Portland-based dancer, performer and performance maker Allie Hankins presents her latest work, By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY, Friday, July 11-Sunday, July 13. The solo work engages the biomechanics of voice and interweaves movement, memory and sound. In this piece, analog tape recorders with looping tapes of varying durations create unexpected rhythmic patterns, rich textures and an imperfect, wavering chorus of voices. Throughout the performance, the recurring sonic fragments are paired—and continually re-paired—with dances, actions and images, generating an ever-evolving soundtrack that layers and distorts the audience’s associations with time, memory and meaning.
Within an intricate tapestry of wails, laughter, overtones and unexplained sounds, MELODY, becomes an excavation and repurposing of the performance series’ own shadow or ghost, blending lamentation, dreamscape, intricacy and humor. At once methodical and mundane, otherworldly and mysterious, the work exists somewhere between an elegy and a manifesto; between a reckoning with the past and an ache for an impossible future. Refusing to settle fully into any single world, MELODY invites audiences into a liminal, continuously shifting space of dissonance, entanglement and transformation.
Performances take place 7:30 pm nightly at Shaking the Tree Theater, 823 SE Grant St. More information and tickets (sliding scale $10-$45) at alliehankins.com/upcoming.