We were lucky to catch up with Amanda Krische recently and have shared our conversation below.
Amanda, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
I feel lucky that this is such a difficult question to answer. A life of dancing affords so many meaningful opportunities: connecting people to movement through workshops, developing interdisciplinary and intercultural conversations with other artists, and continuing to imagine new possibilities and creative infrastructures with my many brilliant colleagues in the field are among the daily diet! But the project that comes top of mind is a long-term work that I’ve developed, which weaves together my work as a choreographer, writer, and herbalist. It consists of creating ritual, movement methodology, and performance practice to establish spaces of healing and storytelling for women who have experienced sexual violence. This work is rooted in and informed by pre-Christian mourning rituals and mythologies connected to the ecosystems of the Mediterranean Basin, and is part documentation, inquiry about movement as a method to mobilize the archive of the body, and a love letter to the ecosystems that teach us about how to allow our bodies to compost and transform the moments of our deepest grief.
The work emerged as my own healing process from my experiences of sexual trauma dovetailed with my training as an herbalist and my practice as a dancer/choreographer. At the time I lacked access to resources to navigate what was a period of extreme psycho-emotional fragility, but I did have a relationship with my body that pointed me toward tools of healing that I could never have intellectually made my way towards. As I was confronted in the studio each day with the intensity of the memories of violence that would be drummed up through my moving body, I learned how to take care of myself through weaving the intelligence of the more-than-human into my life. This cemented a devotion to studying historical accounts of healing and embodiment that live outside of the purview of our contemporary society, while also entertaining a fascination with scientific studies of memory, neuroscience, and ecological embodiment. As I watched myself transform through the years of developing this practice into a person who could not erase what had happened to her but could sit beside it as though with a companion, I felt the urgency of sharing these tools with other people, and of using the storytelling power of performance to make space for these ecosystems of care to be expressed in front of audiences. Establishing those spaces of care has led me to an interdisciplinary career as a choreographer, researcher, herbalist, and writer who gets to explore the insights of neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, ecology, comparative religion, and studies of sexualities. I am lucky to have found work that has constructed a home for so many threads of interest, and it is deeply meaningful to spend time witnessing the incredible depth and power of people all over the world. Spending a life in devotion to sharing the intelligence of the body and the more-than-human world to establish spaces of care in a world that often lacks them is the most meaningful honor I can think of.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am an interdisciplinary artist working among the web of dance, ritual practice, herbal medicine, and scholarship. My practice can be most easily bisected into two categories, though they are most often integrated: my work as an artist, and my work as a practitioner of the healing arts. Everything that I do is geared toward understanding and being in devotion to the human body as an interstitial, empowered site that leads us to new understandings of lineage, history, relationship, and memory. I believe so deeply in the power of bringing practices of communal embodiment back into our larger sociocultural landscape. Whether it is through teaching people about herbal medicine, guiding them through ritual, performing in a theater, or teaching a dance workshop, I am invested in helping to create a shift in culture where we begin to trust our bodies again. Emphasis there on the word help! I am grateful to be part of a much larger web of artist-practitioners who are engaged in this work as well, and it always feels important to summon them when talking about my own practice.
I use my work as a platform to practice anthropologies of relationship: between self and the body, between two bodies, between the human and more-than-human. The body is a site of alchemy and magic, a symbol of all that we cannot know, and so I love to use the various tools in my working box to create spaces of care where all of these relationships can be examined.
As an artist I create dance and performance works that are meant to provide a homecoming for ethics of care and nourishment to be practiced in community. I use storytelling as a primary device to query the boundary between dream and reality, archive and imagination, embodiment and emotionality. I love telling stories that live on the edges of our cultural imaginations, ones that remind us that there are other ways of knowing, seeing, feeling, sensing. These embodiments remind us of our intricate ties with the ecosystems in which we are planted, and so paint a picture of our kinship with the human and more-than-human beings that surround us. “How can my body be a highway through which I can understand the bodies of other beings?” is a question that I often ask, and is an ethic that I try to share in all community settings where I am fortunate enough to share work. I believe so deeply that an orientation toward this question would create a very different world in which we can all commune, and I love that dancing illuminates so many new possibilities for how it is that we might all learn to live together, and be responsible for each other. I also have the great luck of collaborating with artists and thinkers in other disciplines, and have created bodies of work together with psychologists, musicians, folklorists, filmmakers, neuroscientists, gardeners, architects, archaeologists, and anthropologists; I love this cross-pollination and am passionate about seeing every living being as a dance.
I also own a small business, called Amphora, that is my outpost for all things herbal and the healing arts. This is a virtual space that houses a small-batch apothecary with seasonal herbal formulas, classes, workshops, and one-on-one sessions. All of the offerings under this umbrella are designed to guide people back home into deep embodied relationship with themselves and their surroundings: to point to the wonder that is each moment of being alive, and provide resources for continued healing and delight. I think one of the greatest records ever created is Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life”. So I’m inspired by him when I say that the goal of Amphora is to help everyone tune their bodies to the key of their aliveness.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
A lesson that I’ve had to unlearn, and that I am perpetually practicing unlearning, is the fiction that there is one way to be an artist. I was trained in a very classical dance setting that had a limited definition of what a career in dance looked like. It was supported everywhere you turned: you have to look like this, eat like this, move like this, dress like that, express yourself (or stop expressing yourself) like this. The list goes on, and it is exhausting. In my early career I harbored a lot of insecurity around the reality that I did not want to pursue a traditional path of joining a dance company, performing on Broadway, or touring with a famous musical artist. Admittedly, I do think that my decision to not do any of those things made me seem less desirable, or less of an artist, in the eyes of many people in the industry.
But I could not deny where I was being led by following the thread of my interests and passions, and that I was being called to devote myself to a confluence of disciplines that have made my path as an artist a little less definable. If I had pursued a traditional path I may never have met the plants, wouldn’t have understood my devotion to the more-than-human. What has been helpful to unlearn is that there was never a path to walk in the first place. If we are lucky, we are in a constant state of practicing the creation of our own lives, interests, and ideas. My practices have led me to the work that I am supposed to make, and I hope that remains true throughout my career. Unstitching myself from what was expected of me and liberating myself into a curiosity about what might be possible if I release total control over my final destination has been a challenging, circuitous, and always entertaining pursuit.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
If I had to choose just one, it would be the absolutely mind-boggling, extraordinary people that you meet along the way of following the threads of your creative interests. I have met the most wonderful cast of strange, delirious, adventure magicians through my work and it only continues as I continue to develop my practice. These are people who are brilliant, but who also have these ferocious thumping hearts. Whose passion and obsession with their own inquiries create a bigger imagining of the world, one that feels full of possibility and reverence. They are those who believe in the power of creation to create critical shifts in our world, to deliver the medicine to our communities that we are all desperately in need of. The artists identify the invisible places that are ready to become known, and then create the work to make it so. They are the tricksters, the boundary-walkers, the ones who enliven the space of the everyday. Even as I write obliquely about them, and see very specific people flashing through my mind, I am in awe that I have been allowed to come to know people that have stretched the limits of my understanding in the ways that they have. It is a great privilege to meet other people with open hearts, minds, and inquisitive spirits, to create and imagine together with them. To be embraced and also to be challenged at every corner. This is definitely the most rewarding aspect of being an artist.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.amandakrische.com, http://www.amphorahealingarts.com/
- Instagram: @amanda.krische
Image Credits
Images by Chimera Singer, Julia Discenza, Ebar Studios, and Axelle Groult