Artistic Statement
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Greg Romero
Artistic Statement
After 8 years working as a theatre artist and educator in Philadelphia, New York City, and Baltimore, I was recently called to breathe in a new set of revitalizing experiences, leaving cityscapes in favor of National Forests of the American West and the wild terrain of the states of Idaho and Montana, where I lived for two years, working for the US Forest Service.
I am now seeking more expansive questions about what a play is and about the nature and needs of performance. I believe these questions are necessary or theatre—the form of community expression most vital to who we are—will dwell, numb and dormant, shamefully, sleepily aspiring to be more. I love
theatre too much to allow this to be true. How then, to keep this beast awake?
Why do people make theatre?
Do we start there, or go back further?
What are humans, and why are we compelled to express ourselves? What responsibilities come with the unique ability to imagine and transform? How do we commune most vitally with the space and place where we live? What can theatre learn from a fox or a river?
How can live performances demand imaginative, intellectual, and emotional participation? How can theatre best push people off-balance through challenges, surprises, catharses, weirdness, and creative uses of space? What happens when we host potlatches and make things from urgencies whispered over broken bread? What precipitates when we create events inspired by and beholden to the weather? What stories are the ghosts haunting us with?
What unlikely collaborations—across disciplines, abilities, space, ideologies, and species—can we bridge to best shake our bodies? What breaks loose when the audience sings a work song, or a hymn, or a chant, or beats a drum alongside the other people surrounding the vibrating ground?
These are a few of the beginning questions—all directed at finding the places where theatre and community collide together most loudly, most actively.
Deeply occupied by the reciprocation between performance and the natural world, I am singing out to make, give space for, and share with others a more compassionate, vital, full-body-activating kind of theatre.
I am now seeking more expansive questions about what a play is and about the nature and needs of performance. I believe these questions are necessary or theatre—the form of community expression most vital to who we are—will dwell, numb and dormant, shamefully, sleepily aspiring to be more. I love
theatre too much to allow this to be true. How then, to keep this beast awake?
Why do people make theatre?
Do we start there, or go back further?
What are humans, and why are we compelled to express ourselves? What responsibilities come with the unique ability to imagine and transform? How do we commune most vitally with the space and place where we live? What can theatre learn from a fox or a river?
How can live performances demand imaginative, intellectual, and emotional participation? How can theatre best push people off-balance through challenges, surprises, catharses, weirdness, and creative uses of space? What happens when we host potlatches and make things from urgencies whispered over broken bread? What precipitates when we create events inspired by and beholden to the weather? What stories are the ghosts haunting us with?
What unlikely collaborations—across disciplines, abilities, space, ideologies, and species—can we bridge to best shake our bodies? What breaks loose when the audience sings a work song, or a hymn, or a chant, or beats a drum alongside the other people surrounding the vibrating ground?
These are a few of the beginning questions—all directed at finding the places where theatre and community collide together most loudly, most actively.
Deeply occupied by the reciprocation between performance and the natural world, I am singing out to make, give space for, and share with others a more compassionate, vital, full-body-activating kind of theatre.