I’m invested in a theater of big ideas (changing neighborhood dynamics, messianism and the Talmud, ancient Stoic philosophies of consolation) often delivered in mundane packages (sandwiches, cups of coffee, letters in a mailbox). All of these objects connect communities, collide histories, and create spaces to imagine new structures of coming together.
I believe in the power of performance to promote exuberance, amusement, and joy, but am also interested in its capacity to provoke controversy, critique, even discomfort. I’m fascinated by irreverence; but an irreverence that serves reverence in an effort to tease out new perspectives on belonging, collaboration, and community. Committed to performance as a laboratory for existential experimentation, all of my work probes theater’s potential as a public, and fundamentally civic practice.
Living between Berlin, Berkeley, and New York City over the past fifteen years, I have been very fortunate to reap the benefits and opportunities performance affords to work across languages and cultures, across diverse communities of artists and thinkers, across different theater worlds and economies of art. This interdisciplinarity is deeply embedded in the work I make.
Most recently, I have worked in various contexts to foreground the sensory in performance, examining ways the physiologies of taste and smell relate to memory, history, identity, fear, and different forms of bigotry. Working between social service organizations and more traditional art and performance venues, I’ve turned to using food as a medium to investigate the ways communities are experienced, cherished, and potentially flattened – both historically and in the present day.