By My Own Hand, Part 5: INVISIBLE TOUCH

By My Own Hand, Part 5: INVISIBLE TOUCH is the final installment in Allie Hankins’ ongoing performance series
By My Own Hand.

Featuring acclaimed Portland artists Linda Austin, claire barrera, keyon gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim, INVISIBLE TOUCH reimagines material from the previous four performances in the series through each performer’s distinct physical language and creative perspective. Drawing from movement, text, sound, and imagery originally generated in Allie’s solo works, the piece unfolds as a collaborative process of translation, interpretation, and rearticulation. Each dancer’s sensibility enlivens and expands the material while destabilizing the idea of a fixed or singular essence in both performance and identity.

Premiering at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), the piece unfolds as a large-scale experimental environment rich with analog technologies and evocative scenic elements:tape recorders with looping cassettes, microphones, shifting lights, and layered vocal scores. Within the work’s architecture of alteration, tape loops of varying lengths create unstable rhythmic patterns and drifting sonic accumulations—a wavering chorus of imperfect voices. These fragments continually pair and re-pair with dance, action, and image, producing an evolving and distorted landscape of memory, influence, and relation. Through strategies of deconstruction, distillation, resurrection, and re-membering, INVISIBLE TOUCH invites audiences into a shifting field of entanglement and transformation to confront notions of finality, authorship, and perception of self.

September 10th–13th, 2026
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
More details coming soon at PICA’s website