Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

Having had a long-distance collaboration for three years, our practice is built on trust, unspoken understandings, and alternative modes of communication. We improvise, physicalize written/poetic images, and create choreographic structures that often highlight rigorous unison. Our process troubles closeness and the line between public and private, and questions the boundaries between intimacy, sensuality, temporality, and the body. It utilizes subdued humor to reveal hidden truths. Our collaboration challenges our respective ideas around what it means to be close, creating work that feels nuanced and satisfying, while highlighting, melding, and colliding our differences, our intimacy, and the depth of our relationship and collaborative process.

While at Headlands

While at Headlands, we will develop our new piece We Don’t Trust Suddenness. In this work we contemplate corporeal parallax, nautical expanse, and stifled desires, as we imagine steeling ourselves against unstable ebbs and swells of absence. The work is rich with distortion, mystery, and an implied manipulation of unseen forces that imbues a deeply disquieting, eerie, and enchanting sentiment. We imagine the body is a vessel or ship; that which is tethered between the past and the present, the land left behind and the shore ahead, and likens the pull of desire to the pull of the tide, and the depths of loneliness to the mysterious and vaguely terrifying world below soft and swollen waves. We are considering ways we challenge or surrender to our perceived insignificance and helplessness in the midst of vast uncertainty and hidden dangers, and how we find strength in unity and close proximity.

Selected Works

When We, 2017; Rachael Dichter and Allie Hankins

Now Then: A Prologue, 2016; Allie Hankins

(scorpio) 33/33, 2016; Allie Hankins

 

From the Room Beside Me, 2026; Rachael Dichter and Mira Kautto