Artist Statement

Growing up in a rural farming community I witnessed the daily backbreaking struggle to sustain life.  I saw that struggle alter the farmer’s body and I intuited an equal and opposite transformation of their inner landscape.  For years I watched as my towering neighbors of few words, sturdy boots and heavy lumbering walks submitted to the cultivation of entire orchards from seed or annually made the journey to and from birth in the maintenance of a herd of milk cows.  I was eager to submit my own body to a similarly rigorous and transformative regimen, a pattern that demanded, and cultivated, this self same faith and patience.

Perhaps because noh (Japan’s medieval lyric masked dance drama) and kyogen (Japan’s medieval satire) were initially developed by an agrarian culture, they have felt deeply familiar.  Made of a modest vocabulary of physical and vocal movement patterns ingrained with simple aesthetic and spiritual tenets, my nohgaku (noh and kyogen collectively) practice (my study, my teaching and my making) has, over time, transformed me, inside and out.  The immense care taken in the performance these simple patterns nourishes empathy, the way a farmer nourishes life.  As such, my job as a theatre artist is to cultivate empathy one sliding footstep at a time.

Theatre can be a non-hierarchical platform for civilizing and engaging community.  It is an expression of active citizenship.  I pursue a vision that combines the time-honored performance practices of nohgaku with innovation. Drawn to weighty topics I aspire to transformation and want to engage imagination.  I choose to work with traditional Japanese theatre forms because they are rooted in the body, space, time and innovation.  My work is delicately suggestive, poetically evocative and assuredly theatrical.

I believe it is my responsibility to ‘take care’ of the audience while encouraging them to journey to some place new, yet not unknown. I believe theater is best when it embraces a heightened theatricality and strive to imbue my work with skilled performers, big ideas, lyrical forms of transmission, great care, poetry, and craft.