ABOUT

ARTIST STATEMENT

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​I am a choreographer, writer, and herbalist creating transformative interdisciplinary ritual experiences through the prism of dance, creative practice, and performance installation.

I utilize the body as a praxis of multilingual consciousness,  creating interdisciplinary performance to query how altered states of the consciousness might anchor us more deeply into relational cognition. Placing dance, herbalism, and scholarship in dialogue, my practice involves the creation of interdisciplinary performance; workshops available to professional, pre-professional, and untrained, otherwise curious embodied beings; ritual facilitation; and long-form research projects that foster cross-disciplinary discovery. Past and current projects include collaborations with neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, quantum physicists, architects, sculptors, musicians, filmmakers, and marine biologists. This embodied discourse finds its locus in using the body to understand our humanity and the place of that humanity in the world that we inhabit.

 

My art aims to give shape to the mischievous possibilities of the body, attempting to reconcile the contradictions that exist in the gray areas: between bodies, between body and landscape, between two ecosystems, between the archive of our body and the imagination of memory, between audience and performer, between our reality and our dreaming, between our emotions and our embodiment, between intellectual, spatial, and embodied cognition, between what we remember and what we forget, between the stories we are told and the ones that we tell ourselves.

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As a professional dancer, choreographer, and herbalist, I create work in service of embodied, emotional, and spiritual belonging. It is my most sincere belief that the performance space offers a unique opportunity to practice alternative modes of being that offer an alternative to our Western, linear, extractive, and progress-oriented culture. 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, memory, and how our communities may flower if we can arrive to each other with a deeper awareness of our bodies and the lands that we inhabit.

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My work is the child of many disciplines: dance, mythopoetics, alchemy, neuroscience, oral storytelling traditions, quantum physics, folk herbalism, and psychology are but a handful of the north stars that guide the work.  These interdisciplinary interests, situated in the performance environment, invite ecological storytelling: a tentacular practice of performance, community engagement, collaboration, character development, and spatial relationship that blurs the boundary between audience and performer, inviting a unique experience of embodiment that provokes emotional and spiritual reflection. This body of work also activates various modes of temporality: evening-length performance, hour-long workshops, years-long social practice projects and long-term interdisciplinary research collaborations honors the influence of time on our ability to reach understanding.

 

I am currently at work on a massive interdisciplinary social practice and performance, Untitled Women's Project, for which I have been collaborating with psychologists, neurologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists over the last eight years. This work merges my skills as a choreographer, herbalist, and archivist to tell the stories of women who have experienced sexual violence and share the tools of herbalism and movement in service of their healing. Through this work I am further cementing my mission as an artist who not only provides transformative experiences through the performance setting, but also facilitates material change in the lives of those who come into contact with my practice.

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BIOGRAPHY

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Known for insightful performance that renegotiates the audience/performer relationship, Amanda Krische is an interdisciplinary movement artist, writer, educator, and herbalist creating socially-engaged work at the intersection of gender studies, mythopoetics, neuroscience, and ecology. Through the prism of dance and multidisciplinary performance, she creates transformative ritual experiences that tell spectacular stories of the everyday while imagining new possibilities of community healing. Her work is used as a platform to practice anthropologies of relationship: between self and the body, between two bodies, between the human and other-than-human.

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Her work has been shown nationally at such venues as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Carnegie Hall, Moody Performance Hall, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, and The Kitchen, as well as in public spaces such as shopping malls, public parks, and gallery spaces. Her work has been commissioned and supported by the National YoungArts Foundation, Grace Farms Foundation, and Bombshell Dance Project. She was the recipient of a 2018 Grant from the Jerome Foundation to support research on mental time travel and the subjective experience of thinking for a new choreographic process at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Amanda has conducted residencies at Omi International Arts Center,, Keshet Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center, Kaatsbaan Cultural Park. She just completed a Spring 2023 residency at The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France where her research focused on the grieving rituals and mythologies syncretic ally developed along the trade routes of the Mediterranean basin, to inform a new multidisciplinary performance work and social practice.

 

Dedicated to the exploration of the new frontiers created through the practice of collaboration, she has contributed choreography to projects with musician Samora Pinderhughes, filmmaker Christian Padron, and numerous psychologists and neurologists who study the body, memory, and mental time travel in the laboratory environment.

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Trained as an herbalist and flower essence practitioner under the tutelage of noted practitioners such as Robin Rose Bennett, Liz Migliorelli, Marysia Miernowska, and Sajah Popham, Amanda also devotes her practice to bringing people into ecological relationship, exploring the possibilities of healing and belonging inherent in their bodies. She does this through workshops, 1:1 consultations, and ritual facilitation.

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She has been on faculty at LaGuardia Arts High School, MOVENYC, and has taught workshops at Gibney, NYU, and Cooper Union School of Art. She has created interdisciplinary movement curriculum in collaborations with the Louis Armstrong House Museum (Queens, NY), the Pina Bausch Foundation (Wuppertal, Germany), and Queens College. Amanda is a YoungArts Winner in Modern Dance and a United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts.

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