bio.
Gabriel Thom Pasculli (he/they) is a US/Turtle Island-based performance artist, teacher, and theater director. Exploring the intersections of performance and decolonial praxis through body, change and belonging, Gabriel Thom’s multi-linear approach to narrative embraces an interdependent process of making meaning and engaging with the unknown. For eight years, Gabriel Thom was an artistic director of Walkabout Theater in Chicago (now called Wender Collective), with whom Gabriel Thom directed a series of outdoor public stilt spectacles as well as internationally-touring ensemble performances acclaimed as “surreal,” “sublime,” “gorgeous and exhilarating.” During the same period Gabriel Thom was a founding co-director of VoxFest, an annual summer festival of innovative new works-in-progress at Dartmouth College. Currently, Gabriel Thom is the creative producer at Sandglass Theater in Putney, VT, a puppet theater dedicated to social dialogue.
Gabriel Thom has been teaching actor training, movement and voice, and co-creation for nine years; and they are currently teaching at the University of IL in Chicago, the University of Chicago, and SUNY Purchase in New York. Gabriel Thom is a student of Fides Krucker in her Emotionally Integrated Voice pedagogy, and they recently graduated from Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program with a concentration in Decolonial Arts Praxis and Performance Creation.
Other Chicago directing credits include work with Red Tape Theatre, Trap Door Theatre, Oracle Productions, Redmoon and Steppenwolf Theatre. Additional influences include study at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Italy, the Odin Teatret in Denmark, and Double Edge Theatre in Massachusetts.
why performance.
I like the feeling of being led with my eyes closed. I like surprises. I like the woods, white-water rapids, and playing in the ocean waves on the Jersey shore. As a kid I loved watching my hand press through the wall of the water just before the frothy crest would hammer down on my head, churn me and my limbs, and drag us across the rough sandy floor. In performance, I found a practice that taps into this same sense of immersive roil, that wrestles with the tangle of elemental relationships that I experience in my body.
I research performance as transformative experience––the ways it can serve as a vehicle or container for growth. As a teacher and director, I study the interdependent and phenomenological processes of theater-making for each individual. I pay particular attention to how change differs for a group of theater-makers from a group of spectators or short-term participants. Finally, I study the power of symbolic language and fictionalized action available in theater through the language of archetypal symbols, sharing space, and empathic co-imagination.
I look to performance to provide unique tools for engaging creatively with extreme change in group processes of action, imagination, and co-creation.
bio.
Gabriel Thom Pasculli (he/they) is a US/Turtle Island-based performance artist, teacher, and theater director. Exploring the intersections of performance and decolonial praxis through body, change and belonging, Gabriel Thom’s multi-linear approach to narrative embraces an interdependent process of making meaning and engaging with the unknown. For eight years, Gabriel Thom was an artistic director of Walkabout Theater in Chicago (now called Wender Collective), with whom Gabriel Thom directed a series of outdoor public stilt spectacles as well as internationally-touring ensemble performances acclaimed as “surreal,” “sublime,” “gorgeous and exhilarating.” During the same period Gabriel Thom was a founding co-director of VoxFest, an annual summer festival of innovative new works-in-progress at Dartmouth College. Currently, Gabriel Thom is the creative producer at Sandglass Theater in Putney, VT, a puppet theater dedicated to social dialogue.
Gabriel Thom has been teaching actor training, movement and voice, and co-creation for nine years; and they are currently teaching at the University of IL in Chicago, the University of Chicago, and SUNY Purchase in New York. Gabriel Thom is a student of Fides Krucker in her Emotionally Integrated Voice pedagogy, and they recently graduated from Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program with a concentration in Decolonial Arts Praxis and Performance Creation.
Other Chicago directing credits include work with Red Tape Theatre, Trap Door Theatre, Oracle Productions, Redmoon and Steppenwolf Theatre. Additional influences include study at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Italy, the Odin Teatret in Denmark, and Double Edge Theatre in Massachusetts.