AUGUST 13 FIRE CYCLE FILM RETROSPECTIVE!
Catch all 5 Fire Cycle films in one night! Ticket link coming soon.
Thur, Aug 13 at the Darkhorse Theater, Nashville.
THE FIRE CYCLE: STONE SUTRA
In 2025, Clay received an Artist-In-Residence opportunity from the PBS-affiliated arts platform ALL ARTS to create a 30-minute film for broadcast on their streaming platform, YouTube, and select PBS stations. More news to come in the near future!
The film was co-directed by Clay Steakley and Becca Hoback with cinematography by Tyler Dunning Evans. Music and words by Clay, choreography by Becca. Starring Becca Hoback, Denise Eason, Spencer Grady, Frannie Melancon, Asia Pyron, Amanda Reichert, Phylicia Roybal, and Alex Winer.
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These poems anchor The Fire Cycle. They focus on a return to nature and the elemental, a reconnection to ritual and community, and a gentle acceptance of impermanence.
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10 ambient instrumental pieces accompanying the poems of The Fire Cycle. These songs also appear in the films and live performances.
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Experimental shorts created with collaborators like choreographer/dancer Becca Hoback and filmmaker Tyler Dunning Evans.
These films have screened at the Kindling Arts Festival, Defy Film Festival, Far Out Fest 666, and the Cadence Video Poetry Festival
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In 2023, OZ Arts hosted a Fire Cycle lab/workshop for their Brave New Works Lab. Clay Steakley and Becca Hoback built a performance around three poems and songs, titled The Fire Cycle: Stone Sutra. This was the springboard work for a full, immersive theatre piece Clay and Becca are now developing.
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Digital collage, mixed media, sculpture. The Fire Cycle visual art is in a constant state of evolution.
The Fire Cycle is poetry, music, dance, live performance, film, and visual art.
See Stone Sutra at All Arts
Don’t miss the final Fire Cycle film, made possible by a grant and artist-in-residence opportunity from All Arts! See it here.
Who’s behind The Fire Cycle?
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Clay is a writer, musician and actor.His poems have been published in Slake, Waxing & Waning, Cathexis Northwest Press and others. He was a finalist for a PEN Emerging Voices fellowship, and a 2020–21 OZ Arts/Porch Art Wire fellow. The Fire Cycle is his first collection of poems to be published.
Clay’s film work includes Walk the Line, Deja Vu, White Lightnin' and more, and he has been on television in The Wire and the CBS Elvis miniseries. On stage, Clay has worked at Arena Stage, Roundhouse Theatre, Theater J, Actors Bridge Ensemble, OZ Arts, theatre dybbuk and more.
As a musician, Clay has performed and recorded with bands and songwriters in Nashville, and toured the country, playing venues ranging from the Beacon Theater and Ryman Auditorium to bars, bowling alleys, and pastures. He currently composes ambient and contemporary instrumental music.
After long stints in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, Clay returned to his hometown of Nashville, where he lives with his family in the woods and makes his weird art.
COLLABORATORS
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Collaborator on live performance and film.
Becca Hoback is a freelance movement artist, performer, collaborator, and choreographer, based in Nashville, Tennessee.
She worked with collaborators Ana Maria Lucaciu, Ben Green, Roy Assaf, and Ariel Freedman to curate the first Enactor performance program, which premiered at OZ Arts, June 2021. The solo work she has curated, collaborated on, and choreographed has been featured at OZ Arts Nashville, Istanbul Fringe Festival, SOLOCOREOGRAFICO’S Torino, Frankfurt, and Friedrichshafen dance showcases, SOLO Dance Ankara, Alter Ego International Theater Festival, Brussels Dance Contest, Arts on Site NYC, Kindling Arts, and Tennessee Women’s Theater Project.
In 2020, she received a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship for her solo work. Becca received the writer’s choice for “Best Movement Artist” in the Nashville Scene’s 2022 “Best of Nashville” awards. Becca received the audience award at SOLOCOREOGRAFICO Torino 2022.
She was a founding member of New Dialect, and worked with Nashville Ballet 2 and Montgomery Ballet. Becca trained at North Carolina School of the Arts.
Learn more at beccahoback.com
Photo by Tiffany Bessire
Invocation
The sun ascends and descends the altar.
The rib cages of whales are cathedrals.
So are cicadas, sinkholes, actual cathedrals.
Tobacco shops and kitchens are chapels.
Autumn is a prayer rug, the full moon a wafer.
Every day is a feast day if you have the right calendar.
The priest sun with its golden chasuble.
The gleaming train that drags the earth.
The golden sequins that fall away and catch on
The distant sea, in your hair, on lottery tickets,
On the backs of the hands of old women
Contemplating the scratches in their wedding rings.
Crows are priests only because so is everything:
Mice and emeralds and pears and good food.
Supplicant skeleton trees in stubblefields,
Beseeching beeches lifting branches to the sky.
On Halloween a blue moon means something,
But what that is washed long ago off this stone.
The priestess moon, great with child and gliding
Silent and perfect as the queen’s barge
On the Nile, on the freckled backs of galaxies.
White shield, heavenly oculus, leaving her likeness in
Water basins, wells, lovers’ eyes, shanty towns,
Cafe windows smeared with colored light.
The smell of coming snow, like a cold lake.
The smell of good soil, which is mostly rot.
The smell of legs in grass entwined like snakes.
The smell of woodsmoke from an old man’s house.
The smell of coming snow, like a cold lake.
The sun ascends and descends the altar.
Fire Cycle Poetry Excerpt
For more poems, check out the book.