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If my body is a house is an interdisciplinary art film and installation exploring the lived experience of Parkinson’s through community-based movement, embodied storytelling, and poetic visual language. The project builds on the long-term work of Kathak and Contemporary dancer-choreographer Hrishikesh Pawar and his Avartan Dance Foundation, whose “Dance for PD”-inspired programs have evolved over fifteen years across diverse contexts in India, including underprivileged and street-based communities. Recently brought to Germany, the project unites twelve patients of the Parkinson’s Clinic in Beelitz with dancers of different ages and abilities, investigating the body not as a site of decline but as a house of memory, a social organism, and a resilient archive of experience.

Developed during Pawar’s fellowship at the Akademie der Künste and created by Berlin-based artist Anika Krbetschek, the film interweaves three visual worlds: intimate domestic environments, a scenic studio backdrop, and a body-mounted camera duet. These shifting perspectives reveal how movement emerges from relationality, vulnerability, and care. Parkinson-specific movement qualities—tremor, rigidity, balance shifts, altered gait—are shown as aesthetic and poetic material, inviting viewers to encounter creativity of inner logic rather than clinical symptomatology.

A text-based narrative prompting “If my body were a house…” deepens the work with reflections on identity, agency, loss, humor, memory, and hope. If my body is a house positions collaborative dance practice as a form of healing and cultural intervention, restoring visibility to aging and disabled bodies and proposing new models of community, dignity, and embodied knowledge within the dialogue between arts and medicine.