A new multidisciplinary film project by director Clay Steakley and choreographer Becca Hoback will premiere April 21, marking a milestone both for the artists and for Nashville’s presence on a national arts platform.

The Fire Cycle: Stone Sutra, a 30-minute film blending dance, poetry, and music, will debut online via ALL ARTS, a streaming and broadcast platform operated by WNET. The premiere represents a significant achievement for Steakley, who was selected for the platform’s Artist in Residence program—now in its sixth year—and is the first Nashville-based artist to receive the distinction.

The film will be available for streaming through ALL ARTS, YouTube, and Nashville PBS beginning April 21. That same day, a live premiere screening will take place at The Forge, offering audiences an immersive, in-person experience of the work.

The screening event will include a retrospective Q&A moderated by organizers from Defy Film Festival, along with additional programming that expands the film’s multidisciplinary scope. Attendees can expect catered food from Clean Plate Club, a costume gallery featuring designs from the film, and a new edition of the Fire Cycle poetry available for purchase.

The Fire Cycle: Stone Sutra is the fifth and final installment in the Fire Cycle series, an ongoing collaborative project between Steakley and Hoback that spans live performance, film, poetry, and original music. Described as the most fully realized entry in the series to date, the film depicts a woman traveling through mysterious portals, experiencing the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth while meeting strange deities and other versions of herself. Through dance and poetry, she explores the bittersweet nature of life and impermanence. “The Fire Cycle: Stone Sutra” is co-directed with Becca Hoback.

The production features a cast of performers including Hoback, Denise Eason, Spencer Grady, Frannie Melancon, Asia Pyron, Amanda Reichert, Phylicia Roybal, and Alex Winer. Cinematography is by longtime collaborator Tyler Dunning Evans, with costume design by Kat Tierney-Smith. The film’s text and score are composed by Steakley, with choreography by Hoback, underscoring the deeply integrated nature of their collaboration.

The Fire Cycle project has, across its iterations, explored cyclical transformation through layered artistic forms. With Stone Sutra, the artists bring that exploration to a culmination, translating their interdisciplinary practice into a concise cinematic format while retaining the ritualistic and performative elements that define the series.

Both the digital and in-person premieres offer distinct entry points into the work—one accessible to a broad national audience through public media, the other rooted in Nashville’s local arts community. Together, they signal a moment of expanded visibility for the city’s experimental and cross-disciplinary artists.

For Nashville audiences, the April 21 screening provides a rare opportunity to engage directly with the creators and the broader artistic ecosystem surrounding the project. For viewers beyond the city, the ALL ARTS release positions The Fire Cycle: Stone Sutra within a wider conversation about contemporary performance on screen.

Additional information about the project and premiere events is available through the Fire Cycle website (https://www.thefirecycle.com/).