About my creation work
My theatre creation work includes writing, directing, dramaturgy, performance, composition, sound design, and collective creation. My practice centres around cultivating heightened states of presence in audiences and performers. I explore sensory stimulation in relation to narrative – how stimulating the senses in certain ways can create theatrical tension (the embodied sense that something meaningful is happening here and now), which in turn can enhance dramatic tension (emotional investment in story). My tools in these explorations are sound, light, projections, ensemble movement, vocal chorus, smells, touch, and/or certain physical materials in the space… and sometimes a play! I also like to explore interweaving autoethnographic truth with theatrical artifice. I believe that when an audience knows they’re hearing about true moments a performer has experienced in their life, the audience’s empathy and compassion are awakened through the intimacy of the sharing… while skilful theatricality in the telling/showing creates a trustworthy aesthetic container for the experience.
Current/Recent Projects
30-minute solo performance. Part storytelling, part multi-media documentary, and part love-letter to my creative community, the piece emerged out of a year of “micro collaborations” with 15 different theatre, dance & music artists across the globe, in which I explored ways to stay creatively vital while ‘suddenly’ finding I’d become a bureaucrat. Premiered at the 2023 Freedom & Focus Festival in Los Angeles.
An immersive, interactive theatre/game event. The experience begins online, then becomes live in a cluster of immersive performance spaces, where you encounter characters, scenes, instructions, puzzles, technologically-responsive environments… and other audience members. Don’t worry – you may choose to participate to whatever extent you’re comfortable, or to remain a passive observer. Your task is to avert a potential riot before it explodes. As The Riot Ballet progresses, a narrative emerges in fragments: the government works hard to make citizens feel heard and represented… but do their polished messages mask corruption and authoritarian motives? Protesters emerge to challenge the government. Are these protesters’ actions as selfless as they seem? How far are they willing to go to make their point? Journalists report the action as it unfolds. Are they unbiased or are they twisting facts to support a hidden agenda? The show culminates in a (safe but spectacular) burgeoning riot, where your actions in the moment determine just how intense the riot will become.
The Riot Ballet was co-created by Noah Drew, Emer O’Toole, Catalina Medina, Martin Andrews and Shawn Ketchum Johnson, and co-produced by Jump Current Performance (Canada), Working Group Theatre (USA), and La Barracuda Carmela (Colombia).
I was the director, dramaturge and vocal coach for an autoethnographic performance piece, co-created with Anthropology professor Dr. Dara Culhane (Simon Fraser University). Central themes include the changing nature of memory over a lifetime, and the reinterpretation and recreation of autobiographical life stories through narrative and storytelling performance. The piece had performance in Vancouver, Toronto, Los Angeles, Galway, and Dublin.
An original soundscape musical I wrote and composed about what it means to listen – really listen – to those we love, to the world around us, and to the call of our own hearts.
Loosely adapted from Shalom Aleichem’s short story “The Fiddle” and partly based on members of my family, the story follows Ezra, a 25-year-old Jewish-ish autistic man, whose sensory-processing disorder causes him to experience sounds in a heightened way. Sonic details in his environment, unnoticed by others, occur for Ezra as music – sometimes distracting, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes wonderfully entrancing.
Throughout the show, the audience is immersed in Ezra’s world through scenes, songs, instrumentation, live-processing effects, and a highly detailed soundscore. Realistic sounds – and the actors’ voices – float, loop, blur, distort, extend, rhythmicalize and harmonize as Ezra navigates his environment.
“It was a triumph! Some really inspired writing, music and acting.”
– Catherine Rolfsen, CBC Radio
“It was wonderful! The writing, the acting, the set and lighting, the music – amazing
exploration of how our lives and the world collide.”
– audience member
I directed a production of “God of Carnage” by Yazmina Reza, produced by Stendhal X, a company founded by graduates from Concordia’s Acting program. This production put a mixed-race, queer couple at the centre of Reza’s multi-award-winning, globally-acclaimed play about the tensions and mayhem that develop when two sets of parents meet to reconcile after their children have a violent playground encounter. The production performed in Montreal, Gananoque and Ottawa in 2018.
“Powerfully acted under director Noah Drew … [this production] delights in tearing open superficial reality to reveal the darker one beneath it.”
– Patrick Langston, ARTSFILE (Ottawa)