As an artist-scholar-educator, I am attracted to theatre and performance as a living art and vibrant cultural space of energy, sensuality, emotion, empathy, wonder, play, possibility and transformation. I know and have lived it as that which can attune us to the renewing vibrancy of our relationships and the world around us. As that which, by providing encounters with the inexplicable, with mystery, with ancestral rhythms and future visions, fear and fascination, risk and death, allows us, quite magically, to expand and evolve our sense of self, of each other, of the world, and what it means to live. Indeed, I find the most exciting thing about theatre and performance is the way it moves and transforms us with its magic. Ritual in its essence, with an emergent, ephemeral, “now you see it, now you don’t” conjuring quality, theatre creates sparks and resonances that often refuse reason and resist analysis, and yet pulse and persist without question in the body, viscerally and affectively entangled with memories and spirit(s).

A thread that runs through my history with theatre and performance and my ongoing attraction and devotion to its practice and study is a preoccupation with questions of presence, transformation, enchantment and whimsy, the supernatural and the extraordinary, and the tenuous relationship between life and death.

Over the last fifteen years, I trained extensively in expressionist dance, physical theatre, Japanese butoh, Body Ritual Movement, and other somatic and energy-based methodologies. My work as a performer, director and choreographer of theatre, dance, and ritual has developed alongside an educational trajectory that includes an MA from Indiana University in Communication and Culture, a program that privileged interdisciplinary theoretical models, combining critical rhetorical studies, performance studies, and linguistic and cultural anthropology with ethnographic methods, and an MA from NYU in Educational Theatre, an applied theatre program through which I developed my praxis as a classroom and community theatre educator through advanced training in critical pedagogy, as well as directing and devising, Theatre of the Oppressed techniques and arts-based research, including process-drama, ethnodrama and verbatim theatre.

In this time, I’ve grown increasingly fascinated by how theatre transforms both as a cultural practice and social process and how its magic operates across imagined, affective, embodied, and otherwise material or immaterial planes with real material, emotional and spiritual consequences. I am especially passionate about theatre’s spectral, otherworldly aspect that allows people to sense and appreciate the existence of “something beyond,” provides alternative ways of knowing and being in the world that trouble the distinction between self and not-self, (body and not-body, here and there, then and now, real and unreal, life and death), and offers the potential to transform thinking about alterity, relationality and what it means to be human in meaningful, hopeful, and potentially mobilizing ways.

Above all, I believe in theatre and performance as a ritual practice of prayer and play with both life-affirming and world-making power. A means through which we can witness and work with what haunts us and heals us, both as individuals and communities, and expand our capacity to do and feel better. I create and teach performance as a magical, utopic practice wherein we can envision, embody and bring into being something different, something more, something motivating and meaningful. I study and write about it as a practice of veneration and (re)generation, tending to the ancestral line of beloved “theatre people” touched by its mystery, so as to contribute to its ongoing significance and evolution as a cultural form.

My attraction to the study of theatre and performance is significantly driven by a life-long curiosity about and desire for experiences of enchantment. As an inspired feeling-state of magic and wonder generated through the dynamic interplay of presence and absence, revelation and concealment, I find that enchantment both tangles with and transcends theories and understandings of materiality and affect, while also transporting us, at times mystically, into the realms of phenomenology and ontology. I am interested in theorizing how presence comes into being, how feelings and experiences of wonder and enchantment, (categorical terms under which I also claim haunting and spirit possession), are generated and shared through performance.

My research is located roughly at the intersection of three primary fields of study: ritual and magic, theatres of death and mourning, and dramaturgies of the body. It focuses on the hidden, unseen, ungraspable and ineffable, investigating instances in theatre and performance in which the evocation and/or invocation of invisible, supernatural, or extraordinary forces or means do transformative social, cultural, or political work. I am most captivated by performance that engages ritual magic and witchcraft, ghosts and haunting, spiritualism and seance, spirit-work and necromancy, animism, shamanism, time-travel, and neo-pagan, Occult, and/or otherwise secular or syncretic spiritual aesthetics and poetics. I am also interested in registers of performance that extend beyond bounded notions of space and time, that cultivate and operate as and through liminal and altered states, alternative temporalities, visions and dreams.

I am especially intrigued by questions pertaining to the transformative power of theatre and performance in terms of the unseen-alterity, spirit, and magic-and its relationship to identity, memory, and perception. How does theatre conjure, making the invisible visible, apprehendable, or encounterable? What is the relationship between alchemy and performance as a transformative discursive modality? What is the afterlife of a performance and how does it transform in its capacity to haunt? What does it mean to collaborate, conspire, or perform with spirit or with the dead? How does the evocation of spirit or the spectacle of enchantment shape or facilitate an audience’s experience of theatre? How does the experience of performance making or witnessing shift when the line between stage magic and ritual magic, spectacle and spirit, is blurred?

My work gravitates equally towards the whimsical, fanciful, and playful- that which trades and treads in the stuff of dreams- as well as the macabre, gothic, and grotesque- that which casts a shadow and keeps us up at night. I am interested in theorizing performance’s capacity to honor and speak to complicated truths and contain multitudes, how it serves as a space for encountering and working with darkness and light, our hopes and our fears, as a spectrum of human experience, feelings, and lived realities. I inquire into the relationship between the macabre and the whimsical, between melancholy and magical thinking, looking to theatre as a space to note the darker sides of lighter things, and the light that can be found or generated in and amidst darkness, where feelings of grief and mourning might serve as conditions and motivation for magical thinking as a modality for survival, resilience, healing, hope, and necessary change.