Following her successful performances at On the Boards’ Fragmented Flow Festival in June, Allie Hankins brings By My Own Hand, Part 1: GHOSTING to Performance Works NorthWest Friday, August 5-Sunday, August 7.
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.
The always compelling Hankins 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—things 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.
Allie Hankins is a dancer/performer/maker and resident artist/steward of FLOCK Dance Center, a creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists founded in 2014 by Tahni Holt. In 2013 she co-founded Physical Education, a critical and casual queer cooperative comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto and Lu Yim. Physical Education hosts open reading groups and lectures, curates performances and teaches workshops nationally.
Tickets for the three 8 pm performances are available at risk-reward.org/event/by-my-own-hand and are pay-what-you-can, represented as a sliding scale. If the preferred amount is not listed, contact katie@risk-reward.org. The August 5 show will be ASL translated (a language Hankins is learning when not performing) and will be available for live streaming as well as in person.