My artistic work investigates theater’s potential as a social practice, and over the last fifteen years 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. My most recent works of Culinary Theater seek out new performance forms to (ir)reverently squeeze big ideas into small edible packages. Working between social service organizations and more traditional art and performance venues, I’ve turned to using food as a theatrical medium to investigate the ways communities are experienced, cherished, and potentially flattened – both historically and in the present day. For example, I’ve been exploring sandwich as a site of diasporic community connection and contestation (Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2023) and coffee as cypher for Talmudic messianism (Performance Research, 2023). And in a set of gustatory performance-lectures-in-development at Invisible Dog (March 2023), Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center (April 2024) and Freie Universität Berlin (June 2024), I have been probing provocative historical intersections of garlic and the Other in order to examine ways the physiologies of taste and smell relate to memory, history, identity, fear, and different forms of bigotry. Some of these projects 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.
