Theatre

Rachel is a director, devised theatre artist, collaborative playwright, and performer working in the U.S. theatre. Her work activates audiences to discover and participate in theatrical events she creates, in order to propel people to action in their own lives and communities. In the last twenty years she has co-created and directed plays with children, teens, and senior citizens, as well as artists who are Deaf and DeafBlind. Rachel is a co-founder of dog & pony dc, a hearing and Deaf theatre ensemble that operated from 2008-2020, with whom she devised ~20 new plays and interactive experiences.

Rachel’s rehearsal and devising rooms are physical and inquisitive. She brings people together to play with ideas of social consequence, sourcing materials from contemporary media, clowning exercises, existing play scripts and group-generated texts, history, and cultural artifacts relevant to the topic, story, and people at hand. The two dominant guiding principles in Rachel’s work are audience integration and cultural amplification. Audience integration, which she developed during her time with dog & pony dc, is the intentional interweaving of the audience into the experience (and often the narrative) of a performance (or a work of art). Cultural amplification is the acknowledgement that each of us is a unique individual comprised of multiple intersecting cultural identities, therefore all artists are explicitly invited to bring as much or as little of their whole selves to the production process; the infusion of some or all of the artists’ cultures into those presented in the script (while keeping in mind who the show is being performed for) presents a wider set of choices thereby making plays and productions less centered on the dominant cultures and the entire rehearsal room culture more inclusive and accessible. Cultural amplification was inspired by the writings of Justin Emeka.