From the moment we’re born – in all our potentiality and raw vitality, we’re taught that if we don’t follow the rules and stories of society, we’ll be left out. It’s so ingrained in us that we can’t even imagine a completely different way of living. Even our dreams of a better world are just slightly improved versions of what we already have – but never truly different.
The system is designed to keep us from even imagining real alternatives. How then do we create new stories? How do we get unstuck and move forward?
I create interactive performance to help others get unstuck, to move from a place of loneliness, internal vibration, or powerlessness to a joyful place of community, clarity, and action.
I create spaces where we can collectively interrogate and disrupt the stories we tell ourselves and the forces that shape them, using autobiographical, historical, and contemporary material. In the past I’ve interrogated our search for romantic love, our obsession with celebrity, and social climbing.
My performances follow a dramaturgical score developed out of rigorously workshopped experimentation. Each performance includes an overarching, often nonlinear narrative – sometimes in a choose-your-own-adventure style with multiple possible paths – monologues, storytelling, audio/video, and interactive technologies and engages the audience in game-based interplay, guided improvisation, and movement.
My work is profoundly interactive, designed to shake people out of passivity and invite agency. Audiences don’t just witness; they participate, becoming co-authors in the unfolding experience. This offers unrepeatable experiences of varied tones, from laugh-out-loud hilarity as participants reveal their foibles to poignant vulnerability as they share innermost truths, that challenge and transform.
The level of trust I establish with my audience is a distinctive feature of my work, which allows for deep levels of engagement. I aspire to whip the rug out from anything false, then catch the participant and lift them forward to new possibilities.
In past work, audience members have ended their relationships, declared love to their unsuspecting friend, announced that they don’t want to have children, named their depression, and even once, shifted a stiff, formal room so dramatically that an entire festival audience leapt out of their seats, cheered, and starting buzzing in conversation.
It’s real, impacts life off stage, and it’s powerful to witness.
Despite the solo nature of my performance, my work is always made in community with others – be it the audience in real-time, behind the scenes leading and collaborating with a team of designers, technologists, production assistants, and directors, and with the public in open rehearsals, facilitated workshops, and interviews.
Beyond the performances, I create spaces for extended engagement: salons, post-show conversations, and creative ancillary programming that deepen the audience’s connection to the work and to each other. These spaces amplify the communal bond forged during the performance. After each performance, the audience lingers in the lobby, unwilling to give up the space for messy human contradiction and intimacy the show created.
Audiences have told me the way I interact with them is unique; that my work defies expectations and is described as therapeutic.
In a world where we’re louder than ever but rarely truly listening, I strive to create spaces where honesty, risk, and connection thrive, where I actively see and witness my audience, and inspire others to do the same. Through my performance, I hope to prepare us all to meet life’s challenges with greater clarity, courage, and compassion.