Today we’d like to introduce you to Allysen Hooks.
Hi Allysen, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Originally from Houston, I left Texas for NYC at 18 to study at The Juilliard School and continued to live in the city for seventeen years. A majority of this time I was dancing professionally with a contemporary dance company called GALLIM. Through deeply collaborative processes, we made cutting edge, intensely physical dance work that allowed me to perform on stages all over America and internationally, primarily Europe. In a brutally competitive field where full-time, salaried dance jobs are few, and astronomically talented dancers are many, I have extreme gratitude for the longevity, adventure, and artistic nourishment of my performance career.
With ever-growing interest in creating my own dance work, I returned to school and completed an MFA in dance at Sarah Lawrence College. After many years working inside a defined aesthetic value system, I wanted to be shaken up. I wanted to question the whys and hows of dance performance beyond traditional concert dance. I wanted to take creative risks – to tap into the wildness of imagination and the listening to intuition, to hone what it is to draw clarity and meaning out of the abstract. This program offered me brilliant mentorship and support to do just that.
Envisioning the remainder of my dance and choreographic career in NYC, the script flipped when my husband received a job offer here in Austin and we decided to make the move back to Texas. I soon began teaching open dance classes at East Side Performing Arts and connecting with the local dance community. I was amazed at the caliber of artistry here. I met dancers I couldn’t wait to get into the studio and make with. I was and am so inspired to contribute to this beautiful community of dancers and dance makers here in Austin.
Over the past two years I’ve been steadily building a professional contemporary dance company. And by no means has it been alone. With nonprofit status, a major and ongoing grassroots fundraising push, and an enthusiastic and widening donor base, I’ve been able to employ 9 local women – all stunningly unique, electric, insightful dance artists. We’ve had 14 public performances in Austin in various contexts including a Fusebox Salon, a sponsored evening at Soho House, and most recently our first evening length run of shows at dadaLab.
The village that allows a new dance company to materialize does not just stop at donors and collaborating dancers. I’m so lucky to have Stephen Pruitt on our team as our multifaceted technical director and lighting designer, who has for many years brought all kinds of performance work to life on stages in Austin and beyond. I also have Jordan Chiolis, a dear friend from my NYC days now here in Austin, who is an enormously talented composer working closely with us. There have been numerous organizations and companies that have supported our work in their own unique ways, whether it be subsidized or free access to rehearsal spaces, liquor donation for events, linens and theater seating (shout out to Miscellaneous Rentals!), and so on. The outpouring of support from the local community is truly the reason why this dance company is able to exist and continues to grow.
I often feel like I am building an airplane as it flies. It’s sweepingly thrilling, it’s stressful, it’s hard work. You don’t know if you’ll “succeed” or “fail”. It makes me feel so alive and full of love not only for this evolving practice I’ve dedicated my life to, but for the spaces and people to share it with – in the intimacy of collaboration with the dancers and in the charge of performance with audiences.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
With my background I am accustomed to contemporary dance work being held with the integrity, legitimization, and compensation of a profession, but I know full well this isn’t always the norm. Arts funding, as any artist knows, never ceases to be a complex and precarious puzzle. I might even go as far to say that dance is historically undervalued and underpaid. Contemporary dance in particular. For me, artist compensation encompassing hourly rehearsal and performance pay is a non-negotiable fundamental to the operation of this dance company. What this means is while I wear one choreographer and director hat, the other required hat is raising the necessary funds. Committing to hourly pay for artists, while essential, does raise our budgetary needs exponentially.
Having just completed one year of operation and a show run, I am currently fundraising for our second annual budget. The aim is to generate one evening-length piece a year for a run of shows, and the remainder of the year to participate in community engagements and smaller scale performances. Austin is such a rich and diverse network of artists, I am also eager to collaborate with local artists of different mediums – visual art, film, set design, costume design. It would be an absolute dream to build the organization to offer full-time contracts to dancers, not unlike established dance companies in NYC. Big dreams equate to big funding needs!
Contemporary dance is also niche – it’s surprisingly difficult to explain in words to someone with no exposure to it, and depending on the work, has the potential to feel exclusionary or hard to access as an audience member. Culturally in America, it could be said most people understand dance as categorized in boxes of ballet, Broadway, So You Think You Can Dance, music videos, and so on. For some, the idea of contemporary dance as a profession is completely foreign. I don’t believe it’s a matter of ignorance, it’s a matter of exposure. But Austin is a progressive and sophisticated city chock-full of art and culture, and it’s a privilege and a pure joy to contribute to expanding the local contemporary dance audience. I want to attend dance shows where I see an audience beyond friends and family of the performers (even though yes we love that!), full of people who want to experience the magic of live dance performance. I see part of my responsibility as an artist is to create the conditions for experiential transport in hearts and minds of audiences. Whether or not an audience member “likes” or “gets” the work, I want the work to have an impact, to hit, to shift something molecularly, to conjure feelings or thoughts that feel meaningful to the individual regardless of history of exposure or education in this medium. I try for this.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Something I love so much about dance is how visible the person dancing is, how much you can see and understand about them without any words or context other than riding their experience of dancing with them as witness. It’s like each person has this tangible energetic fingerprint that comes more into focus when they’re dancing. Maybe that’s another way of simply saying you can see their soul, their essence. I often am seeking ways to amplify this essence to be louder, more vivid, more vibrating. Another way of talking about this is a felt charge of presence. Though it isn’t necessarily intentional or spoken of directly while the dance it’s being crafted, somehow my work seems to demand a hyper-presence of the performer, a kind of full and total plug-in to the sensations of their movement, their imagination, their surroundings, each other. I crave this hypersensitivity, this rapid awakening to the moment and movement again and again and again in myself as a dancer, and it seems only natural it’s woven in the undercurrents of my choreographic work.
I dwell in the problems of how to create cohesion inside a constructed world, and often these worlds push beyond the pedestrian. If each dance piece is a world in and unto itself, with its own movement language, its own logic and landscape and characters (whether fabricated character, or dancer as self) and relationships, how do you create meaning and narrative arc? I love the potential for elements beyond movement vocabulary to render world-building. Lighting, sound, prop, set, costume all have such rich potential for vivifying imagery and chiseling narrative. I use a wide spectrum of movement vocabulary, from visceral, primal, messy to incredibly measured and sculpted. All to say, each piece is its own can of worms, its own floating constellation of fragments, that I try to filter and alchemize into one sound whole. The more I make the more I realize so much of it is just listening – listening to intuition, listening to what is happening in front of you, listening to my collaborators, and responding from there.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
We have nonprofit status through fiscal sponsorship by Fractured Atlas, allowing donations to be tax-deductible. Our donation platform is accessible through our website. Thank you for your consideration to support our work, which directly employs local dance artists and builds new dance work for Austin audiences.
Feel free to follow on IG and join our mailing list through our website for updates on upcoming performances!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://allysenhooks.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/allysenhooks
- Other: https://www.allysenhooks.com/donate
Image Credits
Featured Photo: Elysia Perkins
1: Elysia Perkins
2: Elysia Perkins
3. Elysia Perkins
4. Elysia Perkins
5. Elysia Perkins
6. Elysia Perkins
7. Elysia Perkins
8. Sinziana Velicescu
9. Sinziana Velicescu
Elysia Perkins IG: @elyyysia
Sinziana Velicescu IG: @casualtimetravel
