Current Projects
The Praise! Project
Premiering in 2025
Co-Created and performed by Gabriel Thom Pasculli and Vincent E. Thomas of VT Dance | In collaboration with Desiré Graham and Malia’Kekia Nicolini | Created with the support of NPN Creation Fund, co-commissioned by Sandglass Theater, Bethany Arts Community, and the Baltimore Theatre Project.
Now an NPN Creation Award Recipient, Praise! is an immersive event exploring self and spirit through a child’s experience of church. Moments of dance, song, testimony and confession are interwoven through collective dialogue and story sharing. Praise! opens the door into a conversation around body, queerness, and sacred celebration in a way that takes nothing for granted. While the two performers crisscross memories and fantasies of divine encounters, the piece asks how we reconcile past experiences to make new meaning for the present. Developed at 2019 at Dartmouth College’s VoxLab and in 2021, 2023, and 2024 at Art Omi in New York, an excerpt of Praise! was featured as part of VT Dance’s 20th anniversary concert at the Baltimore Theatre Project in April 2023. The projects recently completed a series of presentations at Bethany Arts Center in Ossining, NY, and it is set to premier at Bethany Arts Center in March 2025.
Recent Projects
Torn Like a Rose
Presented by Ruth Margraff and the Wender Collective at the Nišville Jazz Theatre Festival, Niš, Serbia, August 10, 2024
librettist: Ruth Margraff | director: Gabriel Thom Pasculli | choreography: Malia’Kekia Nicolini | performed by and co-created with: Jeysa de la Caridad, Anirudh Nair, Malia’Kekia Nicolini and Gabriel Thom Pasculli | costume design: Tessa Bourchier | original music composed by Graham Haynes w/ Haleh Abghari | with new music by Jeysa de la Caridad and Cooper Forsman | additional sound design by Cooper Forsman | libretto originally commissioned by Peggy Choy Dance Company
Inspired by Sufi poet Attar’s Conference of the Birds, Torn Like a Rose explores the epic journeys we take looking for the beauty within ourselves. Set to the entrancing music of Graham Hanes and Haleh Abghari, the performers sing, dance, and clown their way through the skies, across deserts, and deep into the valley of love and despair. Sparked by the mystery of the golden feather, will the journey enlighten or consume them?
Still a Quiet Afternoon
Presented by Steppenwolf’s LookOut Series and Walkabout Theater Company in July 2022 | Written and Performed by Katie Mazzini & Gabriel Thom Pasculli | Direction by Guilherme Kirchheim & Tara Ostiguy | Dramaturgy by Tara Ostiguy & Desiré Graham
While the fires of Troy burn outside their window, an ancient and familiar couple faces off within the present moment’s epic call to action. Time unravels as the couple is swept up into reveries, melodramatic battles, and their own raging desire for affirmation in the midst of an end-of-days catastrophe. The piece is a comic and tender exploration of how we sometimes find grace and sometimes find strife in one another. And how we often miss the point.
Developed in separate residencies at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, the Chicago Parks District, and Post Farm. Photos by brave lux.
interWEBS_
Presented by Walkabout Theater Company | Conceived and Co-produced by Gabriel Thom Pasculli and Alex Benito Rodriguez
An online, interdisciplinary gallery of intimate and remote collaborations inspired by thematic seeds of land, storytelling, and social transformation. Created interdependently by ten artists in seven cities across the globe. Featuring the work of Devora Neumark (Nunavut, Canada); John Titi Namai (Nairobi, Kenya); Percy Van Ort and David Dowd (Chicago, US); and Walkabout members Amba-Suhasini Jhala, Anastacia Narrajos, Alex Benito Rodriguez, Cooper Forsman, and Rudy Nair (Chicago, US and Delhi, India). Website design by Horatio Acevedo.