Artistic Research Statement

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I am a theater artist working at the intersection of performance and community-based practice. I view theater as a relationship between audience, performers, and space, exploring the performance event as a tool for engagement, one that can enliven people to their worlds and to each other. Ultimately, I believe plays (and making plays) are about how we can be together. To me, making theater and making a society are connected.

While I identify primarily as a director, my creative practice also includes playwriting and producing.The multi-hyphenate nature of my artistic identity is expressed in my portfolio, where I categorize my professional activity into five distinct categories: Directing and Creation, encompassing projects made with my theater company PearlDamour; Professional Staged Readings, demonstrating my ongoing engagement with developing new work and showcasing important works from the American theater archive; Playwriting, focusing on community-based “theater action” works; Maria Irene Fornés Legacy work, which includes producing, writing, and directing; and Pandemic Era work, which represents the significant turn my practice took towards Directing on Zoom during the COVID lockdowns.Throughout, I emphasize my presence and impact in the field by including a range of press: features, articles, reviews, interviews and citations.

Below is a summary of my creative research contributions over the past five years, followed by a description of my artistic process and philosophy, and an overview of my creative practice and related scholarship. I conclude by speaking to plans for future work. 

Research and Creative Contributions Summary

Since my appointment at Wesleyan in 2019, I have experienced a time of rich creative growth that carries forward a trajectory of work I have been cultivating for the last two decades as a professional in the field. In these five years, I have developed, premiered, and toured an original work; directed staged readings of new works and adapted and directed seminal performance texts in festival settings; written a play that has been performed in over 20 venues globally; and furthered the Fornés legacy through writing and directing. During the pandemic, I used my academic work at Wesleyan as a platform for making key contributions to the field via a Zoom directing methodology website and a significant live-streamed performance.

This period also saw the publication of three co-authored works, including a book, a book chapter, and an academic journal article, and the inclusion of my play in a collection published by the Climate Change Theater Action Project. During this time, I have also increased my presence within the national theater discourse through participation in thirteen academic and professional panels and roundtables. My directing work has been the focus of eleven published interviews and articles and has been cited in seven public lectures, scholarly essays, and books. My pandemic-era work was tapped for inclusion in the Library of Congress’ “Coronavirus Web Archive” in 2021.

Artistic Process and Philosophy

I am a generative theater director, regularly devising new performance from scratch with teams of artists from multiple disciplines. This is a rigorous practice that involves translating across medium, learning new performance modalities, and building and shepherding hybrid processes that unfold over many years. The projects that result move freely between forms, ranging from intimate and site-specific, to large-scale spectacle on stages, to community-wide celebrations.

The thread that runs through and connects the wide range of my work is an interest in theater as a means to build community or engage with existing communities. Our field has several different terms to describe this kind of endeavor: two of them, “socially engaged theater” and “theater as civic practice,” are apt descriptions of projects you’ll see represented in my portfolio. Some of this same work can also be considered “site-specific,” a term given to performance that looks to the architectural, social, and historical identities of site as determiners of both content and form; or “immersive” theater that invites audiences in as activated and integrated members of a performance landscape.

This investigation has consistently drawn me to make interdisciplinary work outside of conventional theater venues (or use conventional theaters unconventionally), where the relationships between audience, performer, text, object and space are malleable. Traditional plays and theaters position audiences as passive witnesses to a story playing out on a stage; my work seeks to break this frame to activate the encounter, acknowledge the individual, and bring community into focus. For me, centering community is a core value, an artistic imperative, and a catalyzing force. As the systems that support our world are splintering, from governments to healthcare to theater organizations, I see a way forward in gathering, conversation, and interdependence. While we may not share views, we can share space. But that kind of curation and invitation requires great care. Welcoming people into radically imaginative structures and participatory situations can allow fresh perceptions and perspectives to emerge, but it can also shut people down. An audience must be at ease and empowered to fully receive and integrate the content of a piece, without feeling forced or coerced. Therefore for me, hospitality goes hand in hand with experimentation. 

Creative Practice

I co-founded my theater company PearlDamour with Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Lisa D’Amour in 1997. Today, PearlDamour is nationally known for pushing the boundaries of theater-making and civic conversation by bridging the worlds of theater, art, movement, and music to activate and engage our audiences. The four projects showcased in the “Directing and Creation” section of my portfolio—Ocean Filibuster, Milton, Lost in the Meadow, and How to Build a Forest— all created under the name of PearlDamour, revolve around the idea of ecosystems, whether it's the civic or social ecosystem of a community or the interconnecting natural ecosystems of the planet. While each project takes a different form, each leads to the next, linked by common themes and strategies such as humanizing the environment, highlighting the interaction between environmental and human systems, involving local performers, and collaborating with the wider community.

PearlDamour’s projects are highly multi-disciplinary and tentacular, with many arms reaching in different directions but all connected to one body. As a result, the work often doesn’t neatly fit in the categories or spaces of the contemporary theater industry and frequently occurs outside the mainstream. Perhaps for this same reason, PearlDamour is acknowledged as a significant influencer of the field, with performances referenced in books, articles, and lectures by theater scholars.

Specifically, I have been recognized within the new sector of our field called ASTS– which stands for Art, Science, and Technology Studies. In 2022's Routledge Art, Science, and Technology Handbook, a volume that celebrates "the emergence of ASTS as the interdisciplinary exploration of art-science" (introduction), the editors include PearlDamour's How to Build a Forest in their list of "...artworks that can be taken up by ASTS [to] provide a kind of landscape within which to explore the contours of ASTS as a field."  How to Build a Forest is also featured in Cultural Performance: Ethnographic Approaches to Performance Studies (Landis and Macaulay, Bloomsbury 2017), where it is positioned as an example of both performance as art and performance as cultural expression.

The pieces represented here do not end at their premiere (except for the site-specific Lost in the Meadow). I use touring as an iterative practice, evolving the work by drawing inspiration and information from each presentation. This approach allows a project to develop and respond to different performance homes and real-life changes in the world. This is particularly important for projects directly conversing with current events, such as Ocean Filibuster and How to Build a Forest, or specific places, such as Milton. Together, these works focus on the gradual process of culture change: storytelling, softening rigid belief constructs, and shifting the thinking patterns that keep us yoked to destructive behavior. My hope is that they are not just performances but catalysts for societal transformation.  (NOTE: A complete list of PearlDamour projects reaching back to our 2003 Obie-winning performance Nita & Zita can be found in my CV.

My directing practice also extends to working with seminal experimental theater artists I admire and of whose lineage I am a part. I have been fortunate to build a relationship with the great JoAnne Akalaitis, co-founder of the avant-garde company Mabou Mines. JoAnne and I came together in 2018 to produce The Fornés Marathon, a 12-hour marathon of readings of Fornés plays of María Irene Fornés at the Public Theater. I subsequently served as Associate Director on her diptych of Fornés plays Mud/Drowning, composed by Philip Glass and produced by Mabou Mines for the Under the Radar Theater Festival at the Public Theater, NYC, Feb 2022 (canceled due to COVID). I then adapted and directed readings of two Akalaitis masterworks for the Mabou Mines 50th Anniversary Celebration at PSNY, Dressed Like an Egg and Dead End Kids. Both pieces were mentioned as highlights in American Theater Magazine’s feature on the event.

My playwriting background supports all aspects of my directing work, expanding the skills and vocabulary I use to generate and devise. It has also earned me a reputation as a sought-after director of new work; developing new plays by contemporaries has become an important way I meet new collaborators and seed new projects. My own plays have served communities nationally and internationally, notably through the Climate Change Theater Action Project (CCTA). A personal highlight is my short play The Earth’s Blue Heart, which, in 2024, sparked a cultural exchange program between students in New Zealand and Colombia. 

As a direct outgrowth of my creative practice, I publish both academic and general interest writing. I strive to place my artistic practice in dialogue with my peers, using my published works to deepen my engagement with my projects as well as with the field. In making my ethos visible, process transparent, and methodology accessible, I extend my reach into many corners of our industry. 

Plans for Future Work

Over the next five years, I look forward to pursuing new projects with PearlDamour and generating new work with a range of collaborators, expanding my artistic research as I deepen my roots at Wesleyan. With the theater department as a vital base, I want to continue engaging with the “wicked problems” of our time—those complex tangles without easy answers and impossible to address through only one discipline—using my performance projects as structures to build and hold dynamic collaborative relationships with scholars, artists, and activists both inside and outside my field.

I have three such projects in development, all with new collaborators. The first is with feminist performance art icon Holly Hughes, who has invited me into the development of a new performance piece called Indelible. This work looks to trouble questions of power in social and civic narratives by positioning public survivor testimony as a form of endurance art, using Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, and the Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi as primary objects of study. The second project is with Alaskan sound artist and eco-composer Matthew Burtner (University of Virginia) and Canadian playwright Chantal Bilodeau (founder of CCTA). Tentatively called Requiem for a Glacier, the project is conceived as a memorial service for an Icelandic glacier that has recently been declared dead. Finally, I am developing and directing a new piece with South Asian Jazz drummer and Dhol player Sunny Jain (Red Baraat, Wild Wild East) called Love Force. Developed while Sunny has been in residence at Wesleyan, this concert-based story-telling piece is performed by Sunny with a 5-piece jazz band. It is in active devcelopment with a public presentation scheduled for September 2024.