My artistic work investigates theater’s potential as a social practice, and over the last decade I co-founded and co-directed three public performance ensembles – Culinary Theater, Shakespeare im Park Berlin, and the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization [UCMeP]. Between 2009 and 2011, UCMeP engaged performance as a tactical means of “creative protest” and mobilization against the austerity measures that beset public education in California. Between 2010 and 2014, Shakespeare im Park’s site-specific performances drew thousands of audience members to Berlin’s Görlitzer Park in order to rethink its dynamic spaces as simultaneous sites of inter-cultural and multi-lingual performance, postdramatic theater, and community-based art. Most recently, Culinary Theater has been crafting food-based performances that taste, smell, and explore changing neighborhood dynamics in New York City. Working between social service centers and more traditional performance venues, we stage delicious yet purposeful happenings that investigate how our cultural food fetishes are both catalyst and symptom of the ways communities are experienced, cherished, and potentially flattened. These groups have been featured in scholarly forums like Theatre Survey, South Atlantic Quarterly, L.M. Bogad’s Tactical Performance, and Barbara Fuchs’ Theater of Lockdown, as well as in the New York Times, London Guardian, Tagesspiegel, Berliner Zeitung, San Francisco Chronicle, The Kelly Clarkson Show, and Robert Reich’s 2013 film Inequality for All.
