“Is God Is” by Aleshea Harris - 2022 - The New School, NY

TIMESTAMP: 1:22 - 3:50

Okay, I started with a big picture of a moving painting. I then thought about how I wanted to world to move around the twins to show their travel. I wanted to build a prelude that was foreboding, but ended on love and sisterhood: a mini model of the full piece.

I workshopped with friends weeks before rehearsal of how to personify fire. We then worked through it with the cast for comfort, safety, chaos, and tone. The unity of senses is what is so significant to me, here. The stage feels truly rhythmic and unified for the introduction of our protagonists. We talked about patty cake, secret handshakes, and other hella black sisterly things and worked them into the audience’s first meeting with Anaia and Racine. 

I also wrote and recorded the arrangement for the theme music, from which the sound designer, Almeda Beynon used stems to sprinkle as a thematic motif during certain transitions. The music also pulls interpolation from both “Ready or Not Here I Come” by Delfonics and “Ready or Not” by the Fugees, so we also could get the theme of generational cycles in correlation to generation trauma.

“Worlds Melt” by Preston Crowder - 2021 - The New School, NY

TIMESTAMP: 19:28 - 23:30

Since, this was a new play we had been developing together since the playwright’s first draft, we really focused on shifting from the soap opera and sitcom “naturalistic” instincts of the piece to these more stylized dreamlike moments and flashback. This shows some of my experience in and affinity for tone shifts. More significantly is rhythm and unity of each creative discipline. I focused on visualizing the themes of reflection, wealth disparity, inequalities (racial, social, class) and its ubiquity in American towns and suburbs through the stage design (the split). I also brought some cinematic language from Hitchcock regarding voyeurism and the way the breaks in the fourth wall in piece felt both cinematic and theatric.

“Sunset Baby” by Dominique Morriseau - 2017 - Trustus Theatre, SC

Full Clip

Unfortunately, I was only able to stitch together some promotional material from this piece, as I was not able to document the full performance, but I think it will serve to convey my multi-disciplinary style of building atmosphere. Color theory and building a palette and music were the two spotlights in my direction here. I used projection and video design to place for use during transitions and rhythm, while using a score comprised of mixes of Nina Simone songs and modern hip hop and r&b to set the proper aural atmosphere. Sound design also added, using sourced subway noise and other organic audio to immerse the small 50 seat theatre into the uptown NY studio. I wanted there to constantly be sound and light and movement. I also used the sort of ground thrust layout to constrict to give a SC audience the feeling of Nina’s daily experience primarily atmospherically. I worked with a movement choreographer to give Nina’s solitary moments more weight and focus. It’s her story, after all: her perspective. I worked extensively in collaboration with the movement choreographer, Abby Bartman. I discussed set pieces with Brandon McIver and found footage. Used movement to tell stories before dialogue, for example: Nina cleaning her apartment in choreography. Creating a genuine atmosphere here of cramped, hustling, and trying to find personal peace.