My directing aesthetic is built from three key components:
Queer, scholarship, and collaboration. I seek to craft an experience for the community as a way to engage with and support cultural sustainability through nuanced provocation. For me, theatre artists are librarians who use performance to both proliferate and protect stories, voices, and myths.
My aesthetic is, first and foremost, Queer.
My artistry is intrinsically tied to my Queerness. I define Queer as celebratory, subversive, joyous, revolutionary, inclusive, and theatrical. For me, these words do not just define my personal ethos as living Queer but have become rooted within my stagecraft.
Queer, scholarship, and collaboration. I seek to craft an experience for the community as a way to engage with and support cultural sustainability through nuanced provocation. For me, theatre artists are librarians who use performance to both proliferate and protect stories, voices, and myths.
My aesthetic is, first and foremost, Queer.
My artistry is intrinsically tied to my Queerness. I define Queer as celebratory, subversive, joyous, revolutionary, inclusive, and theatrical. For me, these words do not just define my personal ethos as living Queer but have become rooted within my stagecraft.
My directing aesthetic is also rooted in scholarship. I value the use of research within my practice. From theories, articles, and history, I often look to records of the past to help inform my choices. Like with everything, however, this scholarly penchant is a tool to be used with efficacy. Whenever it becomes obtuse, cumbersome, or irrelevant, I close the book. While I know many artists shutter at academia, I find it exciting to parse through the past. For me, it is part of my homework before I enter the room. I have learned so much about and from the past experts, maestros, and revolutionaries, I would feel impious to disregard the “cloud of witnesses” that stand behind me. I have been fortunate enough to travel and live abroad. This provided me experience with a range of theatrical expressions outside of the European and American Modernism (yet that genre and style will also carry firm within me, despite the current proclivity to rebel against it.) This global sensibility has instilled a compulsion to stay informed. I try to learn as much as I can about what is happening in the world around me. I see now that my curiosity to learn has sustained my drive to honor and celebrate stories through my craft.
Lastly, unapologetic collaboration is the final core aspect of my directorial aesthetic. I evoke the word by synergizing creativity around me. I instill ownership of the work created in the room. But rather being individual ownership, it is a collective ownership from all involved. By doing so, I strive to hold space where the artists can bring their ideas and self to the agreed-upon story. I value all ideas that we as a group create together. I am no actor or designer, so I need artists who can bring their thoughts and style to the room. Stanislavski talked about the “Artistic Condition”, a state primed for creative output. I have morphed this concept into my main task as a director: to lead a room where the artists are opened and engaged to generate options, answers, and opinions. It is only then that I can engage from the outside, editing, stitching, and supporting the story we are telling. My own directorial artistry thrives when I edit in three dimensions.
I do not see the director as a stage magician, as it has often been described to me, but as a stage alchemist. Magicians operate in a world of illusion and obfuscation. I guide performative experiences rooted within a real, tangible world. While my world may be formed from a line of text, a wisp of smoke, or just a well-placed chair, it is just as real as you or me.
Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker | Baylor University | Photo by Jared Tseng