Allie Hankins – Like a Sun That Pours Forth Light but Never Warmth

allie-ancient-lakes-007

Allie Hankins’ full-length debut is on the way!

Allie’s first performance in Portland was at the 2011 Risk/Reward Festival. She choreographed and performed a piece titled By Guess & By God under the moniker Part & Parcel with fellow dancer Mary Margaret Moore. Since then, she has become one of the most most talked about artists in PDX. We can’t wait to behold Like a Sun That Pours Forth Light but Never Warmth after several years of development!

BIO

Allie Hankins is a choreographer, performer, and researcher currently residing in Portland and Seattle. She is an inaugural member of FLOCK — a new dance center that serves as a creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists — and a founding member of Physical Education: a casual/critical reading & research/dance & performance body comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lucy Lee Yim. In Portland Allie works/collaborates with choreographer Tahni Holt, composer Jordan Dykstra, Noor, and Zac Pennington (Parenthetical Girls/Crying). Her work has been presented at On the Boards’ Northwest New Works Festival and Velocity Dance Center in Seattle, Conduit Dance and Studio 2 in Portland, the Robert Rauschenberg 19th St. Project Space in New York, and various venues in Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Vienna, and Berlin.   

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

A correspondence between choregrapher Allie Hankins and Ballet Russes danseur noble Vaslav Nijinsky.

Appropriating Nijinsky’s obsessive repetition, approach-avoidance, and sexual deviancy, Hankins constructs an amalgamation of herself and the notoriously troubled dancer. As imitation dissolves into disorientation and false memories, Hankins endures with a persistance  unique to bodies in spiritual crises—confronting isolation and desperation in the pursuit of corporeal transcendence.

Against a backdrop of lurid color and gold-bathed muscle, Hankins negotiates the impermanence of identity, and the volatility of solitary retrospection. Embodying movement’s capacity to engender lust, repugnance, confusion, and ultimately elation, Like a Sun inhabits the space between confinement and liberation, reality and fantasy, myth and man.

ABOUT VASLAV NIJINSKY

Nijinsky (1890-1950) remains, by reputation, the outstanding male dancer of at least one century, and a pathbreaking choreographer as well. Celebrated for his spectacular leaps and sensitive interpretations, Nijinsky became a soloist at the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, in 1907, appearing in such classical ballets as Giselle, Swan Lake, and The Sleeping Beauty. In 1909 he joined Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and the company’s choreographer Michel Fokine created Le Spectre de la rose, Petrushka, Schéhérazade, and other ballets expressly for him.Yet his life dramatically demonstrates the uncertain line dividing genius and madness. The “god of dance” spent 30 of his 61 years in the grip of infantile rages and catatonic withdrawal; neither Freud, institutionalization, sedation nor countless insulin shock-treatments could halt his increasing derangement.

WATCH A VIDEO TRAILER FOR LIKE A SUN THAT POURS FORTH LIGHT BUT NEVER WARMTH

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READ MORE ABOUT NIJINSKY

SOURCES:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8184-0535-8 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/415147/Vaslav-Nijinsky

Enjoy this unique view into the creative process of Like a Sun That Pours Forth Light but Never Warmth by Allie Hankins. These posts were taken from Allie’s blog http://casting-long-shadows.tumblr.com/ – follow her there for more in the future!

Scroll from bottom to top to view these in chronological order, or scroll top down to peel back through time.

With Laura in the Studio.
March 13, 2013
Photos by Matt Olson
Posted 5 months ago

GoPro Camera tests for Matt Olson.
Photo by Matt Olson.
“Yes, it’s recording.”
Posted 1 year ago

 

On the beach with Laura.

March 13, 2013

Photo by Matt Olson

Posted 1 year ago

 

 

You are traveling on a train. You are speaking on a mobile phone. The train enters a tunnel. The connection breaks up and is lost. What happens here? The conversation is abruptly curtailed; you are pained, frustrated – relieved? Whatever their nature, there will be affects. The telephone induces a defection and a crisis of the self: in telephonic communication parts of oneself, one’s consciousness and senses, are donated to the other, one gives one’s attention, one gives ear. And when the line goes down we are returned to the hic et nunc of our physical circumstances without the phatic niceties (“thanks for calling, see you soon”) that not only provide formal closure and break our communicative contract but prepare us for the psychic shock of being alone once more. But, as all who use this technology will know, in the event of disconnection, as the signal strength dies and the state of full, pristine connectivity bleeds into a rebarbative silence, a transitional sonic disfiguration occurs: the voice of the interlocutor suffers violent torsions, a garbled – oddly aquatic – strangulation. What happens here?

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction, by Martin Dixon

I posted this on my other blog a while back, but it means something different to me now that I’m on an island with limited reception and countless “dropped calls.”

“Psychic shock of being alone once more.”

It’s been an incredible month. It’s been a lonely month. I can’t believe it’s been a month.

 

 

"Anatomy of Spasm"  (experiment)

“Anatomy of Spasm”

(experiment)

Posted 1 year ago

 

Photo by Matt Olson

Photo by Matt Olson

Posted 1 year ago

 

Photo by Matt Olson

Photo by Matt Olson

Posted 1 year ago

 

Photo by Matt Olson

Photo by Matt Olson

Posted 1 year ago

 

Performance day.

Performance day.

Posted 1 year ago

 

Version 2: With James.

 

And what is a month in Florida without at least one selfie on my bike riding toward the sunset with the wind in my hair? 

And what is a month in Florida without at least one selfie on my bike riding toward the sunset with the wind in my hair?

Posted 1 year ago

 

Every “dance” I make is also a novel, apparently. Thank you for understanding.  "muscle punch arms—> antennae—>retrograde elastic—>yourself disappearing QUICKLY BY FOLDING."  "MORE MISSHAPEN PEARL!!!"

Every “dance” I make is also a novel, apparently. Thank you for understanding.

“muscle punch arms—> antennae—>retrograde elastic—>yourself disappearing QUICKLY BY FOLDING.”

“MORE MISSHAPEN PEARL!!!”

Posted 1 year ago

 

Photo by Laurie Lambrecht.

Photo by Laurie Lambrecht.

Posted 1 year ago

 

Dancing in a white room is surprisingly disorienting.

Posted 1 year ago

 

Fellow artist-in-residence Matt Olson found these lights in the basement of the big studio today. Possibilities.

Fellow artist-in-residence Matt Olson found these lights in the basement of the big studio today. Possibilities.

Posted 1 year ago

Allie+Laura=Best Shirt Buddies on boating day. Photo by Laurie Lambrecht.

Allie+Laura=Best Shirt Buddies on boating day. Photo by Laurie Lambrecht.

Posted 1 year ago

 

 

 

It finally warmed up today. I’m attempting to put the new vocabulary in new containers.

 

Posted 1 year ago

 

March 8.

Today I will let go of the notion of steps and instead look at movement as a series of states. A state always suggests a particular consciousness or mindfulness hanging in the air while you are moving or even when you remain motionless. But is a state a picture or a sort of vibrating image? It brings up the question of what one is actually creating in dance, live art, or performance. Images or pictures? Motion or action? Are we choreographing transitions between images or creating motion? Maybe we interact with a chain of events happening without creating images.

This can be a physical research: throw myself into a physical situation and, wherever I end up, try to recognize the place I am in. I want to understand the physical structure of that state and try to separate it from the moment when I start to represent, when I give names to the material or sensation. Can I dissociate the moment of recognizing where I am from the representation of it? Am I a person standing or am I a person standing staring out to sea? Where am I and where is my weight? And can I be between these two things?

Maybe states are a different way of trying to understand feelings (I’m full of ‘em out here). That is, the feelings I have and how I embody them. The modern dance tradition aimed to evoke and represent emotions, whereas states seem more related to feelings or rather the concept of “felt sense” (maybe?). Feelings come and go. I cannot always name them. Sometimes many feelings are present at the same time (like today). Feelings dwell in the realm of uneasiness, anxiety, or desire—perhaps these terms are too big, but they tie states to a “felt sense,” to sensorial issues and physical existence, to sensation without addressing them immediately in a theatrical or psychological way.

I’m really lonely today.

 

 

My new friend and fellow Artist in Residence, Laura Brunellière.

My new friend and fellow Artist in Residence, Laura Brunellière.

Posted 1 year ago

 

A rare moment of lightness. Trying to remember lightness.

Posted 1 year ago

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Structure.

Structure.

Posted 1 year ago

 

Today.

Today.

Posted 1 year ago

 

Red Shoes screening at the Rauschenberg Residency, courtesy of Mimi Pond.  Dying Dancing

Red Shoes screening at the Rauschenberg Residency, courtesy of Mimi Pond.

Dying Dancing

Posted 1 year ago

 

Thankful for a familiar face and a shared vocabulary.

Thankful for a familiar face and a shared vocabulary.

Posted 1 year ago

 

And begin…

And begin…

 

I shared this video with the other residents last week. This video, and an essay called “Nijinsky’s Golden Slave” by Kevin Kopelson inspired me to begin making my solo “Like a Sun That Pours Forth LIght but Never Warmth” that I continue to work on here in Florida.

This is Jorge Donn dancing “Bolero” as choreographed by Maurice Bejart. The famous orchestral piece was commissioned by Ida Rubinstein (who danced opposite Nijinsky’s Golden Slave in the ballet “Scheherazade”) for a ballet choreographed by Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava Nijinska in 1928.

Jorge Donn has also portrayed Nijinsky in another ballet by Bejart called “Nijinsky Clown de Dios”

So the glistening, sinewy body of this man, Jorge Donn, was a site of intersection/collision of all these historical interests of mine. And in this video we get to spy on him backstage as he prepares for this monumental task, and then we see him after he has been dancing like mad for 18 minutes, and the explosion of energy at the end—the moment when he faces extreme exhaustion and only barely escapes complete failure—makes me want to jump out of my skin.

 

 

March 2.

“Now it is inside my body that something is happening, the body is the source of movement. There is no longer the problem of place, but rather of the event. It is not I who attempts to escape from my body, it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of a spasm.” —Gilles Deleuze

Spasms call attention to the kinetic potentials of individual bodies—pushed into movement, caught in stillness, reverberating in between.

Spasm interrogates the visual through the kinetic, body through language, expression through emotion, performer through witness, pain through pleasure.

So, today’s work:

  • Consideration of movement as something interior
  • Immobility as a momentary pause of a tremulous choreography of isolation
  • Torquing language of the photographic to speak as choreographic proposal (Images of Nijinsky are all I have to work from)
  • Stillness vs. mobility, recognition vs. incommunicability
  • An exposure of flesh that reveals little intimacy or erotic force as it turns away from and into itself in a contraction of muscle and sinew (my back, my breasts)
  • To obscure an image the very moment you attend to it
  • Athleticism contained within the tension of a gesture
  • Choreography as an unstable site that disputes representation and signification
  • Sever choreography’s anticipated relationship to mobility and stasis and graceful expertise. Subvert a virtuosic notion of dance.

Choreography is given to the erotic: it tests out, seduces, and proposes without ever saying anything. Choreography is a corporeal passage in which the body is both a question and an inaccessible answer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Weeks House with a Rauschenberg and Ann. Photo by Matt Olson.

At the Weeks House with a Rauschenberg and Ann.

Photo by Matt Olson.

 

 

Where I work.

Where I work.

 

 

My home for the next month.

My home for the next month.

 

 

Photo by Steven Miller

Photo by Steven Miller

 

 

What did you think of this years Risk/Reward Festival of New Performance?

We want to hear your thoughts, reviews, questions, comments and more! Your feedback will help shape future iterations of these artists works.

SOUND OFF BY COMMENTING ON THIS THREAD!

Erin Pike (Seattle, WA) – That’swhatshesaid

Pike6_PG (2)

The female gender seems to be a topic on everyone’s lips these days, especially in media. What better way to explore that idea than through Erin Pike’s solo performance That’swhatshesaid at Risk/Reward Festival? The festival is next week. We are PUMPED!

BIO

Erin Pike (creator/performer) is a Seattle artist originally from Oregon, where she studied dance and theatre. Her new work is influenced by both mediums but exists outside of either category. Recent performances includes Her Score (Bryan Ohno Gallery),
SPD: Segway Patrol Dance (NEPO 5K Don’t Run), and Timing and Stain (2012 NWNW Festival). Additionally, Erin has worked as a theater artist with Pony World Theatre, Macha Monkey Productions, Washington Ensemble Theatre, 14/48: The World’s Quickest Theatre Festival, The Endangered Species Project, and Annex Theatre.

 

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Erin Pike assigned local playwright Courtney Meaker a challenge: write a one-person performance using only female dialogue from the most-produced plays in America. That’swhatshesaid is a brutal theatrical exercise in isolation. When a female character is left alone with no male protagonists to support, her behaviors gain both chaos and clarity, resulting in a concentrated dose of the modern theater’s intended role for women.

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Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE) (Portland, OR) – (after thought)

PETE 1

PETE’s work is visual and visceral, and in the past two years, they have hit Portland hard in the gut with their productions of R3 and Song of the Dodo. Their shared language and theatrical prowess comes to life in for this year’s festival through collaborators Amber Whitehall, Jacob Coleman, Judson Williams, Cristi Miles, Mark Valadez, Miranda K Hardy, Peter Ksander, and Jenny Ampersand. Risk/Reward festival-goers are IN FOR IT.

BIO

Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble was founded in 2011 by a group of mid-career theater artists dedicated to creating contemporary works of performance. PETE is an artist cooperative dedicated to creating new theatrical events that reify the relationship between audience and artist through original, ensemble-generated pieces and innovative interpretations of classical text. Inspired by a contemporary design aesthetic, inventive storytelling modes, and heightened emotional honesty, their work is visceral, raw and revealing.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Work-in-progress from a play without words. A story for the image-hungry, designed in rigorous physicality and visceral sound-scape. Boys seeking fresh air chase a radical kind of presence and verity. They hunt an uncompromising experience of aliveness as it is in this room, in this moment. They exist in the space that is after thought.

VIEW A SAMPLE OF A PAST PETE PRODUCTION

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Laura Heit (Portland, OR) – The Letting Go

Laura Heit 6

Laura’s work transcends the word “puppetry;” her work, seen through the wide lens of film or as small as a circus of matchboxes, is always a surprise. We can’t wait to see what Laura will bring to Risk/Reward Festival next week!

BIO

Laura Heit is a Puppetry artist and experimental filmmaker who has been making puppet
shows/performance work and films nationally and internationally for over 15 years. Disquieting and evocative, her films and performances seamlessly cross genres to unfold poetic visual narratives. Heit employs a strong handmade aesthetic, an irreverent sense of humor, drawing, puppetry and animation, to bring together ideas and stories about phantoms, ghosts, love, loss, and invisibility.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

The Letting Go is a performance that includes live puppetry combined with projected shadows, animation, and sound. My intention is to build a performance that is constantly transforming our perceptions between live/recorded and the living/departed to create new perpetually shifting in-betweens. I want the audience to leave mindful of the things in our world that we cannot explain and to reawaken our curiosity in the things we cannot see.

VIEW A WORK SAMPLE OF THE LETTING GO

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ilvs strauss (Seattle, WA) – Manifesto

Ilvs Strauss - by Tim Summers

When we heard the words “California Red Sea Cucumber,” we were intrigued. ilvs strauss (pronounced “Elvis”) is a majorly multi-disciplined artist, working in just about every form of art possible. We are really looking forward to what ilvs brings with her solo performance, Manifesto!

BIO

ilvs strauss (b. 1979) is a Seattle based writer, dancer, musician, performance artist whose work ranges from haiku poetry, to anamorphic outdoor sculptures, to illustrated storytelling (aka Slide Shows), to narrated dance performance. She gravitates towards topics of identity (gender, bi-racial, queer), nature, life purpose, spirituality, sense of place and perspective.
sHe enjoys playing with language: the structure of, the building blocks of.
shE works to infuse her art with heartfelt humor and sincerity. 

 

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

 

Manifesto is a solo show that employs a California Red Sea Cucumber as a vehicle for exploring the topic of womanhood. With no set, minimal costumes and a few handmade, larger than life props, ilvs performs a subtle, detailed dance to the tune of a clear, concise voice over narrative.

VIEW A WORK SAMPLE OF MANIFESTO

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The Neutral Fembot Project (Portland, OR) – Untitled #______

The Neutral Fembot Project

Collaboration is the bread and butter of theatre. By bringing these three devisors together, (Grace, Camille, and Anne – established artists in their own rights), we see collaboration in action as these artists push us in and out of our comfort zones. Risk/Reward… Get ready!!

BIO

Untitled # ______ is a performance project created in collaboration with theater artists Grace Carter, Camille Cettina and Anne Sorce, with composer Ron Mason Gassoway. Individually they bring over ten years of experience as actors, directors, writers, devisors and producers.

 

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Untitled # ______ explores the work and process of visual artist Cindy Sherman from a performative perspective. What are the moments in between images? How does disguise reveal vulnerabilities, iconic personas and the “real self?” Through physical language, Untitled # ______ illuminates these themes using posture, gaze, and… wigs! Of course.

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Lucy Lee Yim (Portland, OR) – Devastation Melody

LUCY YIM 8 - slides

Dancer/choreographer Lucy Lee Yim’s works provoke thought, invite you to meditate on an idea. And the Northwest performance world is excited about her – very excited. Her works have been seen all over Portland, the Northwest, and beyond. We can’t wait to see what she’s created for the Risk/Reward Festival this year!  

BIO

Lucy Lee Yim is a dance artist who has performed locally and nationally since 2005.  Unreliant on old methods of story making, Yim insist on new ways, presenting in‐the‐moment, sensation‐born fragments of thought and imagery. The collaged identity of her work has been described as a marbled fantasy-fable with degrees of fatty narrative intentionally trimmed; a body in constant conversation with the parts that are culturally confused, oppressed, and gendered. Her work nods to more traditional and virtuous forms of dance, but a stranger, more bizarre paradigm is the ultimate objective. Identity is complex; so is our experience of it. 

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Devastation Melody looks into sadness and sorrow as if they were provocative objects. The dance starts with one action that evolves with time, rarely resting, even in stillness. Performed by the choreographer herself, Devastation Melody shifts from moments of meaning to moments of wonder, producing a memory, much like a song.

VIEW A WORK SAMPLE OF DEVASTATION MELODY

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Kyle Loven – Loss Machine

Loss Machine Promo 4

We’re incredibly excited to welcome Kyle Loven and his team back to Portland for our first full-length presentation by a former Risk/Reward Festival artist! Kyle performed a short piece of his epic Moon Show 143 at the 2011 Festival and it premiered in his hometown of Minneapolis’ at the prestigious Guthrie Theater in late 2013.

BIO

Kyle Loven is a Seattle-based performance and visual artist. His work combines puppetry, projections, objects, sound, and other art forms with the human presence. His live performances (B, my dear Lewis, Crandal’s Bag, Loss Machine, Moon Show 143) have been seen in Amsterdam, Taipei, New York, Minneapolis, Seattle and other US cities. Kyle is the recipient of grants from the Jim Henson Foundation, 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. Awards include a 2011 Spotlight Award from Seattle Magazine and the Innovation in Puppetry Award at the 2013 National Puppetry Festival. Ham Sandwich will premiere this June as a part of On the Boards’ NW New Works Festival.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Part installation, part image-driven theater, Loss Machine unearths a world of lost items, misplaced thoughts, and fractured journeys all housed within an intricately detailed set.

In a tower filled with life’s debris, a collection of characters move through an ever-changing apparatus with their shared emotional journey driving the mechanical process forward. This intimate one-man show combines puppetry, objects, light, sound, and original music in a visual exploration of loss and discovery.

WATCH A VIDEO TRAILER FOR LOSS MACHINE

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