“Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.”
-rev. angel kyodo williams
I have been a university teacher for over ten years, specializing in courses for Acting, Directing, Movement and Voice, and Ensemble Co-creation. Currently I teach performance and directing at Union College in Schenectady, NY.
Teaching Philosophy
ethos
In this moment of massive cultural and planetary change, the performing artist is vital to the creative transformation of our communities. The actor’s primary study includes change as an interpersonal act––what Octavia Butler describes when she says, “All that you touch you change. All that you change, changes you.” In both performance and training, actors learn to be uniquely available and full-hearted in a process of empathic co-imagination. This creates the potential for what Erika Fischer-Lichte calls a “laboratory in which a new concept of community [can be] developed and tried out.” The performing arts and the creative revisioning of our communities are inextricably linked, and in the contemporary moment there is great need for both.
My work is dedicated to the empowerment and self-actualization of each student performer: first in their ability to be rooted and resilient in their own cultural paradigm; and second in applying their performance craft in the field or community of their choice. Furthermore I am dedicated to equitable and decolonial systems of access, belonging, and collaboration in every classroom and art-making space.
approach
I approach the craft of acting through the study of relational awareness and physical actions. Beginning with a study of one’s embodied experience, I move outward to the crafting of action, to the context of one’s performance practice, and finally to performance composition. I organize my approach to theater-making through phases of Self Inquiry; Partnership; and Co-creation.
Through Self Inquiry, I facilitate somatic and kinesthetic practices to develop the actor’s proprioceptive awareness and connections between one’s mind-body-self. I specialize in movement and voice training for the actor. In Partnership, students explore the dramaturgical impact of relational experience. I teach scene study rooted in the work of Uta Hagen and Stanislavski, group singing, and partnered training such as physical improvisation, stage combat and partner acrobatics. Finally, in Co-creation, students articulate aesthetics, theatrical style, characterization, cultural context, and multi-layered dramaturgy in composition. I draw from a variety of theatrical devising techniques, including the work of Theater of the Oppressed, SITI Company, the Odin Teatret, and my own years as a performer and director with Walkabout Theater.
lens and lineages
I am a queer, white-bodied, male-presenting, U.S. settler and descendent of Irish and Italian immigrants. My early work was heavily influenced by the laboratory ensemble of Jerzy Grotowski, the Odin Teatret in Denmark, and Double Edge Theatre in Massachusetts. Also formative for me were the experimental theater communities in Chicago, my ensemble at Walkabout Theater (now called Wender Collective), and my time at Steppenwolf Theater and the Eugene O’Neill Center. Most recently I have been studying Fides Krucker’s Emotionally Integrated Voice Pedagogy and the socially disruptive power of personal pleasure and the human yawn. Additionally I studied Stanislavski’s work on physical actions and Grotowski’s development of Art as Vehicle at the recently shuttered Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Italy. In my academic communities, including multiple universities in Chicago as well as my MFA program at Goddard College, I have been collaborating with educators, students, and alumni to adapt my performance pedagogy in ever-deepening dialogue with the field of performance practice. My most recent research has been exploring the intersections of decolonial arts praxis, mythic imagination, personal storytelling, and performance creation as means of interrogating dominant cultural narratives. I carry these lineages forward as I evolve to meet the present moment.