Profile: Allysen Hooks, by Dr. David Glen Robinson

Allysen Hooks hails from Texas and New York City. Her earliest days were in Texas but then she made a life journey to NYC for training, education, and career development in dance—seventeen years’ worth. She earned her BFA degree from Juilliard and MFA degree from Sarah Lawrence. She danced and created work with a host of luminaries and toured widely.

 

In 2024 she made the affirmative decision to move to Austin and run a dance company named, imaginatively, Allysen Hooks Projects.

 

Hooks has a performance philosophy that speaks to new currents in contemporary dance, notably those of greater address of the human mind and older but reviving currents in philosophy, notably surrealism.

 

The greater emphasis on psychology is something of a rediscovery by dance after a lapse in its exploration from the time of Martha Graham’s “Errand Into the Maze” (1947). In that dance, Graham unified, or conflated, the Greek mythic Cretan labyrinthine maze and the monstrous Minotaur in its center with the maze of the human mind (in the time of Freud) with self-identity in its center. Graham depicted the profound confrontation with the self everyone must engage.

 

Surrealism, an art movement, means a state of existence “above the real” where reality becomes insubstantial and images shift and distort and often involve dreams. It is exemplifed visually in the art of Spanish artist Salvador Dali and Belgian artist Henri Magritte.

 

Comes Allysen Hooks and her choreography creating surreal imagery. As she writes in the on-line programme for “Premiere/dadaLab:  "I construct surrealist narratives aimed to capture nuances of the human condition. Crafting dreamlike logic, I invest in how far, how clearly, how resonantly I can push the boundaries of a molded universe.” The statement and the performance to which it refers describe the leading edge of this new current.

 

Dream logic? Not the same logic you learned in algebra class. In dreams, story features and characters come out of nowhere and somehow seem to fit into the unspooling wonderland or nightmare of the dreamer. Same in Hooks’ work.

 

Video and cinema editors understand this particulate or mosaic nature and progress of dreams, but usually they work to fit their images into linear narrative storytelling. One filmmaker who got it in full was David Lynch. His dreamlike, discontinuous imagery gets into the viewers’ subconscious minds and finds a familiar home. Lynch, like Hooks, conveys imagery in a dreamlike way.

 

Few artists can accomplish that goal or even try, but Hooks scored a considerable success in her recent “Premiere/dadaLab.” The intellectual foundation of her approaches to dance and her results to date reveal powerful ambition. The currently underfunded Austin fine arts scene welcomes her energy and surreal imagination.

 

 Hooks is now going the nonprofit route,planning and assembling her company, Allysen Hooks Projects. She also teaches dance at the new East Austin Arts complex. We anticipate more refreshing dance work in the coming months. Follow her on social media, including CTXLive.com.