The Other Side of the Door: the art of compassion in policing is my recently published book charting a project I created in partnership with Lt. Jack Cambria, the then head of the NYPD’s Hostage Negotiation Team, to develop an arts-based compassion training program for police officers. After securing funding from the Dan and Joanna…
Histories are written in books and in journalism, but also, within our social consciousness. Places themselves hold traces of the past and have their own form of documentation. Oral Histories are processes that uplift the stories told by first hand witnesses. We know that often these forms of histories tell us deep truths that we…
My family is from an area of South Louisiana called Bois Mallet. We are Creoles of color, and the mix of our ancestry is thorough, representing at least 17 countries in four continents. Bodies of Bois Mallet is a multi-vocal exploration of our living history. The two project elements presented here are “self portraits in…
Maybe It Will Last Ten Years is a series of paintings and ceramic tablets that render the silences within the pages of the US Constitution visible through a hand-transcription and excavation of the blank spaces between words and letters on each page. The four canvas paintings each stand 67” by 55.” Their dimensions take the…
How is your body an ecology that crosses the borders of time and place? How does it hold the stories of your ancestors, both spiritual and biological, while being its own present self? And how does the form and frailty of your body set the stage for what may become? Our bodies are living…
This performance poem was written as a documentation of the process I went through to create the “self portraits in bloom and decay” in Bodies of Bois Mallet. It exists as a set of performance instructions, printed on butcher paper and mounted on found wood with bark. It is installed as a take-away for visitors…
Gentle and Kind Things is an outgrowth of my work as an artist-activist and my commitment to using art practice as a model for leaders to think more holistically about the implications of their actions and the power of using multi-sensory listening and dialogue within crisis situations. In January 2020 I joined a working group with…
The story of a moment, as told by the sun From May to August 2020 I dedicated myself to a daily transcription of the story of a moment, as told by the sun. I unrolled a sheet of paper and, witnessing what patterns of light and shade fell upon it, offered myself in service of…
What does it mean to be “first?” Is being “first” about getting the most for oneself, or are there other powerful ways of leading that enhance the collective good? It is a short step from these timely questions to the feet of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In his sermon and self-eulogy, The Drum Major…
As artistic director of Little Five Arts Alive (L5AA), I developed and curated a three-year creative placemaking project supported by ArtPlace America. L5AA was a free, outdoor performing arts festival, presenting live, interactive and performing arts on two plazas in an independent business district with programming every Saturday and Sunday for six months a year.…
Life with young children is full of energy, interruption, chaos, monotony, love and multiplicity. The paintings in the series The Sacrament of Interruption are family indices of our experience, created in collaboration with my two young sons (3 and 6 years old), energetic physical creations with a swirl of mood, layers of being and discrete…
What if, in an instant, your blood started flowing in the opposite direction? What if your perceptions were comprised of strange black and white shapes? What if your world was one in which there was language, but none of it decipherable? And what if you woke up one morning and had changed drastically in size? Science fiction? No. This was your life, from 0-3. The…
Marcella took the stage at the community open mic event, and shared with the peppered few in attendance, a poem she had composed, on her father’s death. She had nursed him towards this point for months, and her poem wove a conversation of questions. While her father’s words were a taut warp of bitter resentment,…
All Change Festival was a free, boundary busting performance festival animating outdoor and indoor spaces with accessible and innovative contemporary performance. The 2014 iteration of this festival included simultaneous events in five international cities (Reykjavik, Augsburg, London, New York and New Orleans), with forty-five performance events at the UK site (Lyric Hammersmith) alone. I established,…
The Superjohn Project, a product of a Big Idea Workshop on Belief, is a multilayered, social practice project exploring the power of imagination in dealing with adversity. Inspired by a true story and made in collaboration with patients, families and medical practitioners at the Whittington Hospital Pediatric Oncology unit, outcomes of the project included a…
Two teenagers. A jammed lift. No mobile signal. ‘Listen. Listen…days ago, I had this idea. I just couldn’t make it clear in my mind. But now I can.’ ★★★★ CRITIC’S CHOICE Time Out Inspired by a true story, Gabriel Pintilei’s moving two-hander explores human dynamics in an extreme environment as it follows two youngsters journey through…
by Lucy Alibar Directed by Rachel Parish September 8 – October 1, 2017 at the Aurora Theatre Oscar-nominated screenwriter and playwright Lucy Alibar (Beasts of the Southern Wild) crafted this poetic and powerful solo performance around her life growing up in the middle of nowhere on the Georgia-Florida line. The tapestry of her childhood includes a lecherous…
The Stella Project was a series of interconnected socially engaged performance events, designed to unlock value in the creative process for both artists and publics. The project was framed with the goal of devising a new version of a classic text to present as a professional production in London. For the process, I assembled partnerships…
A Laboratory of Failure led by Rachel Parish and Cristina Catalina. The International Failure Institute’s [IFI] launched Controlled Explosions, part of a worldwide search for what failure means for us today. A day-long participatory workshop at The Shop Front Theatre in Coventry included crafting ideas, debating and researching, playing and wildly speculating, and daring to fail…
SOON UNTIL FOREVER is a tiny little jewel of a play. Poetic and honest and nuanced and beautifully directed and acted at the 503. –Simon Stephens Directed by Rachel Parish. Written by Shireen Mula. Developed with Liz Boag & Nadia Malik. Performed by Jennifer Jackson, Soon Until Forever premiered at Theatre503 in April 2013. Jamie and Emily…
During a residency at Duke University I created And Some Are Hidden in Plain Sight along with a professor and group of 15 first-year students. Through exploring our own relationships to Failure, we identified an imbalance: that some failures are celebrated in society today as the engine of creativity while others we feel we must…
I Confess is a performance experience exploring empathy and intimacy in a structured improvisational and participatory performance. Through the experience, the roles of performer and audience, truth and fiction, and public and private spaces are subverted and explored. How it works: A confessional is situated in a public space with a sign and a person…
Commissioned by the Museum of Broken Relationships in London, Careful was a performance installation interrogating memories of love, loss and forgiveness. The one-to-one experience unfolded as follows: You enter a warm, comfortable room. The walls are covered with stories and memorabilia from previous participants. Inside this room is a single performer. You sit down and…
“You are invited to step into someone else’s skin. They may be within your own city or country, or they may be miles away in a foreign land. Listen to them tell you about the wind on their face, the grass between their toes and the whiff of the streets. Sneak into their present for…
Read more You Are Here /a global sensory teleportation project/
A set of headsets, a voice recorder and an array of cards are arranged in a public space. A sign welcomes members of the public to sit, put on the headset, and open and read aloud one card at a time. On each card is a statement. These statements are phrased to spark memories for…
A commission from Works on Water, Opera in the Shower is a playful meditation on the use of water in our daily lives. A shower appears in the park. From within, an opera singer, dressed in an old fashioned bathing suit, shower cap and with a scrub brush, sings from her repertoire in an outdoor…
This project explored the dialogic nature of identity and the value of being a cultural and racial ‘border dweller’ whose identity alludes definition. The work began with an English person posing a question to Londoners in public spaces. “What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of Americans?’ After photographing the…
Working with the Ideas for Creative Exploration Research Institute at the University of Georgia and Georgia College and State University, I developed The Food Project in 2012. Over a course of three weeks, I worked with a collaborator to engage communities of people throughout Georgia with questions around their relationship to food. Through story gathering…
The Big Idea Workshop is a performance workshop for small groups of artists and non-artists to deeply explore a big idea in contemporary life as a prompt for creating new performance work. The workshop investigates a set subject through discussion, devising and developing dramatic ideas. We do not aim to solve any questions through the…
Firesides are pop up art salons for artists and non-artists to engage in non-hierarchical creative exchange. Using the format of a regularly held dinner gatherings, participants enjoy food, culture, conversation, and collaboration. The evening begins with a welcome and invitation to grab a plate and a conversation partner whom you’ve never met before. A host…
The roots of much of my practice can be seen through a series of projects I began in 2003. Traveling across several continents, I spoke with people ranging from Tuareg tribespeople in the Malian desert to physicians in the USA. I conducted 30 interviews in English and French with people I met in passing, in…
Tesseract was an intergenerational story-sharing project designed to find innovative ways of enhancing memory function in elderly people with dementia and to provide resiliency-building experiences for vulnerable girls aged 7-11 through the arts. The initial project, in Macon, Georgia, connected two groups of people from different parts of a deeply segregated community, using reciprocity and…
“Hearts starve as well as bodies. Give us bread but give us roses too.” – J. Oppenheim Bread and Roses Summer Camp was a three year arts-based resilience promotion program for vulnerable children (children whose lives are impacted by behavioural/emotional challenges and/or parental mental illness, incarceration, and/or substance abuse). Led by a team of professional artists,…
By Deborah Zoe Laufer At the Aurora Theatre, Directed By Rachel Parish Bari is in a perpetual funk, biding her time at a mind-numbing job shipping Tibetan-themed tchotchkes. Cheerful co-workers Patty and Luanne try to see past her cynical exterior through their Prozac-colored glasses. Will Bari ever leave her parents’ house in provincial upstate New York?…
by Alice Birch at 7Stages, directed by Rachel Parish Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. finds theatrical exhilaration in a puckish, yet deadly serious meditation on how language molds our experience of sex and gender.
An experimental piece of ensemble-based theatre, The Silents traverses the stories of three people at a crossroads, exploring the power of internal fantasies and the price of forging your own path. Through their interlocking narratives, audiences traverse a path blending past and present, reality and fantasy, comedy and imminent tragedy. Central to the development of…
A sensual, exciting & terrifying production fusing film, music, immersive design and theatre, Hellscreen follows an artist, his daughter & a collector on their descent into hellish greed & obsession. by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Rachel Parish Inspired by a classic Japanese horror story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, set in the contemporary London art world, and…
What do you desire? What do you dream of? How much are you willing to believe? The rich have left their homes and deserted the city. Three fabulously unsavory characters join forces to pose as modern-day alchemists. Ben Jonson’s classic masterpiece takes a ruthless and hilarious look at the tendency in us all to believe…
As a collaborative theatre-maker, I have authored or co-authored the scripts for many staged productions. These include I Confess, Manifesting Destiny, Superjohn, Hellscreen, The Museum of Our Forgotten Selves, The Journey, Stella, and The Alchemist. The cross-disciplinary nature of my practice has also forged interesting relationships that have application in a number of fields. One…
RACHEL PARISH 