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Performing

PERFORMING

For more information about my performance work and experience, please see my performing resume here!

VIDEOS

Excerpt from The Circus Finale

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"From the very beginning, the circus has been in a state of almost-disaster! It has always been burning down! The train cars have always been crashing! Someone is always going to fall from the tightrope!

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This is why it is so wonderful.

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Everything you dream, imagine, anticipate, and fear makes up the reality of the circus. That’s why the trapeze is so exciting. Because you can imagine in that moment right before the catch both the success and the fall. It’s then that you remember that the performer is not a character, but a person, capable of wonders and of dying. Like you. 

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As you are. Uncertain, undecided, full of questions. The circus doesn’t promise answers, but it gives you a place to lay out your problems, fears, wonders, and the circus turns them into something mystical and full of intrigue. That’s the real gift of the fortune teller.

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Of course, without danger, there is no intrigue, and in the circus, the danger is as real as you are. This is why you must embrace it! You cannot have second guesses when you are being shot out of a cannon.

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And the wildness of that bravery turns fear into joy. To face danger and survive, to not get eaten by tigers, is one of the deepest pleasures we know as humans. 

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And the greatest form for celebrating the drama of not dying is storytelling.  And no matter how epic, how spectacular the circus tells it, storytelling, in its nature, is intimate. Because it asks you to dream.  

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It does not fool or trick you into anything. Rather, you are invited to believe. That’s the magic. It is when you believe that the broken rule redefines the world. Gravity works differently when you watch a tightrope act. 

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Both onstage and off circus follows no status quo. Everyone is invited to be a part the circus. And it is both a dare and an invitation."
 

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

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“Are you the new person drawn toward me?

To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;”

-Walt Whitman Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me

I believe in performance as work in unprovable truth, in the way that painting is work in line and pigment. It is work in speaking to the chasm between what our souls have to say and the seemingly imperfect tools we have to communicate it. It is the work of discovering the abundance contained in any individual, moment, or idea and manifesting that in a sharing of ourselves. Theater is an art that you cannot make alone; it implicates the universe.

 

“Artists grab you by the collar and invite you to catch their particular disease of fascination.”

-Anne Bogart and then, you act: making art in an unpredictable world

I believe that to bear witness to what is delightful and compelling and beautiful and mysterious is a necessary and universal experience-- one that has has no business being privileged by its association with notions of art as exclusionary. Theater as I believe in it is a direct and brave answer to that disparity between the universality of experience and the structures that can privilege art, for theater as an art is in its nature is a deeply experiential form. I am interested in exploring ways of creating art that are not confined by notions of privilege and are celebratory of the realness of experience.

 

“It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are.”

-T.S. Eliot The Cocktail Party

I believe in vulnerability as a necessary and radical act. It breeds the kind of intimacy that causes avalanches, inspires social movements, builds suspension bridges, and breaks hearts. I believe in wonder as something that happens in that kind of intimacy. It is where you find yourself when you pass the road signs for fear or delight and keep going with brave curiosity. I want to explore what happens when we continue to act beyond that point-- beyond the places where words alone are sufficient. I want to perpetuate that which inspires wonder.

 

“Lover of endless disappointments with your collection of old postcards, I’m coming! I’m coming!”

-Charles Simic The World Doesn’t End

I believe in falling terrifyingly, ridiculously in love. With experiences and people and poetry and ideas and paintings and vistas and sofas and books. I believe in being twitterpated, but I think being gobsmacked is better. I go for broke and I believe in being heartbroken. I believe in loving anyway. I am not interested in “supposed to”; I believe in love as something that you do because you cannot imagine doing anything else. I want to add to my library of poetry and provocations and questions and bad ideas and fortune cookie fortunes. I want to collect mountains of little pieces of paper and nonsense and garbage and stories and dreams and make art with them.

 

And I want to challenge all of it. I want to attempt impossible things and fail spectacularly. I want to wonder when things combust and try again when they don’t. I want to share what I have with other people. I want to work hard. I want to make something beautiful. And then I want to make more.  

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