Directing Philosophy

For me, every production begins with this question: What story can this particular group of people tell in this moment, in this place, with this audience that’s never been told before and will never be told again in quite this way? 

 Like a pointillist painting, the image comes into sharp focus because all its parts are united simultaneously. Ensemble. 

 The power of creativity is that every idea can evolve through the ping-ponging of feedback, where one thought leads to another and another until something is born that is truly greater than the sum of its parts.

 For that to happen, the production must begin before anyone enters the room. 

 First, the room must be built from the ground up to be accessible, inclusive, consent-based, open, responsible, and a brave space.

 This requires assembling a diverse team, including roles like intimacy directors and cultural consultants. Together we build a space that considers and prioritizes mental health and access. We create systems that empower the team members to communicate, build connections, form community, problem-solve, and do their best work. This careful preparation and ongoing prioritization of the ensemble’s health builds the foundation for full engagement and powerful work.

 In rehearsal and design meetings, I develop a space where this kind of collaboration is possible. For actors, I create an environment where they can play by giving them clarity about the world they have entered together. I create shared context, revealing the surroundings they can manipulate and the relationships they can affect, and celebrating brave choices.

Creating shared meaning and truth that can be recognized and felt in the room requires specificity.

For designers, I lean into their expertise and storytelling skills within their medium, inviting them to build this world collaboratively from the ground up. 

 Stage management is the motor of our engine. They should be empowered to be the connecting force between the departments, ensuring our systems are firing on all cylinders. I am the facilitator, the conductor, and the editor, working to provide the conditions within this space, inspire the possibility for full engagement, and focus the sound, movement, and, ultimately, the transmission of meaning to the audience.

Finally, in performance, I am driven by how live theatre inspires complicity between the audience and the actors as they unite in their belief of the events unfolding before them and how the audience and the performers engage in the act of creation together. 

Together, the audience’s imagination and the ensemble's work create a third space of shared belief, or communion, where neither could exist without the other. I am interested in exploring how an audience might relate to or experience a live performance and how this space of communion between the ensemble, the text, and the audience is a space of radical possibility. Possibility for empathy, for social change, for acceptance, for defiance. If there is anything that matters to me as a human being and as an artist, it is that we are in this together, that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful, undeniable, and, ultimately, necessary. The theatre, for me, can be the space where we ring a bell of remembrance for what it is to be human, to be connected, and to be in relationship with each other and our world.