Linda Austin and Allie Hankins

Linda Austin + Allie Hankins, photo by Jeff Forbes

Linda Austin and Allie Hankins collapse, expand, and steal time, traveling across landscapes filled with seemingly incongruous concepts, structures, desires, and energies. Inspired by surrealist artists Gertrude Abercrombie and Leonora Carrington, and Jen George’s “uncanny fictive spaces,” The Traveler and the Thief juxtaposes movement, object, words, and song to celebrate and/or bemoan the unstable and precarious grounds of existence.

Linda Austin deploys movement, sound, text, visuals, and props to create non-linear, poetic works laced with an eccentric wit, teetering on the edge between the immediately apprehensible and resolutely mysterious. She is co-founder and Artistic Director of Performance Works NW in Portland, Oregon. As an active participant in the downtown New York dance and performance community of the 80s and 90s, Austin presented work at Performance Space 122, the Danspace Project, and Movement Research at Judson Church, as well as in NDA’s Performance Mix. From 1992 to 1994 she lived and made work in Mexico, and has been based in Portland since 1998. Recent awards include the 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Merce Cunningham Award and a 2019 Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship.

Allie Hankins is a Portland-based performer who makes works that toy with the destabilization of persona through uncanny physicality, wry wit, and skillfully layered imagery, all while trying to suppress her contentious eagerness to please. She is an inaugural member of FLOCK: a dance center and creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists. In 2013 she founded Physical Education with keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Physical Education hosts open reading groups and lectures, curates performances, and teaches workshops nationally. Most recently, Allie has Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis), Linda Austin (Portland), and Ruairi Donovan (Ireland). She has been an Artist in Residence at Caldera, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and the Wassaic Project.