The MCR Interview:

The Culmination of the Sacral Series: An Interview with Becca Hoback

MCR Staff | November 26, 2025

In Solus, Nashville-based choreographer and performer Becca Hoback brings the culmination of her multi-year Sacral Series to the stage with bracing honesty, emotional intensity, and arresting physicality. Known for her fluid, introspective movement language, Hoback channels the deeply personal process of deconstructing belief systems into a multidisciplinary performance that merges dance, film, and live music. Barely a week before the work’s premiere at OZ Arts Nashville on December 5 & 6, in conversation with the Music City Review, Hoback reflects on the inspirations, challenges, and collaborative processes that have shaped this raw and resonant artistic journey.

MCR: Solus is described on your website as exploring the “aftermath of deconstructing a foundational belief system.” What inspired you to turn such a deeply personal and often traumatic journey into a public performance piece?

When I create, it’s from a highly emotional place – and when a particular topic or experience is calling to be explored, I feel I have to follow that impulse. Exploring and creating in-private is an important part of the journey, but ultimately sharing and connecting with others is the thing that catalyzes transformation on a personal and social level. It’s a vital part of the process, and hopefully by being vulnerable myself I can offer the option for others to do the same in their own way.

MCR: This work caps off your multi-year “Sacral Series.” How does Solus serve as a final, or crowning, chapter compared to the earlier pieces like Initial Dissent and Mellow Drama in the series?

Solus is the true reckoning of the journey. It’s the most abstract and focused on the physical process of change. Initial Dissent offers haunting snapshots of a woman coming into her power, Mellow Drama offers a fairytale-gone-wrong-like story telling with odes to old Hollywood and burlesque, but Solus is much more stripped back, focused, and raw. This performance also includes the short “epilogue” to the series, which was the part of “Sacral” I created first. It’s called “Summation,” and it truly feels like it wraps up the method of the process – continuing and continuing and continuing with insistence, a raw animal effort, and cultivating an internal resilience.

MCR: The performance seems to be powerfully autobiographical, processing “struggles, trauma, and vulnerability.” How do you manage the emotional toll of rehearsing and performing such raw and reflective material?

It’s very cathartic to perform such an emotional journey! I think creating and preparing for the performance offers some challenges that often manifest as physical struggles. The emotional and physical are pretty closely linked for me, and I think once I’ve baked the emotional experiences in my choices for the staging and choreography, I’m able to focus on the craft and precision of movement and physical state to let that hold my focus while rehearsing. As long as I can connect to the essence of the inspiration for each movement or section, it sort of protects me from having to actively think through it again and again. And then the transformation happens through the body, and I come out on the other side with new insights! And the process continues.

MCR: Solus is a triptych merging dance, film, and live music. Can you discuss the specific roles of film and music in telling this story, and how they interact with your live choreography?

The film component opens the performance, and offers a peek into another, non-present reality. Created in a far away place (Ordu, Turkey) years ago (August 2023) and reflecting on much older experiences, this film is both quite epic and simple at the same time. Katlyn Raitz, the cellist and composer for the first sections of Solus, actually scored AND edited the film. So she played a very integral role in shaping the work sonically and visually. It only made sense for Kaitlyn to be brought into the physical reality of Solus as well: composing and performing two additional live sections of the piece. Her intimate knowledge of the themes of the film served the further development of the piece – the grand film score becomes a minimal and contemplative onstage (that is to say, “minimal” in only the way a deftly-coordinated master of her craft can execute). We are two onstage, which then wanes to one when the choreography reaches a stage of internal processing that must be done alone.

MCR: You collaborated with composer and cellist Kaitlyn Raitz on the original score. What was the collaborative process like, and how did her music guide or influence the emotional and physical language of the choreography and/or vice versa?

It was a very intuitive process that has spanned the whole year, often conducted from afar. We met and touched base about the project by the recommendation of a mutual friend, and from that initial conversation we learned just enough about each others’ journeys to begin the process. We started with the film score and edit, and then shared ideas and themes for the following sections virtually after another few other in-person discussions. I shared video snippets of choreography and general themes and inspiration, and she offered her written interpretation of the journey and audio files of rough ideas and musical themes. I offered my reflections, she returned with the next version of the score, and then I shaped the choreography based on that track. It’s only when we were able to come together in the studio that the power of what we had made really became clear. Two touring artists coming together and sharing space was electrifying! I can’t wait to see how we continue to intuitively move with and around each other as our show preparations continue and deepen.

MCR: You are known for your “fluid, expressive choreography with mesmerizing intensity.” How have you consciously evolved your movement vocabulary in Solus to physically represent the concepts of loss, nihilism, and the search for the sacred?

At the beginning of the piece, restricting how much of the body can be seen, isolating the movement to only certain body parts, and guiding the witness’s view of the body with strategic lighting are both choreographic and theatrical elements that express these themes. Simple gestures punctuate and give context to the movement, while different physical qualities such as quivering, searching, and quaking offer a felt-sensitivity. The process of developing these movements often required a deep concentration on and attention towards which parts of my body don’t want to move – out of self-protection or social stigma. The epilogue insistently demands that I keep my center (the part of the body that often serves and the held or neutral base in classical dance techniques) flowing and initiating the movement of the body.

MCR: The description mentions Solus “slowly peeling back layers of vulnerability.” What is the emotional trajectory you hope to take the audience on, and what point of reflection do you hope to leave them with at the end of the performance?

I always struggle with questions like this, because I don’t want to assume or impose a certain journey on the audience’s experience! But I hope to share part of my journey and slowly usher people closer and closer to that story, inviting them to rock bottom with me and offering one pathway forwards from that place. With the concluding piece, I hope that the tenacity and resilience that I aim to embody each time I perform will offer restless solace to those who are on their own personal healing journey.

MCR: As a solo artist, what is the most challenging aspect of being the sole performer responsible for embodying and sustaining the full narrative and emotional power of a work of this magnitude?

It’s a lot! I try to design-in elements of the production that will support me as a performer, but in the end I think it’s important to remain in-process with the process. How does each performance preparation period need to adjust to accommodate my practical circumstances, physical energy level, and emotional state – and how does that change each season, week, day, or hour? How does each moment onstage need my felt energy or strategic focus? If I notice I’m “out of it” for a moment, how can I re-enter, and immediately forgive myself for any hiccup along the way? How does each supposed “mistake” become an element of the piece – what does my instinctual reaction offer to the story, trusting that I’m in the felt-state of the performance? It’s a hard-to-explain, hard-to-grasp series of processes and questions that innovate constantly!

MCR: This is a premiere at OZ Arts Nashville. How does the specific space and dynamic environment of OZ Arts influence the staging or feeling of this intimate solo performance?

OZ Arts Nashville feels like a very encouraging environment to share this work, and it feels meaningful and full-circle to share Solus here. I really appreciate how the massive space contrasts the intimacy of what I’m sharing with the audience. The warehouse space becomes a theater, becomes a dark abyss that a singular body gets lost in. The large dark void feels isolating, and highlights the individual as something small, vulnerable, and struggling alone. As the piece develops, I try to fill as much of the space as I can with my energy and movement. I think this leads into Shabaz Ujima and Thea Jones’s work with shackled feet DANCE!, Synergy, with an expansive energy.

MCR: If an audience member has gone through a process of “deconstruction” themselves, especially in a place where a foundational belief system is such a powerful part of mainstream media, what message of hope or validation do you hope they take away from watching your physical journey unfold on stage?

Every part of the process is important and valid. Simply keep going. Survive the vulnerability of not knowing anything for certain. Though there will be moments of recoil and shrinking away – again and again we can open into new expansive ways of being.

MCR: As Solus closes the final chapter on Hoback’s Sacral Series, it also opens a space for audiences to witness the resilience, vulnerability, and transformative power at the core of her practice. Through film, live music, and her own intensely embodied storytelling, Hoback invites viewers into a process that is both deeply personal and widely relatable. Audiences will have the opportunity to experience this striking premiere when Becca Hoback takes the stage at OZ Arts Nashville on December 5 & 6, paired with shackled feet DANCE!’s Synergy, both offering an evening that promises to be as intimate as it is expansive.