This TED Talk features poet, dancer, and playwright Mark Bumudi Joseph, recorded live at TED Global 2017.

The two places where I feel most free aren't actually places. They're moments.

The first is inside of dance,

somewhere between rising up against gravity

and the feeling that the air beneath me

is falling in love with my body's weight.

I'm dancing and the air is carrying me like I might never come down.

The second place that I feel free is after scoring a goal on the soccer pitch.

My body floods with the chemical that they put inside of epipens to revive the dead,

and I am weightless, raceless.

My story is this.

I'm a curator at a contemporary art center,

but I don't really believe in art that doesn't bleed or sweat or cry. I imagine that my kids

are going to live in a time when the most valuable commodities are fresh water and empathy.

I love pretty dances and majestic sculpture as much as the next guy, but give me something

else to go with it.

Lift me up with the aesthetic sublime and give me a practice or some tools to turn that

inspiration into understanding and action.

For instance, I'm a theater maker who loves sports.

When I was making my latest piece, Pilota, I thought a lot

about how soccer was a means for my own immigrant family to foster a sense of continuity and

normality and community within the new context of the U.S. In this heightened moment of xenophobia and assault on immigrant identity,

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