“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
Teacher Creature
I have been a university teacher for ten years, specializing in courses for Acting, Directing, Movement and Voice, and Ensemble Co-creation. Currently I teach movement and voice at the University of IL at Chicago and acting at the University of Chicago.
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 aptly 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
In teaching performance I interweave methodologies from contemporary commercial theater training, laboratory ensembles, and the work of pioneering feminist teachers reclaiming self through embodied practice. Despite the In my first year classes I teach somatic awareness through dynamic movement and voice techniques drawn from my ongoing research in physical action, Somatics for Actors, and Emotionally Integrated Voice. Additionally, I draw from the work of Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, Stanislavski’s work on physical actions, Ann Bogart and Tina Landau’s development of Viewpoints, Stephen Wang’s Acrobat of the Heart, Dr. Tanya Pettiford-Wates’ Ritual Poetic Drama, and evolving research in staging intimacy and violence. All of my teaching is informed by my decades of experience working with physical training in Grotowski-based lineages along with American ensembles committed to both training and performance. In my upper level courses I apply theses pedagogies to scene work, styles, and stage combat as well as to solo and ensemble devising projects.
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 have been studying Stanislavski’s work on physical actions and Grotowski’s development of Art as Vehicle at the very 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.