I love to work collaboratively with a company of artists to make performances. Devising is often the word used for working in this model, but I prefer to emphasize the necessity of the collective over the mechanics of making. I take this approach in my role as Joint Artistic Director of the for/word company; I’ve also worked regularly in the devising model with Available Light Theatre, and as an artist-in-residence working with students as well.
In this work, I have been inspired by the thinking of adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy. Embodied presence, deep listening, and the courage to adapt are essential to “move at the speed of trust” in collaborative making processes.
2017
︎︎︎ Collaborative Maker
Drawn from the letters of William “Hike” Currin, the first Denison student to die in WWI, and Lily Bell Sefton, one of the first women to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States, Ulmus Ohioana is about teaching and ambition, longing and chemistry, regret and waste. It’s about the brevity of our lives, and about their simultaneous indelibility.
2017
︎︎︎ Collaborative Maker
Hope. Where does it come from? Who has it? How can I get some?
No statements. Only questions.
2017
︎︎︎ Collaborative Maker
Plumbing the rich archival holdings of the Missouri Historical Society, Patience Worth explores fragmented identity, sublimated love affairs, a nagging desire for fame, and the limits of credulity.
2008, 2011, 2012, 2016
︎︎︎ Collaborative Maker
North tells the story of a charged meeting between writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife to aviator Charles, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the man whom she felt best understood her work.
2011, 2012
︎︎︎ Collaborative Maker
Little Book is a comedy about writing, and therefore it’s a play about procrastination, disappointment, hypochondria, unrequited love, and blind hope. It’s about why the semicolon is way sexier than the dash. And why children’s literature matters.
