DANCING WITH GHOSTS

At her April 12th showing at Base: Experimental Arts + Space in Seattle, Allie Hankins invited her audience into a ghostly realm where memory, technology, and physicality collided in an uncanny fashion. Presented as an “Entry Point” for her residence at Base to develop the solo By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY, this work-in-progress preview was an eerie and deeply personal meditation on death and presence in both spiritual and technological ways.

The set includes a table draped in a blue tablecloth featuring a large-scale line drawing of a human face. At the beginning of the performance, the whole table begins to slide diagonally downstage, becoming an animated haunt in its own right. Disembodied recordings of Hankins voice begin to play as the table makes its way center stage. Her recorded laughter begins to mix with the sound of her live amplified cackle as, from underneath the table, she pulls the tablecloth off, and reveals she is the “ghost” on the mic haunting it. This tableau set the tone: objects would not remain inert in Hankins’ world—they would be charged and changed with her interactions.

Stacks of cassette tapes, many handheld tape recorders, and a few amps and lights on stands are set up strategically onstage. Hanging from the light grid above, microphones dangle like ghost traps from the movie Ghostbusters. One of the cabled mics hangs just inches above a tape recorder and stack of cassettes. Hankins interacts with these items methodically, recording her voice, pausing to dance and respond to the soundscape she creates, speaking to the audience as she adjusts items on stage. Hankins continues altering and looping her voice throughout the piece. At one point she spells out the word “ghost” into five separate devices over and over again. The repetitious nature of the recorded voice distorts time—past, present, and future selves collide in a sonic hall of mirrors. At one point she says, “We all have a ghost inside of us.” It was more than a poetic refrain—it was a call to action as she activated her body, voice, and the various objects surrounding her to make the invisible tangible. 

This dance with sound was more than just auditory—it became sculptural. Hankins reorganizes the tablecloth with the giant face, situating it on a light stand on stage. This new ghost floats upwards as she raises the height of its base, doubling the face in size and presence. Later, she began using one of the hanging mics like a pendulum, letting it swing back and forth. Little by little, she knocks over a precarious tower of stacked cassette cases, turning cause and effect into something rhythmic and revelatory. Another moment of mic pendulum action created a sort of feedback installation. Tones were created as the mic repeatedly swung back and forth past an amplifier, showcasing an intentional sonic “problem” that became a song to dance to.

Hankins’ approach to composition—as something sonic, physical, and reactive—was deeply choreographic, even when no body moved onstage. I wonder, too, about the choreography of her singing voice (her voice is singular and strong, reminiscent of early Kate Bush). At the post-showing Q&A, Hankins says, “Composing sound on machines feels like choreography because it’s spatial and temporal.” This sentiment rang especially true during a section where she danced in response to the swinging mic’s feedback “song”—a duet with the artifact of amplification itself. Her swiftly moving limbs echo the same lines and arcs of the swinging cable, but she also looks into the audience as though we are a part of the dance. Is she imagining and dancing with the ghosts inside of all of us?

MELODY isn’t only about ghostly machines. It’s also a raw self-portrait. “It is a solo. It is a self-portrait. It is an autobiography,” she noted during the Q&A. There were moments of vulnerability, humor, and generous absurdity that made the work feel deeply lived-in. At one point, Hankins screams into the blue tablecloth (now wadded up on the stage), her voice muffled and redirected as she crouches and slides her head across the floor in a dance of frustration. At another moment, she uses a Whirly Tube toy as a sound source, its high pitched tone taking over the space as she twirls it passionately above her head, singing along with the tone. These elements didn’t aim for clarity—they reveled in their absurdity.

At one point, Hankins spoken text directly addresses the temporality and mortality of art itself: “Many parts of this piece are no longer with us. They’re dead. Now this piece is haunted too.” This self-aware framing is an invitation to think about our own relationship to our sounding bodies and the ways we record and tend to the memories, aka ghosts, inside of us.

With her razor-sharp wit, skillful technology use, and engaging dance vocabulary, Hankins blurs the lines between performer, sound artist, and ghost hunter. There’s an artful chaos at play in her work—an embrace of idiosyncrasies and absurdities that renders it alive. Her focus on analog processes feels like a rebellion against digital sterility. In that rebellion lies a radical invitation to face mortality and memory in a mischievously tender way.

Allie Hankin’s Base Entry Point residency showing happened on April 12, 2025. By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY will receive its full premiere in Portland in July. alliehankins.com