I am a queer dancer, artist, and ritual, learning, healing, and celebration facilitator growing, living, dying, and tending heart and community on unceded Mohican, Mohawk, and Haudenosaunee lands, colonially known as the Hudson Valley, New York. I am made by these lands, the lands of Massachusetts, Vermont, and California, and the low lands of the Netherlands, where both my parents and all of my grandparents are from. I am committed to understanding the past and to everything from here on out being work with the intention for the mutual thriving of all life.
I am provoked by a dedication to care, contradiction, collaboration, reckoning and reparations, joy/grief, eros, and humans’ porous, interconnected, and messy natures. I spend time looking for and creating bridges in pedagogy, performance, language, celebration, and personal and collective restoration and transformation. In this process I design and lead workshops, offer one-on-one counseling & sex and gender expansion work, create performances, organize events, write, and make videos, gifts, talismans, and environments for enchantment. I see my work as a conduit for knowing/unknowing what is here and now, for remembering and practicing intimacy at many proximities.
I have worked internationally as a teacher and facilitator, performer, and artist. I completed an MFA in Dance from UCLA in 2008 and a practice-based PhD in Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2022. I am strongly influenced by my background in Euro-American contemporary dance, somatic practices, and performance art, Japanese experimental dance practices, Black & queer social dance, and Buddhist thought and practice. I have been meditating and learning Buddhist philosophy since 1998, having studied most extensively in Thai Forest and Burmese lineages. I am trained in the Internal Family Systems method and am deeply held and inspired by the approach. I completed my level 1 IFS training in 2015 and received one-on-one counseling from IFS synthesizer Richard Schwartz for over 15 years, which I acknowledge as the true portal for my understanding of and intimacy with the model. I am grateful for this access. I am also inspired by and trained in yoga, Urban Tantra, and Bondassage and have studied DREAMWORK with Mala Kline. I am a co-organizer and instigator, with Angela Beallor and Elizabeth Press, of FlagSSS Day in Troy, NY, which entwines celebration and challenge, protest with party, and dissent with a dedication to joy, and organizes parades, rituals, and flag-making workshops.
Some of my closest collaborators and peer teachers are the artists, healers, and misfits Erica Dawn Lyle, Erin Sickler, Lea Keiffer, Eli Nixon, Dori Midnight, Tomislav Feller, Nikola Knežević, Senem Pirler, margit galanter, Angela Beallor, Elizabeth Press, Lailye Weidman, Jason Martin, taisha paggett, Julia Handschuh, Asher Woodworth, and Sara Jane Stoner. I am indebted to these comrades and to my teachers Barbara Carrellas, Deborah Hay, Debra Bluth, Ashon Crawley, Jennifer Monson, Simone Forti, Mala Kline, Richard Schwartz, Thanissara and Kittisaro, and Pascal Auclair, and to teachers and influences I have never met in person including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Bayo Akomolafe, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Min Tanaka, Paul Preciado, Pauline Oliveros, Silvia Federici, Karen Barad, and many others.
Instagram @hansihaha
Email hjvanderkolk (at) gmail (dot) com