About
I act, write, direct, train, and teach across theatre, film, performance and digital media.
I was a "traditional" Stanislavsky-trained actor in the 80s. It was a combination of classes in Sonia Moore's System at college in Calgary and real encounters with it overseas. I was lucky enough to visit the (then) USSR in the days of glasnost where I audited the training at a regional conservatory in Kiev.
I'm grateful for that because I actually didn't undertand quite a lot of it. The common language of the work was used so differently. And that got me on this track.
I am building this network of websites and papers to gather my trajectory into a flexible, hopefully inviting, online workspace.
I aim to bring together projects, writing, people, and tools that focus on how actors and directors actually build work in the room; what is best for this moment of our history, and what's on the horizon in the future.
Diversity is central to me and my lived experience. My work aims to intersect differences and points of origin. The goal is practical. I want to build conditions for meaningful work shaped from where we actually stand.
Latest Projects
Crosspoints sits inside my larger approach to acting. Being a polymath meant I trained quite a lot in traditions from both the East and West (and the blurred edges). I created Crosspoints as a bridging tool, giving a shared, visual language that helps map ideas without locking them into fixed definitions.
In practice that means more precise, bolder choices and really taking into account the conditions shared by all working actors in the industry today. We are not the same as the last century. I hope these ideas help you find a way to connect intuition with structure, and without reducing either one.
My work on this project began through an invitation from Rosa Cheng, originator of the "fusion opera" and Artistic Director of the Vancouver Cantonese Opera Society. It has been generously supported by the Creative Activity, Research and Scholarship office of Capilano University.
Our process has been invented through necessity, bringing together traditional forms and contemporary performance practices with musical fusion at its core. Nothing is overly conceptual. Everything is solving a problem by re-organizing storytelling, presence, and attention in new ways for both of us.