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I am an immersive theater composer and artist-researcher pursuing one question from two directions: how do relational structures — domestic, institutional, public — shape collective life? My current cycle, Every Room Speaks, works from the domestic end. It pairs common rooms within our homes with forms of verbal communication they often foster — bathroom with internal dialogue, kitchen with commentary, bedroom with conversation, living room with interview — and composes that recorded speech into multisensory, theatrical installations of music, linguistic narrative, lighting, scent, touch, and taste for one to three participants at a time. Each room-based installation is then adapted to a park, a transit stop, a sidewalk, testing whether the forms of social care and conflict management we practice at home can recompose how strangers share public space. My scholarly writing works from the institutional end, reading Norway's debates over publicly funded art through the institutionally critical music theater of composer Trond Reinholdtsen.
“[T]he global is always at play in the quotidian. The quotidian is not some misfortune that must be redeemed by way of understanding its dependence with regards to global connection. It is the time within which the whole of an injustice of a condition is concentrated, but also its possible reparation...where the evidence that structures the temporal order of time is erased, where the distribution of the possible is reconfigured, and with it, the power of those who inhabit time.”
— Jacques Rancière, “Time, Narrative, Politics” (trans. Drew S. Burk)