Rachel's Sky+Mortal+Gods (-Earth)

A brief intro:
I am a theater maker and performance artist who also works in longer-form theater.  When I am working in more traditional modes, I work with several theaters in Minneapolis as a playwright and/or performer.  For the past several years, I have also run my own performance art collective, called APORIA, where I work as a much more free-form theater artist, writing/directing/performing alongside a group of other people working in a similarly multi-disciplinary fashion.  I do a lot of self-producing, which means that I often perform at tiny theaters with a specific following, such as The Mudlark Theater in New Orleans, or Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis: venues that have a specific focus to everything they produce.  These factors both inform and limit my work.  

I am interested in expanding out of these specific contexts into a larger framework of audiences/collaborators who bring different expectations and realities into my work.  With this in mind, I have begun a collaboration with Ben (as in Burpee) and Johanna Cairns that is exploring the transformative qualities of desire and the potential for sensory experience to disrupt and rewrite existing systems.  We are currently exploring how/who to bring in as audience members.  

I answered the prompts below from my experiences in the past.  The future might be different. Duh.


Mortals: In general, the type of human that exists in/around my work is younger than the average theater-goer: somewhat educated, sometimes (but not at all always) interested in radical political and/or social change, and looking for ways to manifest this through art.  There are a lot of artists of all type who work in/around/at my work.  The people who see my work are quite often reflective of the people who perform in it.  

Gods: I work primarily in systems that expose systems.  Through using (fairly) traditional performance elements, I allow for multiple readings of the body in performative moments. While the values and paradigms that this can touch on are somewhat limitless, I tend to focus in on sexuality, power structures, and notions of romanticism, and creating non-traditional narrative realities around these topics.

Sky: Ideally, my work allows for people/performers to find new ways of existing inside their own notions of self.  Most often, this is non-directive: I mean mostly that when performers play with notions of power and reality, new ways of looking can open up, for them and for the audience.  Objects/touch/emotional knowledge can be read differently.