“A practice of inquiry:
from flesh to form,
from memory to motion”
ANOTHER VERSION OF EVENTS (2024)
What if grief, like light, only reveals its full spectrum over time? Born from the belief that pain holds multitudes beyond what’s first perceived, this work explores the layered nature of loss. What appears singular on the surface often reveals a spectrum of hidden truths. Drawing inspiration from the sun’s unseen complexity, the piece weaves vivid light and spatial textures into its design. Costumes echo the celestial path of light, while soaring, rigorous movement pulses with emotional velocity—propelled by a soundscape both cosmic and primal, sorrowful and transcendent.
Choreography: Billy J. Hawkains III in collaboration with dancers of the KSU Dance Company
Costume Design: Heidi Made
Lighting Designer: David Reingold
Music: The Comet is Coming & Paul Stevens
Photography: Christina Massad
Premiere: KSU Dance Theater, GA
IMAGO (2023)
What does it take to reclaim a self distorted by the gaze of others? This work confronts the societal projections placed on Black bodies, unearthing collective trauma while asserting the right to individuality and healing. Through striking imagery—figures cloaked in anonymity, gradually revealed—the choreography moves through stillness, rupture, and resolution. With grounded, breath-driven movement and motifs passed communally through the group, the piece becomes a ritual of acknowledgment and release. What emerges is a declaration of presence: embodied, burdened, and beautifully becoming.
Choreography: Billy J. Hawkains III in collaboration with The III Collective
Costume Design: Billy J. Hawkains III & dancers
Lighting Designer: David Tatu
Music: Resequence & Anton Silaev
Premiere: Ferst Center for the Arts, GA
WE ARE THEY (2022)
Healing emerges through the tension between resistance and connection. This duet examines the paradox of struggle as both conflict and collaboration, embodying how human relationships navigate pain, power, and reconciliation. Through intense physical engagement—grasping, pushing, and releasing—the dancers create a dynamic dialogue that transcends individual bodies to evoke collective transformation. Rooted in social and ceremonial traditions, the work invites viewers to witness an unfolding process of “true healing and true deliverance,” where embodied vulnerability becomes a pathway to renewal and communal restoration.
Choreography: Billy J. Hawkains III & Agbegninou Naima Ifeanyi
Music: Chants of the Ancestors
Photography: Addison Rudicile
Premiere: Fall for Fall Festival, GA
BY FIRE: A FILM (2022)
When the body becomes a site of memory and liberation, transformation is inevitable. This film explores the body as a transformative vessel, rooted in the spiritual and physical rhythms of the Southern Black church. Drawing from the ring shout tradition, the choreography embodies resilience, resistance, and liberation—where movement becomes both remembrance and renewal. Through immersive, close-up film techniques, it reveals the intimate power of embodied expression, transcending cultural boundaries. Developed with a diverse ensemble, the work offers a universal invitation to freedom, made possible in part by support from the UNCG Kristina Larson Dance Fund.
Choreography: Billy J. Hawkains III in collaboration with dancers from the UNCG School of Dance
Videographer & Editor: Alex Moore
Costume Design: Billy J. Hawkains III
Lighting Designer: Azaria G.
Music: Original music by Billy J. Hawkains III
Photography: Peter J. Brown
Premiere: Greensboro, NC
To be both the offerer and the offering is a delicate, urgent dance. This film uses rapid, flash-like editing as an extension of choreography, weaving movement and cinematic form into a visceral exploration of sacrifice and surrender. Featuring a solo dancer whose leaps, spirals, trembles, and shifts in and out of a chair embody this duality, the piece evokes the tension between control and release, presence and transcendence—inviting the viewer into a fleeting, intense encounter with vulnerability and power.
A______SACRIFICE: (2022)
Choreography & Performer: Billy J. Hawkains III
Videographer & Editor: Alex Moore
Costume Design: Billy J. Hawkains III
Lighting: Azaria G.
Music: Original music by Billy J. Hawkains III
Premiere: Greensboro, NC
FLESH LIKE YOURS, FLESH LIKE MINE (2020)
The body remembers what the world tries to erase. This dance film centers the Black body as sacred and sovereign, offering a visual and kinesthetic affirmation of Black humanity, divinity, and dignity. Rooted in a Christian worldview, the work asserts that Black and brown bodies are not excluded from—but integral to—that spiritual cosmology. It seeks to reinscribe the Black body with its original value, systematically denied by white supremacy in America, and offers a choreographic space of resistance, reclamation, healing, and the restoration of divine identity.
Choreographer & Performer: Billy J. Hawkains III
Videographer: Peter J. Brown & Alex Moore
Editor: Billy J. Hawkains III
Poem: Billy J. Hawkains III
Music: Erasmus Talbot
Premiere: Evening with the Creative Class (Film Screening), NC
/ IN THE REALM / (2020)
What if the performance never truly ends, but instead lives and breathes through constant reinvention? In the Realm challenges traditional dance structures by inviting dancers to co-create in real time, blurring the lines between choreography and improvisation. Developed over six weeks, the work unfolds through three “realms” — fixed beginnings and endings framing a living, evolving middle where no two performances are alike. Rooted in a deep inquiry into human resilience, it probes how we choose to persist amidst uncertainty, wrestling with surrender and endurance in the face of struggle.
Choreography: Billy J. Hawkains III in collaboration with dancers from the UNCG School of Dance
Costume Design: Billy J. Hawkains III
Lighting Designer: Chris Flemming
Music: Live Music from Andrew Merrit & James Kohrt
Premiere: UNC at Greensboro School of Dance, NC