I’m not a believer in ghosts, but I am concerned with hauntings as a feeling; we are haunted by the phantoms of nature, whether we know it or not, and by our colonial past, bleeding and curdling into the soil of our present. Being haunted is, more or less, our default state of being. This aspect is present, in a certain way, in all live performance, which is always “haunted by the spectre of failure,” as experimental theatre-maker Tim Crouch once said. There is always a sense of potential intrusion, always a crack in the facade- which is, after all, what a haunting is. It eludes perfection, but embraces the sublime.
Our world is shaped by the invisible forces that haunt it: the lurking machinations of entrenched privilege and ripple-effects of colonization, the products of strip-mining and environmental degradation that surround us, push us, guide us, haunt us. The work I strive to create is a focal point for these forces, taking place in the spaces that exist at their convergence (or absence), with characters who are caught between them.
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