Artist Statement

I am a theater-maker and multidisciplinary artist, working as a director, puppet designer, devisor, clown, and playwright. When I moved to Chicago in March 2020, I had intended to be an actor. Well, we all experienced March 2020, and I did not become an actor. Instead, I collected unemployment, stayed home, and made puppets. My first project in the Chicago theatre scene was a puppet-musical in a community garden about snails up against their landlord. After so long isolated, this community event showed me that this is exactly what I want to make theatre for: to gather, to play, to be in community. I believe in DIY theatre because it can create work that is financially accessible or even free for the public, and because it invites the participation of actors and non actors alike.

Conjuring Ghosts

Every show I have ever worked on has been an exorcism for ghosts. It can’t be helped. Ghosts travel through three mediums: open windows, dreams, and stories. So if you are telling a good story, you are conjuring the dead. So much of my work deals with history, ancestors, personal and collective memory. The very reason I am a theater maker is because these ghosts keep knocking on my consciousness, whispering, let me out, let me tell my story. I am constantly reaching back to the past asking, who am I?

Dreams & Immersive Work

I find that my spiritual life is a direct conduit for my artistry. For four years in a row, I have directed a community devised, queer re-interpretation of a traditional Purim spiel, which included people with MFAs and people who had never been in front of an audience. All of these productions were highly immersive and involved the participation of the audience. Some years ago, I had a dream of a Purim play that took place throughout a huge mansion, each room swirling with strange and deconstructed aspects of the story. A few months after that, I saw a show in Mexico City that took place throughout a huge, beautiful house. Each room had a woman, who was also a spider, and audience members wandered through the space, or were taken from room to room, exploring the oppressions, sensuality, and danger of the feminine. It was abstract—Spanish is my third language, but I confirmed with the native speakers there that they weren’t sure what was happening either. But the show was reminiscent of my dream. And like my dream, the images and feelings from that show have stuck with me a long time. The next year, we devised the biggest Purim show yet: in a huge, old firehouse, in the style of the show I saw in Mexico City, akin to my dream. Directing that show in particular pushed me immensely as an artist and inspired me to do more immersive work.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

I do not believe in the fourth wall. The kind of work I make is not only immersive and site-specific in its staging, but experimental in the way that the audience experiences it: there must be an exchange of energy between the audience and the performers that moves and activates the audience. As a director, I am a curator of perspective and sensory experience. Theatre is immediate, experiential, and durational in a way that other forms of media are not, and therefore, we must pay attention to the 5 senses. Not only what the audience sees and hears, but what they feel.

What do they feel in their body? Are they sitting or standing? Are they comfortable? Are they hot or cold? Do they hold something? When they fidget in their chair what do they feel? What do they smell? Are they so close they can smell the BO of the actors? If the audience gets to eat, do they feel at home? Have they been served tea?

Immersive theatre has an ability to move spectators, in the vein of Theatre of the Oppressed, into spect-actors, and discover their own agency in our troubled world.