Our inaugural performance, "Bandh: Meditation on Dream," is an evening-length dance theatre piece that is a journey into a state of being where we are able to focus on the desires, hopes, and aspirations that sustain life, and that enable us to look beyond logistical details that are necessary for mere survival. We believe that women’s dreaming, including their resistance, their reaching for beauty, their claiming of space on their own terms, has generated healing and life-sustaining forces throughout time. Bandh explores and celebrates such dreaming. Structured in three movements, Bandh moves from scenes of despair and death, through an awakening of dreams, to a celebration of feminine sensuality inspired by chalaman bigraha (moving deities) of Bengal and Odisha – goddess images carried in ritual processions through villages and towns. The dismantling of a tall wooden altar, downstage left, marks its transformation from a place of sacrifice of women to one that empowers their journey at the end of the show.