By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY
Friday, July 11th – Sunday, July 13th, 7:30 PM nightly
Shaking the Tree Theater, 823 SE Grant St., Portland, OR 97214
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. Analog tape recorders with looping tapes generate 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.
Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis