directing, devising, dramatugy
As a director, I focus on nuanced and complex character work, playing with intimacy and alienation between the performers and the audience, tension and proximity in intimate spaces, and using a collaborative design process. I always love an abstract, surreal, or absurd twist to a piece, and I love to work with surprising, experimental, and/or lyrical language. I am passionate about making work by and for trans, queer, and disabled people that interrogates capitalism and the status quo. I dive deeply into texts to figure out what they need to be most vivid and resonant, and my process is guided by my background in both performance and literature. I hope to be a guide who facilitates the team's process of discovery. Finally, I love to develop new work, and I also find the process of adapting or reviving a work fascinating and fulfilling - I've worked on adaptations, reframings of established work, and new work as a dramaturg and director.
My most recent directing project, Cassandra Sounds/Visions, focused on how bodies create sound and how sound can infect the bodies of the audience. We used rhythm, screams, vocalization, glass-making and glass sounds, projections, and poetry to explore Cassandra's experience in the hopes to allow the audience to truly hear her and her experience, her prophecy, and her pain. Buidling off of prior workshops at Oxford and Cassandra Sounds/Visions, I am now a part of a Cassandra research group at the University of Verona studying voice in performances of Cassandra. You can read more about this academic project
For Sweeney Todd, we cast with a color-conscious and gender-conscious lens so that we could engage with the discussion of cyclical violence present in the text, and also tell a story about racial capitalism and gendered violence today. This allowed us to have discussions with our auditionees about the stories they wanted to tell and how we could best support them, and we followed their lead. The cast created complex, empathetic portrayals of characters that are often caricatured. We also created a satellite stage, placing the orchestra between the satellite and the proscenium stage, in order to bring the actors more proximate to the audience and fully enmesh the orchestra in the storytelling in our large proscenium space. This staging allowed us to ensure the audiences were viscerally proximate in songs like Epiphany, while still creating a space that emphasized the aloneness of the characters and the grand, systemic nature of the problems the characters faced.
In my dramaturgy practice, I use my academic background and experience in production to create in depth research and analysis of the themes of the play and facilitate discussions with the directorial team and the cast. I'm especially experienced in Queer Studies and Trans Studies, queer and trans history, queer and trans art forms, and the study of Greek tragedy, reception, and performance studies. I research references and influences on the text, but I also love theory, and enjoy exploring how theoretical ideas can shine a light on the work and on our work as artists.