Mandy slid sideways from the world of contemporary dance into the world of circus. She began her movement journey in western Pennsylvania as a competitive dancer by day, climbing around in trees and abandoned steel mills at night. After becoming a professional dancer, she started creating guerilla acrobatic dance in and around trees with Tree Project, a group she founded which toured nationally in 2013. At the same time, she dug into rope, fabric, lyra, sling, and unconventional flying objects of all kinds, and has since performed 30 feet over an orchestra at the Kennedy Center, fallen out of the Denver Convention Center’s ceiling covered in sparkles as an event aerialist, built a ritual of love and loss in a magical forest as part of an immersive circus-theater troupe, and created choreography for contemporary dance, circus and theater companies of all stripes.
Mandy’s studies of dance, somatics, and comparative religion have spooled out into a practice of circus as embodied philosophy, using the body as a way to pose questions of the universe and explore possibilities of being, both individual and collective. She has an abiding obsession with unconventional spaces, with tying herself in knots and following the thread wherever it goes, with bird women, with unexpected intimacies, with the subterranean and the monstrous.
Mandy has performed and taught aerial arts, contemporary dance, and composition nationally and internationally. An ardent collaborator, she has performed with ground and air companies including Frequent Flyers, Control Group Productions, Rainbow Milita, Sinecdoche Dance, Mike Kelley, and many others. As a choreographer, Hackman has created commissioned work for Excessive Realness Queer Dance Festival, for the U.S. Aerial Dance Festival, and as the circus director of circus-theater work Escape Velocity, which premiered in Pittsburgh’s New Hazlett Theater in 2018. These days Hackman calls Boston home, where she coaches circus arts and movement efficiency at Esh Circus Arts and Commonwealth Circus Center, and is currently making work with Circus 617 and Hypha. When not dancing on various objects, you can find Mandy training clients in her body-inclusive fitness project All Our Bodies, or reading tarot for private clients and corporate events.
