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I grew up in Austin, Texas, and my early years were spent hiking the Greenbelt and leaving gifts in “Fairy Ally”. I grew up on live dance and river parties and kayaks tipping over. My first live performance was reading Island of the Blue Dolphins to my Dad in the car on the way to visit my grandfather. I loved the car. I loved chapter books in the backseat while my dad visited job sites. I loved stories. Stories about regular people triumphing. At four, I sang Sweet Baby James in the open mic hour at the coffee shop my cousin worked at. I suppose that was my big debut in the Austin scene.

I did not grow up viewing great big spectacle-style performances. The live music sets at Shady Grove and Blues on the Green, and Central Market, and the musical performed by elegant fifth graders I saw in kindergarten were not precisely big-budget productions. But live performance is about souls in a space telling a story to other souls in a space. That is my core belief in developing performance. I  am not particularly interested in art that has to appeal to “grown-ups”. Something that speaks to one person is worthy of making. Big, commercial work has its place, but I don’t think success is limited to what is popular. I want to find collaborators who will walk through Fairy Ally with me and look around. I hope my next years entail a deep dive into honest work that may be silly or unrefined. I think honest work can exist only when we address the fear of being seen.

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I have worked with children in some capacity for the past five years. This includes working in a church nursery with infants, as a camp counselor, and recently as a nanny and a teaching artist with a focus on improvisation. Children have a whimsy and are, ideally, allowed a space to explore the world with less internal and external judgement.  I think younger me would be excited to hear that I am diving head first into sound design. I have been an admirer of music and sound all my life, but I avoided engaging with it because it felt like a secret I had to be told. The truth is, all I needed to do was ask. I feel so much joy learning a new medium and allowing myself to wade through feeling bad at something. We do not scorn children for being beginners. May all of us continue to feel like beginners.

My contributions are undoubtedly influenced by the brave ideas of young people. I aspire to appease my younger self  in the work I make-to be excited and interested and to solve a puzzle. My favorite project of this academic year has been Baby Rave, performed at the Cohen New Works Festival. It initially to be an interactive Theatre for Young Audiences installation. In the process, it transitioned focus to exist for the inner child of adults, as well as children. It was magical to watch my peers become comfortable in a space that was silly and earnest. My role was movement, and I tapped into my experience to create an environment where people felt comfortable to frolic around the room with acrylic scarves and dance to songs that ranged from house music to Baby Shark. Me and the folks involved in the project, without saying a word,  collectively agreed to be goofy. This lack of judgement is one reason we were successful.

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What draws me to theater as a medium is that I cannot be the sole contributor. Conflict is inevitable, and I value identifying what things are worth fighting for and what can be forgiven and forgotten. I hope the same is done for me. We can choose to be open when we know conflict is inevitable, or we can decide it is not worth it, and the product suffers.  Kirk Lynn wrote: “This room is the perfect setting. Now is the perfect time of day. You are the perfect group of people. Or not. You decide.” Often we cannot choose our preferred all-star cast and crew of collaborators. Even when we do, its actualization is rarely what we expected. Realizing new collaborators' personal and professional styles is a dance, and I find that process to be so rewarding. I was lucky to meet an expansive group of technical designers and choreographers during Dance Repertory Theatre in February 2023, and I gleaned so much regarding the process. I was able to watch how decisions are made in the performance space and what navigation between designers and choreographers can look like. I gave myself the benefit of believing I was in the perfect space at the perfect time with the perfect group of people.

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Behind the Scenes-Assistant Sound Design for Dance Repertory Theatre 

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Behind the Scenes-Assistant Sound Design for Dance Repertory Theatre 