Today we’d like to introduce you to Amanda Krische

Hi Amanda, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.

My earliest memory, second only to my sun-up-to-sun-down effort to learn how to tie my mother’s sneaker at the age of three, is of dancing in my living room to the sonic whirlwind that is Heart’s “Crazy on You”. I remember rewinding the CD player over and over to listen to the chorus, building a sequence of thrashing movements with each successive listen. I haven’t stopped dancing since, though my definition of dancing has expanded, folded in on itself, and become frequently new. I think these two early memories set a clear thesis statement for my narrative arc: obsessive, disciplined, ear-wormesque repetitions that create a set of circumstances for movement to erupt from the body, or for an internal conversation to be put outside of the body and laid upon other objects, relationships, areas of research, characters.

I started my classical training at LaGuardia Arts High School when I was 13 years old, where I started to be exposed to the wonder of interdisciplinary collaboration. During my lunch periods I would sneak down to the basement to listen to the orchestra practicing, or to the fourth floor to listen to the gospel choir. I would stay after school to watch the drama students rehearsing their scenes. I would slip notes into friends’ lockers across disciplines and invite them to the studio to collaborate after hours. It was a deeply expansive time of realizing that the moving body was, for me, the crux of multifaceted and dynamic human inquiry. My artistic practice has always been about more than just dancing. It has been an exploration of dance as an inquiry into the nature of our humanity, the depth and breadth of the worlds of subtext that live beneath the surface of our interactions and experiences. It has been a place to recognize similarities and contradictions, and it has always and above all been a place to keep remembering. High school was the first place that I started to become aware of how vast my interests were, but it was also a place that confirmed that dancing would always be the home in which I interrogated those interests.

After high school I went to conservatory, but the best explanation for where I am now is everything that came after that moment, when I started entering the world of interdisciplinary collaboration. The years of my professional career have led me to many strange places: collaborations in a laboratory at the University of Cambridge (UK), where I studied the capacity of mental time travel in Corvids to inform the memory-making capacity of the human body while in motion; starting an interdisciplinary movement company that houses dancers, vocalists, composers, scientists, and architects; a residency in Southern France to research the grieving rituals and mythologies created along the trade routes in the Mediterranean Basin to inform social movement practice; studying trance and ecstatic movement practices of Eastern Europe to build a movement methodology that queries the possibility of shifting consciousness through the individual and collective bodies; spending six days without eating, talking, or communicating with family and friends in the mountains of Greece while engaging long-durational tasks that challenged the physical and mental bodies; collaborating with neuroscientists and quantum physicists to try to understand the slippery nature of our realities; I’ve gotten rejected (so many times); I spent six years also training as an herbalist, apprenticing in the folk herbalism traditions and also studying clinically. I read a lot, I ask a lot of questions, I fall in love with people and try my best to understand them, I study the more-than-human: oceans, birds, plants, ecotones. These are a few of the threads that I have pulled to find myself where I am now, and I am very much still at the origin of this larger story. I am in constant pursuit of curiosity, and a desire to keep learning, discovering, sharing, and adventuring. And to make dances in order to continue asking questions about the world. I love working, it is the only way that I can manage to understand the potential shape of reality, and how I’d like to participate in it.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?

Is there such a thing as a smooth road!? Not to romanticize struggle, but I have come to know that there is a great benefit to putting the self in a place of risk, a place where our perceptions of reality and relationship are challenged. Where we are forced into change we would otherwise rather avoid. I have been learning that our greatest transformations lie within the urgency that accompanies crisis. So no, it hasn’t been a smooth road. And those moments of rupture or perceived diversion have led me to the most stringent curiosities in my work, and to the strangest growth spurts that could not have occurred if not thrust into them unwillingly. I experienced many challenges that most dancers experience along the trajectory of their training: a lot of pressure, self-esteem issues, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, etc. I name these things, though they are serious and I kind of want to keep them to myself, because they are such frequent experiences and because I think it’s really important to not contribute to the culture of silenced isolation that leads to a lot of shame for those that do experience these particular challenges. A beloved part of my career is teaching young people who are just about to become professionals, or who have just devoted themselves to their career path as dancers. It is important to me to voice those things that we are taught in the embedded methodologies of the Western dance psyche and how they are harmful to our development: this need for perfection, the solipsistic obsession with ruminating on only what has been done incorrectly, this shame around celebrating accomplishment. I am trying to hold myself accountable for presencing my own journey with those challenges.

But the thing that really comes to mind is a confluence of physical, emotional, and mental events that fundamentally shifted the arc of my career. At first I was reluctant to accept this, but now I am fortunately in a moment where I am opening my arms to it, embracing the truth that my career is a much more mischievous creature than I at first wanted to believe. Early in my career I sustained my fourth concussion, which was major and which had real physical ramifications: my vision changed, my sense of spatial awareness was incorrect, I had short-term memory loss, I would get nauseous if music was playing too loudly, and a lack of ability to regulate my emotions because my hormones where all out of balance. These symptoms lasted for about a year, and were all very bad news for a dancer working in the company setting. This brought me more deeply to the center of myself to prepare for a long episode of mental health challenges shortly after I entered the professional field. I’m not so interested in naming what this entailed or why it occurred as much as I am interested in sharing what I experienced from it. Whenever I danced I experienced memory recall of a traumatic experience that happened earlier in my life. This memory recall, while safe to experience in the studio where I feel I had a certain degree of mastery over listening to my body, caused episodes of severe dissociation outside of the studio. It got to the point where I needed to stop dancing for a while because it was making my life so unmanageable. Having quite a few years’ distance from it now, I can really say that I was in a tremendous amount of pain. I don’t think I allowed myself to really observe that pain at the time. This all came at a moment when I was on a very linear trajectory for a “successful” career, as defined by traditional standards. But my need to step back was less of a choice than a requirement, and I still grieve the loss of those years of dancing, which we are really taught are some of our most prime years of performance embodiment. As I stepped away from the stage I began teaching Improvisation at the high school that I went to as a student, which helped me to heal so much by stepping out of the role as a dancer and into the role as a facilitator of others’ experiences and storytelling through movement. It helped me to realize that memory, while important to claim as a part of our lived story, is also just that: a story. Whose continued mythology can potentially be rewritten through the application of deep, consistent, and continuous listening to the body. My students were angels for me in these moments. I love facilitation/teaching because it allows your own personality and set of circumstances to take a backseat. Your identity, your history, your memories, your emotions dissolve into the larger microcosmic orbit that is collectively established through the needs and requirements of a group. You really have to enter in to group mind, to be willing to forfeit the importance of your own personal struggles, questions, and evolutions. Though they had no concept of what I was struggling with, working with my students taught me again how to play, how to ask questions, how to be more rambunctious, how to tell different stories, through our shared inquiries about the capacity of movement to liberate instead of restrict. I now love looking for these healing invisibilities: where are the places of healing that remain unnameable, and even more true for our inability to name them?
In being of service I was able to recover from all of the stories that told me I was not worth being of service. I started my studies as an herbalist in this period, and dove deeply into somatic trauma recovery, breathwork, collaborations with psychologists, and mythological research. I created a proverbial neural network of relationships, inquiries, collaborations, and creative practices. I did this because I had to; it is dramatic but it did feel that I would not survive otherwise. Again, the idea of crisis leading to transformation. A lot of my research both through scholarship and choreography has been focused on memory: how we make it, why we make it, and what the body remembers that the mind cannot – and maybe, should not. We live in a time where there is a lot of cultural incentive to follow the thread of remembering, as though our being able to intellectualize the site of harm could help us alleviate the pain that harm has caused. But I think there are times when that becomes an inappropriate pursuit. I am interested in confabulation, and in dancing the line between what is real and what is imagined, in our past and in our present.
As I emerged from the cocoon of focusing on caring for my own health, which took about five years, and added my circuitous experiences to the archive of my body, I came back to the performance space and faced another challenge: The sense that I had lost a lot of time, that I was now behind all of my contemporaries and, worst of all: that it was all my fault that I had wasted it! I really had to reckon with the seventeen-year-old version of me who was absolutely positive that this was really all supposed to be very different. It was hard for me to summon the courage to forgive myself, to forgive those who wove the experiences that caused this challenge in the first place, and to forgive any part of me that believed I was no longer allowed to build that life I most longed for because of my diversion. But as I did (and continue to), and as I wove the tools, relationships, and disciplines of information I had sought out exactly to build a world in which I was cared for by my questions, I found more clearly what my mission is through the work that I do. And again, not to romanticize trauma, but it did lead me to the work I am meant to be doing, and gave me the unquenchable passion to do it at all costs.
This also taught me my greatest lesson: Timing is NOT everything. Persistence is. Dedication is. Devotion is. Curiosity remains the North Star of this life.
So this giant eruption, this challenge that felt very much like an underworld journey, brought me to a kind of presence with the facts of life: we are constantly living on a spectrum, vacillating between pleasure and pain. I am interested in experiencing it all, and feel very lucky that that my work is also a home through which to more deeply converse with those experiences.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?

I am a dancer, choreographer, teacher, writer, herbalist, lover of the Earth and Sea, and person who likes to collect information. I live in devotion to the moving body, and to the multitudinous ways of understanding the human body in relation to other bodies: bodies of the more-than-human (plants, animals, etc), bodies of story, bodies of land and sea, bodies of memory, bodies of history, etc.

I create multidisciplinary dance performances and ritual experiences that use dance, music, text, audience/performer relationship, and environmental elements to activate the body as a nexus for emotional and spiritual transformation. I specialize in creating performance experiences that highlight spectacular stories of the everyday in order to collectively embody the shared humanity that animates all beings on the planet, and allows us access to an altered state of consciousness that can hopefully bring us deeper into our bodies and our sense of responsibility for listening to others. I have a rigorous research practice that informs my movement and every work that I make, traversing inquiry in many disciplines: quantum physics, neuroscience, Eastern European folklore, mythology, anthropology, systems theory, ecology. I imagine I am forgetting some, and there are other disciplines soon to visit in my practice that I have not yet put my finger on. When I am working with performers to create a new work, I really prioritze non-hierarchical, imaginative creative processes. I am interested for every piece to be a medicine for those who are participating, and so I usually begin each process asking each of the cast members: “What is the medicine that you most need right now?” It is my hope that the exploration of a piece, and the development of it for performance, might be an avenue for people to consistently be held in a process of becoming more deeply alive, vital, more comfortable in their bodies and more clear about the curiosity that helps them move through the world.

I specialize in asking questions. Ha! That is the soil of my practice: a hunger to know, to understand, to more deeply listen to the interconnected relationships that animate this planet. I hope that the work turns an audience’s gaze inward before they begin looking at the world around them. That there may be a way of spiraling into the center of the self that allows us to ask fundamental questions about how we engage and experience the world around us, and each other: What shapes our perception? How willing might we be to reframe the borders we have built around the world(s) that we inhabit? What are the stories we have not yet opened our hearts to, and why might we have refused to listen to those stories?

I teach for the same reasons, leading open-level movement classes that welcome everyone to ask these questions of their bodies. We play many games, we breathe a lot, we sit with the sensations of the body, we listen to how the energy might be liberated through our intention and then we allow the movement of that energy to physicalize itself through the dancing body. I do this in-person in NYC (and occasionally in other cities when I am traveling for work), and also lead an online movement community that meets weekly.

To be transparent, I think I am still figuring out what sets me apart from others, and it might take me another few years to really be able to answer that question. I am typically more interested in understanding what brings me into interconnection with others, naming similarities and shared dreams. I world-build in community, sometimes in direct collaboration, and sometimes just in the space of shared witnessing with friends and colleagues who are making work that also efforts toward collective modes of storytelling and embodiment. I am deeply inspired by my friends, and that always feels important to name. I don’t think I could throw myself into the work the way that I do if I didn’t also see others so generous in their pursuits of creation. But what sets me apart? I suppose it’s the commitment to the research, and to working across seemingly contradicting disciplines. I’m not interested in narrowing my viewfinder to a specialization that doesn’t allow my practice to be interrogated by many perspectives. When I become interested in a subject I will go to the ends of the earth to be inside of that discipline, no matter how far it might be from my “area of specialization”. And then I will chew on that subject matter, live inside of it, build my life around it, in order to understand how to build a world in which an audience may be invited to bring their bodies into the story. That’s another element – the invitation to the audience that is inherent in each performance structure. I sometimes think I am more interested in choreographing audiences than choreographing performers. And then, maybe also the way that I merge the modern world of quantum physics with very ancient, embodied mythological practices: both ways to understand life and our place in it, on very opposite ends of the space-time continuum.

Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the Covid-19 Crisis?

I learned that there will always be another dance to dance, another song to sing, another person to love. Dancing has saved my life so many times, and this period of time was no different. There were so many personal and social crises that were amplified by those particular global circumstances and, through each moment, what kept me tethered to waking up each day was the ability to drink a cup of coffee and head into my practice. It was so hard to be away from the stage for so many years, and I think the performance community is still recovering. So much of the practical infrastructure that allows performance to be shared was impacted by the Covid-19 crisis. I really learned how to keep dancing, even when there isn’t anyone to share it with. And then to find curious, nuanced ways to share those things that were developed in private.
I also think that the reclusivity of the time brought me more deeply in touch with my practice. Prior to the lockdown, my creative process was always happening in front of other people: in a studio with many dancers to direct, or students to teach. Being alone forced me to be more specific, more clear and refined with the work that I wanted to make and how I wanted to make it. And to be okay with trying creative possibilities that may not work out in a measurable way. To not seek validation from others so often, to not need someone else to tell me that the questions I was asking were worth asking.

Pricing:

• Sliding scale $5-$20 open level movement classes in NYC, Wednesdays
• $45/month, Online movement community

Contact Info:

• Website: www.amandakrische.com / www.amphorahealingarts.com
• Instagram: @amanda.krische

Image Credits

All photographs taken by Umi Akiyoshi Photography