One of the helpful exercises that I took away from graduate school was the idea of doing a one page - front and back - conceptual statement for every show that I direct. I can't recall the book where the notion came from, but the writer called it a General Beauty Statement, forcing the director to confront what they find compelling and beautiful about the story they're telling, and what it has to say to the world.
Read More[S]he is losing so much. She’s lost her ability to communicate or connect fully with God, she’s lost her drive and mission, she’s losing faith in people, she’s losing ties to her family, and some other things that I’ll omit for sake of spoilers. She isn’t losing her faith - that feels clear as we’re working - but all the ways she knew how to operate in faith seem to be escaping her. Coping and finding strength through all of that loss is hard, and I think that’s a lot of what this play is.
Read MoreWhen Craig Joseph called to offer me the part of Frog in the Seat of the Pants (SotP) production of Heidi Shreck’s Grand Concourse I was flattered, delighted, and filled with a modicum of doubt. Let me explain the doubt part.
Read MoreTen years ago I was doing some one-on-one yoga therapy. One day the yogi asked me what I wanted to do at that point in my life. With the clarity I'd found in some of the work we'd been doing, I knew I wanted to 1.get out of corporate America, and 2. be of service to people, both on stage and off. It would take longer than I'd hoped...
Read MoreAs the script is just starting to marinate with the company of a production, each cast member and designer is asked to find inspirations that bring them into the world of the play. In the initial iteration of this exercise, production members were specifically asked to source images to fuel this inspiration, but as time goes on, we’ve discovered a variety a media can be instructive for this exercise: soundscapes, songs, video, foods, cookbooks, poems, telescopic cosmological photography, and more.
Read MorePart of the process that I don’t think gets shared enough is the spyback...feedback, or communication in such a way that allows one to reflect, learn, grow, and evolve. Sometimes I think that this step gets stunted in art-making - that it’s somehow too sensitive or too personal to have genuine conversations about…which then starts to feel antithetical to the function of art…right?
Read MoreIdeas would germinate in my head or scribbled in journals, often erupting into semi-spontaneous performances on stage. This solitary process could feel exhilarating but also isolating, and I now understand how it can drive a person mad in its repetitiveness.
Read MoreI feel if I do my job correctly, you might not even notice the “props”, they are all just part of the setting, unobtrusively enhancing the story. Sometimes, the props are practical physical items...
Read MoreI found myself curious to explore a different challenge within the Seat of the Pants collaborative process of storytelling. Telling a story as an actor from a single character's POV has always been where I felt I worked best, but over the years of working with Seat of the Pants I find myself increasingly drawn to the work happening within the process of rehearsal.
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