By My Own Hand, Part 2: TRANSPARENCY

Allie Hankins’ performance series, By My Own Hand, threads together ideas of manipulation, suicide, sleight of hand, and self-reliance, and queers notions of autobiography and self-reflection. In Part 1: GHOSTING (2022), Allie populated the space with light, shadow, haunted objects, dancing, and songs. Soundtracked by five tape recorders playing echoes and reverberations of past performances, rehearsals, and experiments, the show was an excavation and repurposing of the performance’s shadow or ghost. In Part 2: TRANSPARENCY, this excavation continues as a series of solos choreographed by Linda Austin, claire barrera, keyon gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim, and performed by Allie. Each of the five solos is composed of elements (choreography, props, songs) from Part 1, and each solo may replicate, distort, or exaggerate any parts of Part 1 that the choreographers wish. Through the slippery processes of deconstruction, distillation, resurrection, and re-membering, Part 2: TRANSPARENCY reveals an aftermath of contending methods of makers and shared histories of friends and colleagues and confronts notions of finality, authorship, and perception of self.

Photo by Chelsea Petrakis

By My Own Hand, Part 1: GHOSTING

With the word “ghost” as a thread to tie together ideas of self-effacement, the impossibility of memory, the slipperiness of language and associative thinking, GHOSTING centers deconstruction. It questions attempts we make at containment; at naming; at establishing lines and boundaries. Soundtracked by echoes and reverberations of past performances, rehearsals, and experiments, the show is an excavation and repurposing of the performance’s shadow or ghost. Allie populates the space with light, shadow, haunted objects, dancing, and songs as she toys with the perceived power of the systems we use to define ourselves such as astrology, psychotherapy, and dream interpretation. As the piece unfolds, GHOSTING coyly points to the futility of upholding a fixed persona in life, or in performance.

Photo by West Smith

/ə ˈsɪŋgəl pɪŋk klaʊd/

Inspired by surrealist painters such as Gertrude Abercrombie and Leonora Carrington, Linda Austin and Allie Hankins weave movement, objects, words, and song to celebrate (or is it bemoan?) our unstable, unpredictable world and the revelations yielded by a rigorous yet playful devotion to unlikely pairings and (re)combinations. Along the way: a hyena, rustling onion skins, swirls of darkness and light, and a big pink surprise.

Photo by Chelsea Petrakis

When We

Set in an austere world characterized by coded language, penetrating focus, and biting humor, When We is a dance/performance duet by Allie Hankins (PDX) and Rachael Dichter (SF). With a steadfast presence, Allie & Rachael skillfully utilize the expansive and charged moments between events to slowly reveal a world where tension is currency, silence is sustenance, and surreality is a given.

Photo by Ashley Sophia Clark

(scorpio) 33/33

On my 33rd birthday I started this series--I made a video a day for the first 33 days of my 33rd year. (scorpio) 33/33 is a determined and whimsical experiment in the rigor of play, and a distillation of unanticipated and fortuitous creative energy.

Now Then: A Prologue

Part lecture, part choreographic exposition, Now Then: A Prologue is a solo performance that affirms the futility of lust and its anticlimactic arc—from the first intoxicating charge of the unattainable through the subsequent stumbling pursuit of desire. It's a slyly comedic work that weaves seduction, stand-up comedy motifs, and forced voyeurism in an eager attempt to exhibit the extraordinary and cumbersome illogic of love and sex.

Photo by Ashley Sophia Clark

Like a Sun That Pours Forth Light but Never Warmth

Like a Sun That Pours Forth Light but Never Warmth serves as a correspondence between choreographer Allie Hankins and Ballet Russes danseur noble Vaslav Nijinsky. Against a backdrop of lurid color and gold-bathed muscle, Hankins negotiates the impermanence of identity, and the volatility of solitary retrospection. Appropriating Nijinsky’s obsessive repetition, approach-avoidance, sexual deviancy, and struggle with gender identity, Hankins constructs an amalgamation of herself and the notoriously troubled dancer. Embodying movement’s capacity to engender lust, repugnance, confusion, and ultimately elation, Like a Sun inhabits the space between confinement and liberation, reality and fantasy, myth and man. As imitation dissolves into disorientation, false memories, and transfiguration, Hankins endures with a determination unique to bodies in spiritual crises—confronting isolation and desperation in the pursuit of corporeal transcendence.

Photo by Steven Miller