artist statement.
a few things to know about me off the top:
i do my best work in the bathtub. i come up with my wildest ideas in conversations on late-night drives to anywhere, but i’m usually for real about them. if you find me on top of a mountain i’m definitely not wearing the right shoes for the journey but i didn’t want to miss the sunset and anyway that’s how i roll. and i absolutely believe excel is a creative instrument if you learn how to play it (and i’ll armwrestle you to defend that claim).
i fell in love with theatre because of the intense collaborations at its heart. i was brought up in it by auteur-directors who mentored me throughout my early career in canada and germany.
i’ve spent most of my theatre-making career trying to reconcile these two seemingly opposing influences. i’m convinced that holistic collaboration and auteurship are a false dichotomy. for me it’s a question of process: by what means can we come together as a group to manifest something greater, more specific and heartful than the middle road or the lowest common denominator? how can we build a collectively held aesthetic vision that contains space for—and celebrates—the multiplicity of perspectives a group of collaborators will hold?
of course i have my proclivities. i am drawn to questions without answers, and questions about those questions. i love poetic articulation in words and movement, high saturation (who’d say no a thick cloud of fog and neon pink light?), ‘yeah but still a little more bass please,’ and plays that do not feature couches. i seek infinitesimal tenderness in the epic, and most of all rehearsal halls that are grounded in generosity, bravery, and above all, PLAY.
over time, i have come to see the evolution of my artistic practice as a pursuit of queerness in process. as a community defined more by difference than sameness, queerness at its best holds, celebrates, and supports a broad range of identities, experiences, and intimacies. we may not always have the exact same goals or needs, but we are moving in the same direction; our liberation is bound in the collective. “we may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as a warm horizon imbued with potentiality.” (josé esteban muñoz).
i am at my best co-leading a room, and i aspire to create environments where everyone feels empowered, valued and cared for. i’m not intimidated by mediating several divergent points of view: i thrive on it. i feed off the alchemical energy of ‘we are all all-in, making something wild, a little impossible, and if we pull it off we might even smash some hearts.’ these are the values i carry into my work as an educator and a leader.
my teaching work is grounded in honouring and honing the voices of the student artists in the room. when a school invites me in, i see my responsibility as being to offer the students craft and a container for their own passion and expression. i contest hierarchical models of expertise and try to meet students as artists who are experts on what matters most to them. our shared work is to connect that to the material we are working with, with whatever tools i can offer to get there. i orient creation processes around collective values, authentic expression, and rigour of shared vision.
in recent years my practice as a theatre maker has led me into artistic leadership. i was frustrated by my own frustration with the institutional status quo. i was hungry for institutions to take expansive views of creative process. i wanted artists to dream wilder dreams than our funding models seemed to create imaginative space for. i longed for institutions to make themselves so relevant and so integral to their communities’ senses of self that people would take to the streets and break into buildings to protest a change in artistic vision that didn’t reflect them. (i witnessed this last one at the volksbühne when i was living in berlin in 2017).
among many things, our era is marked by a distrust of institutions on both the left and right. i continue to believe in the value of cultural institutions as repositories of community resources. when i enter an institution my questions are always: who is this for? who could it serve? what would it look like to do that brilliantly?
i am a systems-oriented thinker who understands the multiple factors involved in change and transformation. i work strategically, seeking out the levers that will organically produce ripples of adaptation, while supporting the process by building values-alignment and care across a community. in navigating complexity, either in art or in leadership, i am guided by gibràn rivera’s question: “what is the next most elegant step?” what process does this question need to move toward a solution?
i have been called ‘relentlessly optimistic,’ by more than one of my collaborators, but i still constantly wrestle with whether a piece of theatre can really do anything. the live arts, as we were brutally reminded throughout the COVID lockdowns, are non-essential in a state of emergency. and yet, as heiner müller reminds us: “the only thing a work of art can do is awaken a longing for a different state of being. and that longing is revolutionary.”