Allie Hankins
(Portland, OR)
By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY
DESCRIPTION
By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY is a solo work that engages the biomechanics of voice and an interweaving of movement, sound, and specter. Join us for a screening of the documentation of this piece that includes analog tape recorders with looping tapes generating unexpected rhythmic patterns, dense textures, and a wavering, imperfect chorus of voices. These sonic fragments are paired—and continually re-paired—with dances, gestures, and images, shaping a world of dissonance, entanglement, and transformation. As if intoning an elegy to her past selves, Allie conjures a space alive with poltergeist activity: dancing and singing within an intricate tapestry of wails, laughter, overtones, and unplaceable sounds. At once methodical and mundane, otherworldly and operatic, the work lives between elegy and manifesto, between haunted house and an architecture of alteration.
Lighting design: Al Knight-Blaine
Costume: Lars Kemp
Performed in July 2025 at Shaking the Tree Theater as part of their Open Space Residency Program.
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 presented as part of the Open Space Residency at Shaking the Tree Theater in Portland, OR, and supported by the Base Residency at Base Experimental Arts + Space in Seattle, WA.