Allie Hankins
(Portland, OR)
By My Own Hand, Part 5: INVISIBLE TOUCH
World Premiere
DESCRIPTION
By My Own Hand, Part 5: INVISIBLE TOUCH is the final installment in Allie Hankins’ ongoing performance series, By My Own Hand, which queers autobiography through examinations of manipulation, self-effacement, and systems we use to define ourselves, including psychotherapy, astrology, and dream interpretation. Developed over the past several years through a sequence of solo works, this culminating chapter marks Allie’s first-ever group performance.
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.
Director: Allie Hankins
Choreographers: Allie Hankins with Linda Austin, claire barrera, keyon gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim
Performers: Linda Austin, claire barrera, keyon gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim
Lighting Designer: Al Knight-Blaine
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Allie Hankins is a dancer, choreographer, sound artist, and facilitator who has been producing and performing experimental works in Portland, OR since 2013. Her work centers on deconstruction and the destabilization of persona through uncanny physicality, labyrinthine logic, and a razor-sharp wit. She has self-produced nine original works and toured her productions to San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Seattle, WA; New York, NY; Berlin, DE; Minneapolis, MN; Albuquerque, NM; and Cork, IE. In the Pacific Northwest, her works have been commissioned by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, OR and On the Boards in Seattle, WA. Allie’s interdisciplinary practice has led to her professional engagements with choreographers Milka Djordjevich (Los Angeles, LA), Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis, MN), Julien Previeux (Paris, FR), and Ruairi Donovan (Cork, IE); and Portland artists Linda Austin, Takahiro Yamamoto, keyon gaskin, Tahni Holt, Danielle Ross, claire barrera, and Emma Lutz-Higgins. Allie has performed with these artists at esteemed venues such as New York Live Arts, New York, NY; Jacob’s Pillow, Becket, MA; DiverseWorks, Houston, TX; and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. In 2013, she co-initiated the ongoing Queer performance cooperative Physical Education (PE) with keyon gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. PE produces festivals, hosts reading groups, and teaches workshops nationally, promoting accessibility and critical engagement with performance in Portland, OR and beyond. Allie is a co-steward of FLOCK Dance Center, where she serves as a key facilitator of Portland's experimental dance community through residency and public engagement programs. Her avant-sound trio, LTD Time, with Shao Way Wu and John Niekrasz, performs at raves, record stores, and galleries. Allie has been awarded residencies at Centrum, Ucross Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, Caldera Arts, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Robert Rauschenberg Residency. Her work has been funded by The Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, National Performance Network, Oregon Community Foundation, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is a recipient of the 2024 Miller Foundation’s Spark Award for Oregon Artists in Performance.
SUPPORT
This work was made possible by the National Performance Network Creation Fund and Documentation & Storytelling Fund; The Ann J. and William Swindells Fund of Oregon Community Foundation (via the Oregon Community Foundation Creative Heights Grant); the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Portland Arts Project Grant; and Christopher Rauschenberg and Janet Stein. By My Own Hand, Part 5: INVISIBLE TOUCH was co-commissioned by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, RED EYE COLLABORATION, Velocity Dance Center, and NPN.