performance

I have been a practicing theatre and performance artist almost as long as I have been able to walk and talk.
My work includes interactive performance formats, devised and collectively created theatre, playwriting, solo and lecture performance, and live lit.

talk performance

Much of my recent work has involved talk performance, my term for performances that centralize ordinary language as it is responsively generated or deployed in the performative present, and which probe the distinction between talk and text. I have created a number of different formats and platforms that utilize ordinary, extemporaneous speech as a performance material in response to various social, disciplinary, and media situations onstage, in galleries, as sound art, and through interactive encounters, both public and intimate. This includes my principal ongoing talk performance project, An Interview.

An Interview

An Interview is an ongoing, linear, itinerant performance, consisting of a series of interlocking one-hour segments, each built around a unique encounter between ever-rotating pairs of participants, one of whom is returning from the previous segment, the other newly arriving. Each segment is comprised of two halves: a reading of the transcript of an interview conducted by the returning participant with the previous participant during the prior segment, and a new interview, in which the new participant interviews the returning participant. That interview is then transcribed to be read in the next segment, when the interviewer returns to be interviewed by a new participant, an interview that will then be revisited in the following segment, and so on.

An Interview was first initiated at Tritriangle, an art space in Chicago, on October 14th 2016, and has been ongoing ever since. Dozens of people have now participated in iterations at the Chicago Cultural Center, Rhinoceros Theatre Festival, the BeauTown Cabaret, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in various living rooms and nontraditional performance spaces around Chicago.

An Interview is always seeking invitations to theaters, festivals, museums, galleries, performance spaces, living rooms, storefronts, restaurants, cafes, offices, classrooms, libraries, prisons, factory floors, houses of worship, barrooms, city parks, community centers, backyards, gazebos, Zoom meetings, or wherever two people can meet and talk. Contact me with ideas + opportunities.