KRISSY HARRIS​

I am fascinated by the moving body’s capacity for resilience, fluidity, and expansiveness. I wonder: How do we keep going? What do we source from? How can our internal world energize us to move fully through the space? How does our humanity show up in process and performance? I find that my movement is highly driven by the motivation to both understand and harness responses to these questions. 

 

Anchored in gender studies, feminist studies, and queer theory, my work explores the ways in which the body’s interior environment takes charge and boldly participates in the exterior space. Through movement, I work with femininity as a complex entity and qualitative force, that remains shifting and fluid. Utilizing choreographic structures and scores, how can my work reveal a complex relationship of the internal/external body’s energetic and expressive potential? 

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My dances are episodic and cinematic in structure, and progress with a non-linear narrative. We jump, run, fall, fail, sweat, and mammothly take up space. The movement is highly physical, plays with chaos and abandon, chases after catharsis, and challenges endurance. The group forms of my work access non-hierarchical unison movement and exchanges of leadership, following, and gathering.

I continually seek out ways to keep my process responsive to the shifting socio-cultural and socio-political circumstances that surround us. 

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Recent projects have grappled with questions of: Queer wonder, femininity, 1980s MTV, and rock and roll history. Projects have also drawn on my family history and lived experiences with Eastern European folk dancing and Lithuanian American communities. As methodologies and forms of disruption, my work engages with: physics concepts, somatic memory, isolation, stark interruption, and choreographic stridency. 

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My research is driven by an excitement for cultivating community and inciting joy. It is also informed by training in classical and postmodern dance traditions, and the navigation of my Queer/nonbinary identity. In the spaces that I create within, I activate my awarenesses for the ways in which power dynamics function in group spaces. I reflect on and grapple with the various forms of power that I will inherently hold coming into any dance space. I continually practice ways of centering the collaborating artists that I am leading. I enjoy highlighting the amalgamation of movement histories each person brings into the room. 

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I value commitment, heart, and sincerity within the dance form. From a deep sense of personal responsibility to our work, to an ideological diversity, and a dedication to the dynamism of process – we can discover, generate, practice, and perform to our fullest extent.