EXPERIENTIAL & OTHER PROJECTS
WanderWord
In 2013, my husband, Ed, and I went to Wilco’s Solid Sound Music Festival for the first time and felt like we were dreaming. The arts merged around the spectacularly curated music festival and I was burning to add in poetry programming. MASS MoCA is an endless imagination adventure lending its architecture and factory campus to invent playful projects to engage people with poetry. 2015, 2017, 2019, 2022 - WanderWord returned each time with a fresh programming including campus wide magnetic poetry, poetry dominos, poetry typists, poetry clothesline, poetry audio map and more. WanderWord has also staged events at S.U.N.Y New Paltz, New York, and with the Poetry Foundation at First Night Evanston in Chicago.
We founded WanderWord as an artist collective who invent and produce site-specific, interactive poetry events. Our mission: to regale new audiences with forward-thinking blends of live performance, technology and anti-technology. We like to think of it as Recreational Poetry.
Circus Warehouse, Aerialist Text Experiments
Within a concrete industrial patch of Long Island City, there once was a little gold door, the only thing that glimmered alongside the Newtown Creek. If you opened it, you were greeted by a merry-go-round horse and a bevy of dedicated circus artists. Many evenings I walked through that gold door into Suzi Winson’s inventive and inviting Circus Warehouse. Suzi created a program in conjunction with 100K Poets called Aerial Text Experiments and I was fortunate to work with a variety of circus artists who staged my poems.
My work there culminated in a collaboration with Constellation Moving Company and video artist and costume designer, Crystal Thompson, dexterous performer Jon Levin (Sinking Ship Productions) as Seurat, and musicians Micheal Feld and Michael Fletcher who created stunning, original scores. Together we produced a full-length performance of my poem, Chromoluminarism, about Georges Seurat’s final days and unfinished painting, The Circus.
An Island of Cherished Things - children’s book (forthcoming)
Inspired by his trip to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and his passion for the ecological awareness, producer and filmmaker, Ram Devineni envisioned a powerful story for kids. I wrote the text for An Island for Cherished Things, an interactive children’s book and mixed reality exhibition about discarded toys who come to life and encounter the magical, ancient statues left to ruin on the island. By scanning the pages with an augmented reality app, the fable comes to life through animation, ecological short films, and 360-degree mixed animated films shot on Rapa Nui. A metaphor for the global depletion of natural resources and ecosystem collapse, the adventure creates questions and awareness about the fate of what we discard, including our excess of infrequently repurposed plastic toys. Illustrators and artists Syd Fini and Neda Kazemifar brought the story to life with their charming and spell-binding animation. As part of the book’s Augmented Reality, the characters further come to life thanks to the exulted puppeteer company, Los Animistas from Columbia who animate a mini story within the main story.
Made possible in part with public funds from the National Endowment for the Art and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of New York State Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Neon Crow Theatre Lab - The Dread Road: a radio drama based on text by Meridel LeSueur
One very cold winter, our small arts collective rented for $30 a month the once iconic 2B, (former gas station turned Lower East Side welding sculptor’s paradise). We lit illegal propane heaters and curated a season of original, amazing works - theatre, art, and installation pieces. Much to the distain of the welders, we painted the bathroom bright aqua. It was here, at Neon Crow Theatre Lab, that Toni Presti and I produced, directed, and performed our project. The Dread Road was both a staged and recorded radio drama based on text by Meridel LeSueur. The radio drama was featured on WBAI, won a National Federation of Broadcast Silver Reel Award and is available at the New York Public Library Performance Arts Research Center.
As an actress in Minneapolis, Toni met Meridel and was deeply inspired by Meridel’s work and vision. Meridel was an American writer associated with the proletarian movement of the 1930s and 1940s. The Dread Road, Meridel’s final work, published by West End Press, is a lyrical, postmodern collage of voices: a woman’s bus journey to collect her son deformed by the Nevada Bomb Tests, the massacre at Ludlow, Whitman, Poe, Lawrence. Masterfully edited for the stage and directed by Toni Presti, our production featured the voices of Lisa Collins, Madaha Kinsey-Lamb, Tom Knutson, Rachel Kramer, Daniel Mailley, Toni Presti, Jason Webb and me. Watching master engineer/recorder, Ephraim Kehlmann, I became deeply enthralled by radio dramas and audio editing. Meridel remains an inspiration to us, and we’d especially like to thank her daughter, Rachel Tilsen, for supporting this production.
Acts of Art
I formed Acts of Art, an organization which invited artists to become civically engaged. With poet and long-time activist Mae Jackson (Art Without Walls), we organized a Congressional Hearing on Healthcare for Artists, 2006, attended by Congressman John Conyers, New York City Council Member John Barron, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, representatives and leaders of arts unions and organizations, advocates, nurses, doctors, and artists. A packed house witnessed a compelling day stacked with accredited evidence and heartbreaking testimonies addressing the astounding lack of healthcare in the arts community. Acts of Art also participated in many protest marches against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act. We attended Brooklyn Peace Fairs, and gathered funds and art supplies for children in New Orleans and Afghanistan.
Wooster Group and Collapsable Giraffe
As an intern at the Wooster Group, I observed rehearsals and creations led by theatre genius, Elizabeth LeCompte. I was inspired by luminary performances including Kate Valk, Willem Dafoe and Peyton Smith. From there I met directors Jim Findlay and Amy Huggans and joined their feral and fierce avant garde theatre company Collapsable Giraffe for several shows. At the helm of Collapsable Giraffe, they led performers through some bewitching wormholes – including a show at The Performing Garage, the Collapsable Hole. and the first live performance at Show World Strip Club since Mayor Guilliano closed it down, Three Virgins (1999). We had some very interesting drop-in audiences.
