24H MEDEA, IN PROGRESS (2019-PRESENT)

Creator and Director

“I wish it had never sailed, the good ship Argo...”

In Euripides’s Greek tragedy, Medea—marked as a religious, ethnic, and gender outsider—infamously slays her two children at the play’s end. There are multiple ways to understand this act: as revenge, as resistance to patriarchal and xenophobic violence, as intervention in the oppressive reproduction of power.

But is another outcome possible? Can tragedy be undone? How far back do we need to go in order to avert past harm?

24H Medea is a durational, immersive, music theater performance in which the tragedy of Medea repeats and revises 24 times over the course of an entire day. With each round, performers switch roles and begin again—each time, a real experiment to see what could happen, and what might shift, through repetition, duration, and the contingency of the live event. We draw from techniques of chance operations emerging from performance art as well as aleatoric music (John Cage et al.), alongside theories/practices of revision as described in literary/black studies (M. NourbeSe Philip, Saidiya Hartman), in order to propose that theater can be used as a model for intervening in seemingly intractable cycles of violence.

2024 Artist residency and work-in-progress showing at Subcircle, supported by a grant from The Pennsylvania State University.

2023 Artist residency at Haverford College, supported by the Department of English, Distinguished Visitors Fund, and the Initiative for Ethical Engagement and Leadership.

2022 MAP Fund finalist.

2020-2021 Regional Faculty Fellowship from the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Forum on “Choice.”

2019 Inspired by a devised adaptation of Medea (dir. Jack Isaac Pryor), Department of Theater, Reed College.

Current Collaborators

Additional Collaborators

Thomas Choinacky, AZ Espinoza, Sarah Myers, Una Osato, Lindsay Reckson, Pax Ressler, Rosie Tabachnick.