I have a great love of Holiday Romance films. The silly, over-the-top, just-because-its-christmas films popular on lifetime, netflix, and hallmark bring me so much joy from November through December every year. As the days grow darker, I find a deep amount of Joy in the light from stories about love and connection.  I had the great pleasure to develop this play with class of 2022 EIU Student Hannah Killough as her Senior Thesis project. 

EIU has done a full foley radio play every other year for the past few years. It's a low budget production, and I was told that the options for scripts were to find something in the public domain or do something new. New Plays are my passion, and many of those old scripts are inherently sexist and racist (And often xenophobic) so it seemed a better bet to just start from scratch. Hannah and I talked about what made a good holiday story and we shared our love of silly holiday romances and decided to take the play in that direction. We listened to old-time radio plays to get a sense of the form and the possibilities for what could be. 

Love, Garland, Bows, and Tinsel is a holiday radio romance with a specifically queer bent. This is not a coming out story, but rather a holiday romance for queer students focused on falling in love and finding light in each other as the days grow dark and finals approach. The play will be recorded live on Dec. 3rd and 4th at the theatre at EIU and then aired on EIU Radio on Dec 12th. It will also be available via youtube. 

Last Spring, Dr. Harvey Thurmer, a Violin Professor at Miami, came to my office with an idea about climate change, fake news, and Russian composers. We conceived of a joint performance between the theatre department and the music department. We received generous support from The Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies to develop and perform the piece. 

Dr. Thurmer contributed musical selections from the Russian composers the work centered on: Prokofiev, Shchedrin, Stravinksy and Shostakovich. I was able to work with my graduate students Mackenzie Kirkman and Kelley Feeman to develop the script as a dramaturgical project focusing on documentary sources from the four composers and the women in their lives. My Dramaturgy course provided additional research support for the play. We were also able to hire Projection Designer Joe Spinogatti to design the important visual elements that helped to meld the worlds of music and spoken word together. 

The piece premiered on September 14th, 2018  on the Gates-Abegglen Stage featuring the Oxford String Quartet and Miami Alum Low Chyh Shen on Piano, and acting by Theatre Department undergradute students, under my direction.

Some press on the piece:
http://miamioh.edu/cca/news/2018/08/deceptive-cadence.html
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I've been accepted to present research from my dissertation at the The British Library and Institute of Historical Research for the Pocahontas and After conference from March 16th-19th. 

Paper Title: Giving Voice to Pocahontas in the 1990s: Decolonial Dramaturgy in Native American Women’s Playwriting. 
 
Abstract:
Pocahontas’s voice does not exist in the archive. She left no account of her own. John Smith recorded and co-opted her story, which was then reiterated in foundational mythologies of the United States. Pocahontas's conversion to Christianity and marriage to a colonist was often interpreted as national permission for colonization. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, Pocahontas was enacted on the American stage, often as a titular character that was not also the center of the plot. In the 1990s Indigenous women performers and playwrights in North America began to re-voice Pocahontas and other famous historical Indigenous women adding alternative interpretations and Indigenous perspectives to the narrative. 
 
In 1990 Kuna and Rappahannock actor and playwright Monique Mojica created and performed Princess Pocahontas and The Blue Spots, a solo performance piece in which Mojica embodies an alternative imagining of Native women's history in the Americas. She gives Pocahontas a voice and perspective outside of the confines of western narratives. Mojica's work is part of a larger movement of indigenous women's playwriting during the 1990's that restages and gives voice to historical Indigenous women like Pocahontas, Sacajawea, and La Malinche. Collectively these playwrights create a decolonial dramaturgy- that is a mode of playmaking that honors indigenous epistemologies and heritages and work that performs a decolonial history, one that shifts and alters the meaning of colonization. 

On April 3rd at the University of Pittsburgh, sponsored by the Year of Diversity and the Theatre Arts department, I am producing a staged reading of Mfoniso Udofia's award nominated play runboyrun. Mfoniso Udofia will direct the piece featuring students and professor's from the University of Pittsburgh and artists from the community.  

 Mfonsio Udofia is a first generation Nigerian-American storyteller, playwright, actress, and educator. Her plays have been developed and/or produced by Playwrights Realm, The Magic Theatre, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, Hedgebrook, Sundance Theatre Lab, Space on Ryder Farm, NNPN and New Play Showcase, Makehouse, Soul Productions, terraNOVA, I73, The New Black Fest, Rising Circle's INKTank, At Hand Theatre Company, The Standard Collective, American Slavery Project, Liberation Theatre Company and more. Her play Sojourners was selected for the 2015 Killroy list, and it was a finalist for the Eugene O’Neill New Play Conference. She attended Wellesley College and obtained her MFA from ACT. She co-pioneered the youth initiative The Nia Project, providing artistic outlets for youth residing in Bayview/Huntspoint. She’s also the Artistic Director of the NOW AFRICA: Playwrights Festival and a proud member of New Dramatists class of 2023.  
 
runboyrun is the third entry in Udofia’s Ufot Cycle of plays that follow the Ufot family’s experience as Nigerian immigrants in the United States, a people uprooted from their home by war and strife. runboyruntells the story of patriarch Disciple Ufot, and his failing relationship to his wife Abasiama Ufot. They have been living in the memory of the Nigerian Civil War that forced Disciple to come to America, living in the trauma of that day over and over for many decades. A sudden burst of frustration breaks their pattern and time suddenly rushes forward while also reeling backwards; forcing Disciple and Abasiama to finally navigate the treacherous waters of illness, memory and love. runboyrun blends the present day with the civil war of 1968 to produce an evocative tale of trauma, love, and the secrets that devour us from the inside.
 
 
This year’s Big Ten production of Baltimore explores the fraught racial relationships within the United States and on college campuses. runboyrun explores the experience of Nigerian immigrants in America, and complicates the story of what it means to be black in the United States. This play deals explicitly with the global resonances of African diaspora after the middle passage and introduces the audience to implications of the Nigerian Civil War for that population. As we embrace a year of diversity, hearing stories of the wide range of experience grows our understanding of and empathy for difference in our community.

"Space is the Simultaneity of Stories So Far"- Doreen Massey

Sponsored by the Year of Diversity initiative at the University of Pittsburgh this audio project is a digital interaction with the lived reality of residents of Wilkinsburg. Project conceived in collaboration with Aaron Henderson, Prof. of Studio Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Currently in development seeking community partners, look for the guide in late spring.

Project Description: Every day people from the suburbs pass through Wilkinsburg, PA to get to their jobs in the city. They pass through, but they don’t stop. Wilkinsburg’s reputation within the greater Pittsburgh area is an area of violence, blight, and crime. Yet, there are lives of positivity lived on the streets of this urban suburb. The crime statistics have fallen in Wilkinsburg since 2010, but the narrative in the news about Wilkinsburg is always peppered by crime, violence, poverty, and race relations. This project’s goal is to add to the narratives of the space through the people who live there, adding human encounters and stories of the space that change the way we understand what Wilkinsburg is.The project, conceived as a digital walking tour that can be experienced online or in person through gps location tagging.