Category: Performance Portfolio

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Playing Apollo

Over the past year I worked as dramaturg and actor on Patricia McQueen’s “Will you stay and watch me dying,” an exploration of theatre through transmedia performance installation which sought to provide new perspectives in the area of performative and visual arts and their interaction with multimedia technologies and attempted to investigate how the medium of theatre addresses mechanisms of violence and power, and the role of sacrifice within them; the ambivalence of love and hate; the trauma of separation and loneliness in the face of death; the dark and cruel side of human nature, displaced beyond humanity; injustice and guilt, which cannot be clearly defined; and the unspeakable loss inscribed, at times, within love.

It was a great experience to work with some of Ireland’s finest actors, artists, and directors, and a great opportunity to go a bit “method” while preparing for my role as Apollo: God of prophecy, poetry, music, sun, truth, plague, archery, blah blah blah blah blah… I hope you like the photos. #Apollo69

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Archives: I Diavoletti present, Shoe (2012)

MAGIC RE-SOULED. Today, the classical style of stage magic is virtually extinct as a form of popular theater and entertainment. Over-edited street magic flourishes on television and over-produced illusion acts rule Las Vegas. It is time, then, for 21st century magic to be re-souled. Howard Thurston, America’s Master Magician in the early 1900s, said, “You can fool the eyes and minds of the audience, but you cannot fool their hearts.”

With this piece, I attempt to deconstruct the fast, flashy, loud, and soulless Las Vegas style; while dodging the comic cliché of the ‘bumbling magician’ (a parody which outlives the parodied). Act One, by functioning like clockwork, provides a silent set up to an act of even greater deconstruction, as magic gives way to clown and the clockwork is torn apart gear by gear.

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Archives: Comedy Trapeze (2007)

In my mid twenties, I was studying and teaching at the School of Acrobatics and New Circus Arts (SANCA) in Seattle and I began developing a doubles trapeze act. Creating an original partner act on the trapeze is difficult to begin with, but it was uniquely difficult for me because I didn’t have a partner. I began training with a Cabbage Patch Doll, in the process creating an original act which blended trapeze technique with clown and object manipulation. I have performed this act around the world, including in Cairo with the Egyptian National Circus, where the Egyptian Star (the Egypt Affiliate of the International Herald Tribune) described the act as, “An epic one-man collision of funniness and foolishness, of tragedy and triumph.” Here is a video of the act from when we were young. Ah, yesterday! (2007)