ARTIST STATEMENT

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This is an ever evolving, changing and dynamic vision statement as I am an ever evolving artist and human. I welcome your thoughts, insights and questions.... 

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My work as a director centers the act of making and remaking: making space to amplify new voices and stories and telling and remaking stories through multiple entry points, perspectives and approaches. 

 

Although my specialization and training is grounded in directing, devising and contemporary performance, I embrace many theater pedagogies, lineages and techniques and use a broad spectrum of tools and approaches  within my ever evolving creative process.

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As an educator, director and creative process facilitator, a core value of my own practice is to embrace the continuum of teaching and learning while developing new models of horizontal collaboration and leadership.

 

In addition to a strongly visual, movement based and physical approach to storytelling, my strengths as a director are in the areas of new work development and in centering voices that push theatrical form and content. I am skilled at ensemble building and in cultivating rich partnerships between performers, designers, dramaturgs, movement directors, musicians and multimedia artists of all disciplines. 

 

As a producer, I am dedicated to the practice of “Community Dramaturgy” and am constantly exploring new ways of engaging diverse constituents outside the theater, making performances relevant and accessible and bringing in community partners to engage more deeply in themes and questions the play is asking. 

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As a theater practitioner and human, I am dedicated to the ongoing work of antiracism and anti-oppression in and outside the rehearsal room. I learn, unlearn and evolve within this work every day.  Working within a continuum of contemporary and consent based practices, embracing diverse bodies, materials and narratives and actively expanding beyond Eurocentric theater lineage, are some of the ways that I am engaging in this work. I believe these practices are vital to building equitable, sustainable, healing and joyful spaces of collective learning and liberation.

 

Through the combination of critical reflection and embodiment, Theater has the potential to invite presence, stillness and a slowing down that is becoming rare in our fast paced world. In this moment of increased disconnection, technological overload and social isolation, live performance is a vital catalyst for grappling with huge questions, finding connection and opening new pathways to empathy. I believe in the words of Taylor Mac that our job as artists is to dream the culture forward. I believe theater is a space where we, ‘hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature’ but it is also where we have tremendous capacity to question what is being reflected. 

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The practice of making theater is the practice of making and remaking, of never being “finished”,  of continual process, exploration and wild discovery. Theater invites us to reflect, to witness, to shine a light but it also ignites our collective imagination and allows us to radically re-imagine our world and our collective future.

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