India Harville (she/her) is an African American, femme queer, disabled, performance artist and disability justice activist. The unifying thread in India’s work is facilitating people working with their bodies as a vehicle for personal and collective growth and transformation.
India’s chronic health journey has been her most constant influence and most antagonizing dance partner rolled into one, providing equal measures of inspiration and challenge. India seeks to create a dance space where she can fully show up however she is each day. Ultimately India’s work is about radical acceptance as a path to transcendence. India’s work centers the premise that all the ways our bodies show up in the world are perfect and worthy of existing, thriving, creating, ritualizing, and being witnessed. India models this in her own practice, performance, and teaching because she still needs to be reminded of this daily.
India’s performance work addresses racial justice, queer identity, survivorhood, disability, and chronic illness. Including an intersectional analysis in her work and offering a critique around the exclusivity of the mainstream dance world is very important to India. She wants to complicate the conversation around what inclusivity in dance means to not just include superficial accessibility but to also include chronically ill and disabled fat bodies, queer and genderqueer bodies, and all experience levels of dancers. Her aim it to help deconstruct hierarchical structures of dance and to interrupt the racism/ableism/heteronormativity/sizeism inherent in it. She wants to give dance back to the people, to all of the people. She believes if you can breathe, you can dance.
India has had the privilege to travel, perform, and teach dance across the United States and internationally. She has performed with Sins Invalid, The Inclusive Interdisciplinary Ensemble at Cal State East Bay, Dance Exchange, and DanceAbility International, and the Queer Arts Festival.
[ID: India Harville, African American cis woman with curly black locs in pigtails is crawling and reaching for her manual wheelchair with her right hand. She is wearing studded makeup jewelry on her face that mimics teardrops and is looking intensely into the camera. She is wearing a long sleeveless black and white tie-dye dress with a spider web-like pattern.]
