur Waraich (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist from the West Midlands, UK, whose work spans poetry, performance, and acting, with a focus on feminine narratives. Her debut poetry collection, Rooh (2018), was published by Verve Poetry Press, and her second is forthcoming with Seren Books in 2026. She has created theatre, films, and spoken word pieces addressing themes of the body, history, and gender. Her recent work explores the intersection of poetry, dance, and film in performance art.