Healing and Rites of Passage

Insight into a new performance, premiering September 10, 2023

Image: Illustration of a medieval grieving ritual

What do we do when an emotion becomes so big that it spills over the edges of our body? What happens when we are not sure how to dance with that overwhelm, and so we create a smaller orbit for it: condensing what is wild until it keeps quiet under the floorboards of a room in our memory palace, where we might not need to look for a while? And what happens when we do need to look at it, but are so distanced that we can feel the memory in our body, cannot tell its stories, cannot give our bodies over to the way that it needs to move through us?

There was once a time in our human history when these moments of overwhelm had their own map to walk. Rites of passage, always a community endeavor, facilitated the embodied marking of Time. This embodiment is a refusal to skip over the invitation that life has passed along, wearing the face of change. It is a refusal to accept the very flat idea that we have control over our timelines, and that time moves only in one direction, instead of digging many roots down into fertile soil, branching in multitudinous direction, leading to a source that the human eye cannot detect. It is the embodiment of Time bending in on itself through the lens of elevating sensation, emotion, and community care. It is an acceptance that we cannot walk alone, that the joy of life is in the biodiversity of our ecosystems: how much we allow other people into our orbit, how we are able to make time for the processing of information that comes through our days, how we are able to teach our bodies to hold more emotion, possibility, and transformation. 

I am writing with some thoughts that point obliquely to the threads I’m pulling in preparation for a new performance premiere on September 10th. Taking place in NYC at Arts on Site at both 6.30pm and 8.30 pm, this new work will be sewing together the many disciplines that have held me over the last years, and to which I currently devote my life: movement, performance, ritual, herbal medicine, and community healing. This word healing has been a long-time curiosity of mine and, as I have mentioned to many people, is something I have developed a mild allergy to. What is healing and who does it belong to? As with any word that becomes so overused that it travels away from its origin story, often becoming a weapon that is used against those who do not fit its description, I have many bones to pick with the way that concepts of healing have been weaponized by capitalist agenda. I accept that life is full of contradictions, though, and so I cringe through my own use of the word until I can locate another language for what I believe in: that healing is the ability to sit with all that is, to have a more ecologically-minded process of telling our stories, moving them through us, and sharing them with others. That healing, to me, is best described as the process by which we learn to live harmoniously with all that happens within and with-out us, to forfeit control and deeply listen to the patterns, signals, and invitations that are extended to us by the web that exists around us. To acknowledge that we are but one part of a vast whole, and that we must wrestle and dance with all that we are and how we are changed and shaped by the world around us. I am always at ease when I remember that storytelling is a communal act, and that everything that happens to us is a story to tell, to metabolize, to chew on, to digest. Our only task is to follow its plot until the story becomes something else to follow, and to get curious about the multispecies and interdisciplinary ways that we can give voice to those tales and the characters in them. It means shaking our grief through our body when it comes, it means howling when we have cause for celebration, it means activating the feral body and letting new languages be birthed through extending our arms toward the life that we are living. 

In the last years my primary lens of research has been focused on the grieving rituals and mythologies of the Mediterranean basin, as performed by women in pre-Christian indigenous traditions. This research, both academic and embodied, has led me through many of my own rites of passage, and has completely changed what I think of as the purpose of performance. Performance is, first and foremost, a place to gather. It threads a web through which transformation occurs. It acknowledges the presence of each person in the room, and hopefully also leads to the empowerment of recognition: recognizing yourself in a story being told, the invitation that is being extended by the way that story lands in your body, and allowing others to recognize your presence in the space. It is also a space which is an origin story, or a point of beginning. I have long held the hope, as a creator of performance work, that what occurs inside of a theater (or the semblance of a theater, if a work is site specific), is just the beginning of pulling a thread that will unfurl in each being in the days to come. This is the way of traditional medicine: to open a portal, to cross a threshold, to signal toward otherwise possibilities, and to welcome a person to walk into that portal, across that threshold, to step into an embodiment of new possibilities.

This new work on September 10th will be a collection of new ideas, and I must say: it is a work-in-progress. I am trying to challenge my own desire for perfection, and am allowing myself to share with you some ideas that are new, that want to be seeded in community, and which need the presence of witnesses to come fully alive as we continue digging into the work that wants to come forward.

I would be so extraordinarily grateful if you would be there for what is sure to be a deeply meaningful evening. 

You can purchase tickets here for the 6:30pm performance https://www.artsonsite.org/events-1/amanda-krische

Or here for 8:30pm performance:

https://www.artsonsite.org/events-1/amanda-krische-2

Thank you so much for considering spending the evening with us. I will be sharing over the next couple of weeks more about the stories we are telling and ideas we are considering, so keep an eye on your inbox!

With care + gratitude,

Amanda