Although I work primarily as a theatre director, I think of my artistic practice as curational game design. In each project I ask: how is this space and story an invitation to play? As a theatre-maker, I work with my collaborators to construct immersive environments and adapt relational narratives into imaginative performative experiences. These experiences excavate the enchanting potentials of the spaciotemporalmatterings unique to live performance, and the risky intimate connections conjured when we partake together in the presence of play.
I work primarily with adaptation, retelling and reframing to defamiliarize and repoliticize the unexpected within stories we thought we already knew. My adaptation work is inspired by the maximalist camp and sensuous materiality of lesbian-feminist performance-installation, and the environmental storytelling and uncanny anticipations of indie exploration video games. Over the past decade, my stylistic focus has transitioned from the cheeky crowd-work of drag into the engaged world-making of immersive work; throughout, when choregraphing exchanges between scripted performers and improvising spect-actors, I evoke the traditions of burlesque, using the power of gaze and the tease to establish boundaries of mutual consent. At its most evocative, performance allows us to practice paying attention and playing attention in accordance with the rules of another world, and in doing so creates room to rehearse not only for the revolution, but for the world on the other side.
My most recent project, Haunted Natures, Hidden Environments, is an immersive-environmental performance exploring the performative relations between the super/natural and in/human. The piece adapts five contemporary plays, Nathalie Claude’s The Salon Automaton, Marie Clements’s Burning Vision, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Erin Shield’s Paradise Lost, Anne Washburn’s Apparition, each differently preoccupied with how spectral phenomena draw attention to ecological crisis. Set in a post-apocalyptic haunted theatrical house, Haunted Natures invites the audience to freely roam through seven distinct environments spanning over 5000 square feet, experience up to nineteen different hauntings, and determine what the ghosts of this world might want from their visitors. This project was created as part of my doctoral dissertation Spectral Ecologies: Queer Hauntings at the Edge of Climate Crisis and served as the culminating class project for four undergraduate classes at Cornell University in May 2022.
My practice is rooted in praxis and pedagogy. Each project is developed first and foremost as an opportunity for student performers, designers, and technicians to experiment, to expand their sense of what theatricality can do. My theatre-making practice is also a small step within my self-guided pedagogy, my research-creation process: I use the craft of directing as a tool for translating my theoretical questions into activity; into games that can be played by the actors, and with the audience. I reject the terms “vision” or “message” in relation to my artmaking; I do not seek to materialize a predetermined product or thesis. The design studio, dramaturgical drawing board, rehearsal room, and performance event are each an opportunity for discovering how within play our attentional actions come to mean and matter.
I work primarily with adaptation, retelling and reframing to defamiliarize and repoliticize the unexpected within stories we thought we already knew. My adaptation work is inspired by the maximalist camp and sensuous materiality of lesbian-feminist performance-installation, and the environmental storytelling and uncanny anticipations of indie exploration video games. Over the past decade, my stylistic focus has transitioned from the cheeky crowd-work of drag into the engaged world-making of immersive work; throughout, when choregraphing exchanges between scripted performers and improvising spect-actors, I evoke the traditions of burlesque, using the power of gaze and the tease to establish boundaries of mutual consent. At its most evocative, performance allows us to practice paying attention and playing attention in accordance with the rules of another world, and in doing so creates room to rehearse not only for the revolution, but for the world on the other side.
My most recent project, Haunted Natures, Hidden Environments, is an immersive-environmental performance exploring the performative relations between the super/natural and in/human. The piece adapts five contemporary plays, Nathalie Claude’s The Salon Automaton, Marie Clements’s Burning Vision, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Erin Shield’s Paradise Lost, Anne Washburn’s Apparition, each differently preoccupied with how spectral phenomena draw attention to ecological crisis. Set in a post-apocalyptic haunted theatrical house, Haunted Natures invites the audience to freely roam through seven distinct environments spanning over 5000 square feet, experience up to nineteen different hauntings, and determine what the ghosts of this world might want from their visitors. This project was created as part of my doctoral dissertation Spectral Ecologies: Queer Hauntings at the Edge of Climate Crisis and served as the culminating class project for four undergraduate classes at Cornell University in May 2022.
My practice is rooted in praxis and pedagogy. Each project is developed first and foremost as an opportunity for student performers, designers, and technicians to experiment, to expand their sense of what theatricality can do. My theatre-making practice is also a small step within my self-guided pedagogy, my research-creation process: I use the craft of directing as a tool for translating my theoretical questions into activity; into games that can be played by the actors, and with the audience. I reject the terms “vision” or “message” in relation to my artmaking; I do not seek to materialize a predetermined product or thesis. The design studio, dramaturgical drawing board, rehearsal room, and performance event are each an opportunity for discovering how within play our attentional actions come to mean and matter.
projects
|
The Ithaca Department of Arts and Futures: Coalition and Celebration for the World to Come (Ithaca 2023). Envisioning that the City of Ithaca has met its sustainability and Green New Deal Goals in the year 2030, this one day performance-event brought together together arts workers, sustainability specialists, land-centred stakeholders, and members of the public to vision together what a more ecological culture might feel like for our community.
Haunted Natures Hidden Environments: an immersive environmental performance (Ithaca 2022). Exploring manifestations of the ecological uncanny through immersive theatre, this walk-through performance featured scenes from Nathalie Claude’s The Salon Automaton, Marie Clements’s Burning Vision, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Erin Shield’s Paradise Lost, Anne Washburn’s Apparition, casting doubts on the haunted and haunting edges of eco-catastrophe.
In Fair Verona: A Lesbian Dystopic Burlesque (Montreal 2016). Exploring burlesque as a method of lesbian appropriation, this 60-minute adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet teasingly featured dance and drag interpretations of Postmodern Jukebox's discography.
|
eTRASH Lab: an Exploratory Experiment in Theatre/Transforming Research/Representing And System/Shifting Humanity/Healing (Ithaca 2020). Exploring the performative edges of the human, this six-week open workshop series introduced participants to core question of queer performance ecology and theatrical devising practices including burlesque, circus, commedia dell’arte, moment work and story circles.
Peter Pan (Montreal 2014). Exploring the queer erotics of J.M. Barrie's original novel and the theatrical tradition of the breeches role, this adaptation of Peter Pan brought forth the adult undertones and lesbian sensibilities of the boy who never grows up.
|
