DIY Dance

January 20, 2025

An Interview with Erin Kilmurray

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Erin Kilmurray is a Chicago-based dance artist who is perhaps best known for the queer punk dance and variety performance project The Fly Honey Show. She also recently presented her piece The Function, described as a femme-powered, world-building dance performance. Here, Erin shares more about The Fly Honey Show, The Function, and what drives the DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetic found throughout her work.

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Can you share a little about your own dance and movement history – what shaped you as a mover?

I grew up in the MTV era, so music videos were my entrance into dance. I had a pretty typical suburban studio training, church basement vibes, and was into the competitive dance team scene. I entered into dance from a commercial angle. Some of the things that shifted and added on to that were training in contemporary performance and spending a lot of time in artist-led self-made performances in my early adulthood, making performances in alternative venues, house parties, and night clubs. I really wasn’t making work for the proscenium. That combination of influences in dance and performance culture have shaped what I’m up to today.

What was the impetus behind The Fly Honey Show?

The project started in 2010. Fly Honey started as a way for me and my colleagues to explore dance and movement in the most provocative way we could think of at the time. It started as an experiment in personal expression and comfort. I was interested in burlesque dancing, strip tease, exhibitionism, and the ways it empowered me, my collaborators, and my community at the time. I was interested in what was possible to leverage that experience and let it be bigger than ourselves.

How would you describe The Fly Honey Show to someone unfamiliar with it?

Fly Honey is a performance project and a shape shifter. We are an ever evolving collective and performance group that creates in a variety event framework – cabaret, camp. We focus on promoting our work through a femme-powered queer-celebratory lens. It’s very glittery, joyful, and vulnerable.

How has The Fly Honey Show changed for you?

I started the project with my colleagues and friends when I was 24 in an apartment for one night, and now almost 14 years later, it’s become a much larger scale production that is performing at thousand-seat venues. The reasons why I started it when I was 24 and the reasons why I do it now evolved as we have become different people and more grown. In general, Fly Honey as a project has really changed me, my understanding of the body, my understanding of expression, gender, and sexuality, and the ways in which creation and performance can be a liberatory practice. It’s only gotten deeper, more complicated, and more beautiful as we have expanded more contemporary conversations around the subjects, and we ourselves evolve with it as dancers and performers.

You also produce and choreograph shows outside The Fly Honey Show. For example, you recently produced The Function in Chicago for five sold-out performances. What was the show about?

The Function was born out of a real desire to experiment with the autonomy and agency of being seen. I’m empowered and energized by the collective. The Function is a small collective of dancers who are trained in and practice DIY (do-it-yourself) stage craft, where we devise the material itself and the dancers also design and operate the lights and sound and everything happening inside of it. When I started The Function in the studio, it was the beginning of 2020, and we had just gone into lockdown. The big questions coming to me were how we reimagine structures that are broken. Just as importantly, how do we build them. The labor of imagining, the labor of building, and having the skills to execute it don’t always align. I was interested in asking the group as a collective: What do we want to build, illuminate, destroy? How do we want to imagine a future for ourselves? How do we build it and operate it? The Function is about the labor of building and imagining.

Your work is known for its DIY approach. What does DIY mean to you – do you consider it an artistic choice (in addition to what I assume is an economical choice)?

I think it was a consequence of resource for a really long time, and then that became the aesthetic and what was so interesting to me. The DIY approach has become what inspires me about making performance, specifically the agency. It empowers the individuals in any given project. It empowers and gives them agency to make storytelling choices beyond the movement or composition. That approach has allowed me to have a much more holistic experience within creation and execution. When the work reflects that, it’s energized and deeper for the audience to watch.

The DIY element is born out of the need for the performers to be able to take care of ourselves in any room we walk into. The performance is contained in our own hands. When you’re making work for places like a bar, you don’t have wings. The edges of a performance container are very visible. There’s an audience member a foot and a half in front of your dancing body. It’s all very real and in front of you. Once I started to create in those environments, that proximity started to excite me. People being right there became the thing that was exciting. I feel excited seeing all the elements of the production crafted into the piece itself.

Your work is also known for “exploring the celebrations and liberations of women, queer folks, and the underdog.” How did this become the focus of your work and how has that focus evolved over your career?

I really started making dances because the emotional, physical, psychological, and kinesthetic experience of the ways in which dance and dancing with other people is healing, energizing, and empowering to me. At the beginning of the day, that’s what I’m motivated by. I start there and center my interest to return to dance with joy, approachability, and familiarity. I try to activate and empower the liberatory experience of dancing, because that’s where everything comes from. As a consequence of doing that, I find this way of identifying how my work unfolds and who it is for.

At times, that can mean the societal underdog or at other times a character journey that can happen within my work. When I think about the underdog, it feels less like a specific individual or identity, and more a desire to uplift through dance regardless of skillset or training or motivation or approach. There’s always a little underdog throughline brewing in everything I make. Effort is another way of saying it, though it’s not the same thing. Aside from identity groupings, my work lives in spectacle, effort, playfulness, and pleasure. There’s always something to overcome.

What’s next for you?

Rest for sure. That’s not my strength.

I’ve been working with a colleague of mine named Kara Brody on a duet for some time. It explores liminality, the distance between two people in any relationship, and the multiple realities always happening. It’s called Knock Out and it has a surrealist energy. It has suggested characters and universes that Kara and I embody throughout the piece. It’s about the distance or space between friend, enemy, family, lover, and the complexity of those potentials. The distance between action and inertia, imagination and reality.

I’m thinking a lot about how dance serves us as we age. I’m not sure how that will manifest in a project, but I’m wondering about when athleticism or virtuosity or mobility start to transition, how does dance continue to serve us? Or as community shifts and as relationship to body shifts, how do we continue to dance? I’m interested in the ways in which concepts of femininity translate to youth.  That feels like a huge question for me right now that’s the beginning of something.

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To learn more, visit www.erinkilmurray.com.