My mission is to create original, multi-disciplinary, music-driven performances rooted in the queer/trans experience.
Through exploring the surreal and fantastic, I seek to liberate the imagination, a vital part of the larger struggle for justice and freedom. My process requires honing myself with the utmost discipline, skill, and practice so that I am able to open myself and allow the stories and songs to pass through me and speak for themselves.
My 15 years of classical violin Suzuki training focused my attention on discipline and the technique of the violin, but my violin teacher saw from early on that my playing truly came alive when I could bring story to the music. This was how I began composing, and where I began to merge the worlds of theatre and music. Beginning in my pre-teen years, I was determined to become the best composer I could become, and tell the best stories I could tell. This, along with a non-normative gender identity, propelled me away from institutions of higher education and onto the streets, where I lived as a busker for several years. Using Minneapolis as a homebase, I hopped freight trains from coast to coast and even traveled down the Mississippi River on a homemade raft. Sometimes alone with my violin, sometimes with a small troupe, I survived largely from what I made by passing the hat. This way of life was profoundly transformative. I learned quickly and well how and what to play to gather and hold an audience’s attention. If I didn’t believe in the music I was playing neither did they, and those nights my hat was empty.
To have my very survival dependent on my skills as a composer/performer was the best education I ever had.
My passion for composing and the merging of my love for story and performing inspired in me a theatre made of archetype, music, and movement. The training-based practices of my ensemble Open Flame are meant to hone our awareness, our instincts, and our ability to be present. This requires a full engagement of the body and the imagination. We seek to transport our audiences to surreal worlds outside of the limits of the rational, to expand beliefs of what is possible culturally, politically, socially.
Based on my existence as a transgender individual, my research has centered around queer mystics and the ancient role of the psychopomp (someone who leads souls from death to the afterlife). There are stories on every continent of the varied roles that queer folk have played in society since human societies began, and in my research I found a common thread. Throughout human history those with non-normative gender or sexual identities have served as the conduits between this world and a world beyond. Sometimes this was defined as the afterlife, sometimes as the world of our dreams, but the connection is omnipresent.
This is the thread underlying all of my work over the last 10 years, and why I play the role of Virgil, Dante’s guide, in The Wastelands, the first piece in Open Flame’s Rewilding Cycle. It is also why I play him as a gender-fluid skeleton, straddling life and deatH.
I see my role as an artist as someone who crosses, transgresses and thrives in between boundaries. In my role as an Artistic Director for my MN-based ensemble, Open Flame, I situate our work within a social justice framework and in dialogue with what is happening in the struggles for liberation in our communities. Our most recent opera, The Garden, was made for a transgender gaze, and was made by an ensemble composed entirely of trans people from the Twin Cities. Our characters were created in relation to our experiences as transgender individuals and our experiences in community. We use a process of rigorous physical training sourced from Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, MA to generate performance material grounded in our research about the themes of our performances.
To make our site-responsive work, my collaborators and myself vision, play, train, and perform indoors and outdoors, with the lands and waters around us being a vital partner in the creation of our theatre. To create The Garden, I engaged in numerous conversations with fellow trans people in my community throughout the whole four year creation process because I didn’t want to just make a performance, I wanted to make a transformative ritual that would be an act of reclamation for myself and my trans community.