inDANCE’s "ROWDIES IN LOVE": Hari Krishnan and the Dream, the Ideal, and the Possibility

Hari Krishnan’s ROWDIES IN LOVE, created for his company inDANCE, captures a complex multiplicity of ideas while also asking a simple and age-old human question: Why do we fall in love?

“That led to this amazing, astonishing, dare I say one-of-a-kind, spark,” Krishnan said.

A culmination of over 35 years of dance-making, ROWDIES IN LOVE brings Krishnan’s investigation of the Indian classical dance form Bharatanatyam boldly into the next phase of his creative arc. Since he was a young dance-maker, Krishnan has been interested in the interplay between the study of a particular movement discipline, such as Bharatanatyam, with global life experiences, such as being an immigrant or being queer.

Krishnan carries that sentiment into ROWDIES, along with his signature “kick-ass technique” used in previous dance pieces. This work pushes that unique choreographic language to new heights.

“It has… a kind of tarnishingly freaky rigor in the movement vocabulary,” Krishnan said. “Why it’s different is that the audiences have never seen anything like this.”

To Krishnan, ROWDIES is singular in its reshaping of ideas around Indian classical dance, contemporary dance, and queer representation of identity. He pushes against the presumed aesthetics of Bharatanatyam and Eurocentric contemporary dance, and challenges the ways in which we think about queer intimacy and sexuality.

“For the first time, I was able to integrate all of these different streams of interest, research, and humanity together in a singular work,” Krishnan said.

Dancers Eury German and Spenser Stroud, who have both danced with inDANCE in previous works, echo how these ideas have developed over time and how they manifest in their performance of ROWDIES.

“Hari is really interested in each individual dancer, the story that they bring to the work” German said. “Which is such a special thing to be a part of, especially from a process based perspective.”

Central to ROWDIES, and much of Krishnan’s work, is an exacting and specific movement vocabulary underpinned with intense physicality, German and Stroud said. Stroud finds the precision of the movement vernacular inspiring, and feels that it allows the work to live and breathe as it continues to develop over time.

“Learning these gestures… it inherently levels the playing field between all the dancers, which makes it a fertile ground for really robust and fruitful relationships that can stand the test of time,” Stroud said.

For German, the rigorous physical demands of the work connect to the themes of queer identity explored in ROWDIES.

“I think of queerness as a sort of horizon idea, something you can’t ever arrive to,” German said, “And I think about this piece in its impossibility with the timing, how incredibly exhausting it is as a performer to do it, the way that I push myself.”

Because of the “impossibility” of the movement, the dancers have become attuned to sitting in disorientation and ambiguity. Moving into this state opens the dancers up to explore the aesthetics of intersectionality–in the body, in the self, and in the world.

For Krishnan, this opening of possibilities stems from the way he approaches Bharatanatyam and contemporary dance from intercontinental perspectives, as well as his refusal to adhere to binaries and oversimplified juxtapositions of movement styles on stage.

“Throughout my professional life, I’ve always been interested in challenging popular notions of culture and cultural stereotypes,” Krishnan said. “So all of my work speaks to that way of subversion and refusal, of protest and resistance.”

In that sense, ROWDIES seeks to intervene not only in the assumed aesthetics of contemporary dance and classical Indian dance, but also in the ways in which we navigate overlapping identities and difficult conversations. It embraces “rowdiness” as a way to investigate the self in connection with others, whether that be on a global scale or through intimate love.

ROWDIES IN LOVE is basically a manifestation of that; the dream, the ideal, and the possibility.

Hari Krishnan

“I always like to reimagine new possibilities of the self and what it means to be an American, global self… that has been a singular, pulsating question I bring into the dance studio, into the classroom and into my daily life.” Krishnan said. “ROWDIES IN LOVE is basically a manifestation of that; the dream, the ideal, and the possibility.”

This Pillow Pick was written by Lucy Kudlinski.