Permission to Be Included: Allison and Drew Thomas' Dance Through Grief

Partway through the premiere of Stages in Marfa, the music turned angry and the projection behind Allison Thomas turned red. Across it swayed a field of flowers, each one grown from someone's story of grief. One of them belonged to a friend of Allison's in the audience. She had written about a friend who was murdered, and she had filed the story under anger.

She watched her flower grow while Allison danced the feeling she'd written down. She started crying and turned to the person next to her.

"That's my flower."

That is the project working exactly as Allison and her husband, Drew Thomas, designed it. Before they made anything, they agreed on one sentence to steer it.

"Drew and I's main sentence for the whole project before we started was permission to be included," Allison says.

Stages is about grief, and it began with theirs, after the loss of their son, Indie. But they built it so anyone could walk in.

Allison started dancing at three and didn't really understand it until around thirteen. From nine to eighteen she was a competitive dancer, and everything was measured. "You were, like, given a score, you could tell where you placed."

Her first audition out of high school was for Disney World. She booked it and danced in the Christmas show at the Magic kingdom. Then, instead of starting college, she moved to New York, "much to my mom's dismay, but they let me fly." She got far on the Broadway track, until she was badly injured at a callback for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Depression followed. She ended up at college in Arizona studying dance, until she realized what she loved was dance on film, and switched majors.

She'd been making films since she was ten. Her first college film, a relationship told through dance and shot on a handycam, won every award at the school, and she understood why. Nobody in it was a defined character. "It could have been you in it."

In 2014 a mentor told her to do her own thing, so she started her own dance company. One of its early shows, in 2015, was with a musician named Josh Hines.

Leaving competition meant unlearning it. "Once I graduated, that was when it kind of clicked to me like, 'Oh, nobody's scoring me anymore. Like what is this for?'"

"I was kinda caged as a dancer," she says. "For better or for worse, I learned how to, like, stand in line and be the same as everybody else."

After the Marfa premiere she sent a clip to a dancer friend, a clip of herself screaming and singing and looking, she says, "so messy." Her friend wrote back that she'd spent her whole life trying to make her feet and her turnout perfect, "but the point is liberation. And when I watch this video, I feel your liberation, and I feel it in my bones." To Allison, that was the biggest compliment she could get. She had unlocked the feeling in someone else.

She chases the same thing at weddings. She's a good dancer, so she deliberately dances "like a psychopath" to give everyone else cover. "Okay, the weirdest, wildest person is already there. I can be included."

Underneath it is a belief about bodies. Most of us are sedentary, she says, and we've lost something our ancestors had dancing together around a fire. When you watch someone dance, she says, your own body starts to feel what theirs is doing, the tight chest, the deep breath. That's what makes dance such a gentle way in. "You don't actually have to move to be a part of it, but you can feel your breath, and you can feel your body."

Drew, by his own account, is her opposite. He drew and painted seriously through school, then gave it up "on purpose" for graphic design, because everyone told him art couldn't make money. Crypto brought art back to him, this time as code. On Stages he handled the on-chain side and the projections. "I'm very, like, in my head, not in my body," he says. Allison keeps touching the space between his shoulder blades to lengthen his spine, "which he wants to kill me most of the time." Which makes Stages, as she puts it, "our first professional collaboration that we've seen to completion and not wanted to kill each other doing."

The first phase was fifteen photographs. On the anniversary of Indie's passing, a friend photographed Allison in her bedroom, moving through the stages of grief. They worked with five: denial, anger, bargaining, sorrow, and acceptance. The photographs went on chain, and for fifteen days, whichever stage collected the most that day became the one she explored through movement that evening. The totals later decided how many songs each stage would get in the show.

The second phase was the Garden of Grief. You write your story, choose the stage you were in, and a flower grows on a digital stage. Around three dozen are there now. Hover over one and you can read what someone wrote, anonymously.

They could have made the show only about Indie. Allison decided not to. Losses like theirs are more common than most people realize, she says, but plenty of people will never go through one, and she wanted them to find themselves in it too. "I didn't wanna make a whole show just about losing Indie. I like to make things that you can see yourself in." The stories in the garden shaped which songs made it in, and in what order.

Drew saw the need from the other side. After their loss, people kept telling them about their own. "Oh yeah, like I lost a child too," he says, "where you would never know because like no one talks about it."

The show is Allison and Josh. He sings his own songs, moving between guitar, keyboard, and a handful of other instruments. She dances, and she uses him "almost as a prop," as Drew puts it. Josh plays lying on his back. She spins him across the stage. In one section she wraps a cloth around him and they pull against each other while he keeps singing. Behind them, Drew's projections bloom with flowers from the garden.

Allison hadn't planned to dance it herself. She wanted to choreograph for dancers she thinks are better than she is, but she couldn't raise enough to pay them, "and I refuse to ask people to work for free." So she took the stage. "It was the universe, like, being like, 'Go ahead, do the thing you said you wanted to do. Don't hide.'"

One melody threads through the whole show. To her it sounds like acceptance, because you can't leave any stage of grief until you accept that you're in it. After Indie died she spent a long time in bargaining, retracing every path of what she might have done differently, a stage she still visits from time to time. So the show explores each stage to its end, comes back to the melody, and moves on.

She and Josh wrote the last song together, reading through her journals. One entry said, "I wanna be able to say your name for normal things, like, 'Indie, put your shoes on.'" Josh's response: "Ooh, that's a lyric." Another line came from the shower, right after Indie died, when she would hear him in her head as a three-year-old. "It's okay, Mama, you have forever."

"I've spent my whole life really racing towards the end," she says, "feeling like I'm running out of time." That whisper "calms my soul so much."

Marfa's crowd was mostly men, and she wasn't sure how it would land. They couldn't black out the gallery, so she could see every face. By the last song she was singing along and crying as she danced, and Drew, at the back, could hear the room sobbing. Then everyone stood. What people told her afterward was that seeing her and Josh be so vulnerable made it safe for them to be vulnerable too. One man, whose son had died, asked for a video to bring home to his wife.

"We took them to the edge," Allison says, "and then we came back down and landed."

"I don't think it's ever complete," she says of grief, "but I do think it gets less sharp." They tried shaping the show around the hero's journey, and it felt wrong. Instead it starts and ends the same way. "It's just a circle, and you don't even know where the beginning or the end is."

In the West, Allison points out, grief gets a funeral and a wake and not much else. After Indie died she built rituals of her own, from tracking the moon to a five-minute journal every morning and night. Stages tries to give its audience something similar.

It opens and closes with an interactive installation by her friend Traci Osborn. A woman lies in a bed on a giant wooden panel, and when you spin a wheel, the bed becomes a field of wildflowers, then fireflies, the world turning around her while she can't move. Beside it sits a bucket of rocks and markers. People write down something heavy they're ready to put down and leave it in the room. After the show, Allison says, the installation got much busier, "because everybody's hearts were really open."

Some of the work is still yours alone. "Nobody's gonna heal your heart but you," she says. But she has come to believe in "connection being medicine."

Stages comes to Austin this Sunday, November 1, at Springdale Station. The exhibit runs 4:30 to 6:30, the show from 6:45 to 8:00, then connection and reflection until 9:30. The Garden of Grief at stages.art is still open for your story.

I worried this segment would feel like whiplash after all that. Allison's picks fit right in.

First, three deep breaths when you wake up.

Second, a glass of warm water with lemon.

Third, when you notice you're tense at your desk, stand up and shake for a minute. "Shake it off."