Director
“Orion is one of the most exquisite artists I know, whose musical work and personal spiritual commitment to collective liberation are profoundly intertwined. We’ve created multiple works together, from the minuscule to the epic, and from the overtly political to covert, narrative work.”
“Orion continually inspires me as a collaborator/composer/director, in the way they hold space and people as sacred and whole beings. The care, rigor, and thoughtful communication evident in all layers of their interactions speak to the way that SPIRIT and JUSTICE are moving at their core.”
I understand myself, first and foremost, as someone dedicated to the question: “who and how might we be together most bravely in light of our collective liberation?” Thus, I am most drawn to work that sits at the intersections of theater and civil disobedience, theater and political organizing, theater as ritual and sanctuary, theater as space for collective action and collective healing.
I have worked in theater as a director and composer/conductor for over 20 years now. Alongside my theater career, I am a community minister and facilitator and political organizer, with abundant experience and ease with co-creating liberatory processes with large teams of people.
Recent Directing Highlights Include:
*{my lingerie play} 2017: THE CONCERT AND CALL TO ARMS!!!!!!!!! The Final Installation, at Rattlestick Theater, by Diana Oh (Co-Directed along with Diana)
*T(estosterone), workshop at the Hub Theater, by Kit Yan and Anjimile
*All I Want Is To Be Happy Sometimes, workshop at the Kennedy Center (Playwrights’ Week), by jacob margaret archer
*(W)holeness, workshop at the WP, by Liliana Padilla
Upcoming: RENT, NYU Tisch Mainstage, April-May 2024
You can find my full C.V. here.
When Occupy Wall Street happened, I dropped everything to show up there full time, believing I would not be working as an artist anymore. Much to my surprise and delight, I came full circle! Connecting to making music in the context of civil disobedience and direct action, and in learning about anti-oppression facilitation, I found a way back into theater making that held my whole heart more than ever before and I grew into understanding, in a deeper way, the relationship between artmaking and justice and liberation.
I am drawn toward the epically simple and the simply epic. My Autistic brain feels like an ocean of algorithms, and I love the multi-tiered universes that theater makes possible. At the same time, I revel in accessibility and heart-centered stories. So I am at my best when I am allowing vastness and complexity in form/structure/ecosystem, while letting that grow from simple core content/seeds.
I am Transgender, and I carry a ferocious and fabulous commitment to Queering: to unruliness, to non-conformity, and to unsettling the dominant scripts that are built on power over others rather than power with others. I believe that my life, and our lives, literally depend on this. And I am rooted in this sacred unsettling not only in form and content, but also in process.
All of our access needs are connected, and I have experienced, time and again, the freedom and bravery that springs from centering the meeting of access needs in theatrical processes, starting with everyone’s capacity and building the very shape of the process from there. I live with chronic illness, which comes with limitations, and also which I have come to understand as a superpower of sensitivity and deep listening. Over time, as I have grown into deeper integrity with my own body and capacity, I have learned to be more deeply attuned to the needs and capacities of everyone in the room.
How we make is as important as what we make. Care for everyone’s well-being and relationships with each other is paramount! In every collaboration, I strive for fractal integrity with this mandate, so that every tiny piece is a reflection of the whole, and each element of a process is connected to the more just and liberated world that I know in my blood and my bones.
Every breath is a prayer, every word is a spell, and theater making is a sacred collective act. It is important to me to co-create rituals with the team to ground us in our connection to the earth, to our ancestors, and to who and to what our work is dedicated, and it is important to me to allow those rituals to be a core part of shaping the work that unfolds.
From the time I was a child, I have known that collaborative storytelling and singing together are some of the most powerful (and most ancient) technologies of transformation. Disrupting and transcending systems of dominance requires resilience with discomfort - resilience with bearing witness to pain and violence and also, equally as powerfully, resilience with tolerating joy and possibility. As a theatermaker, I am devoted to creating sacred containers to support our resilience with the discomfort of transformation, in all these ways and beyond.
For more on what shaped me, please see Roots and Lineages.
Feel free to reach out to see video clips and/or to discuss specific past projects or projects that are in development.
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In the words of some wonderful collaborators:
“Orion’s work is grounded in integrity, possibility, and deep trust. They have real craft—helping actors navigate switchbacks in scenes, thinking expansively but concretely about design—but they also understand the alchemy of igniting the collective imagination of a group of collaborators, leading them to make their best work in an environment of expansive care. Working with orion was productive, inspiring, and a lot of fun.”
“Orion’s care and attention to making sure our rehearsal hall was a “brave space,” through collaborative values, community care, and balancing our forward momentum with each participant’s access needs, made our short workshop a place of trust and deep exploration. Orion creates an environment where relative strangers can come together in a deliberate and mutually supportive space, and has a remarkable ability to guide a group through difficult and sensitive work. i got so much vital feedback on my project through this process, and it really took my script to another level.”
“I have always admired Orion’s ability to make a process feel like one amazing continuous moment of discovery. They are thoughtful, intentional, a taskmaster, and creates an environment of joy, where artists can be their whole selves in order to do the best job possible in telling a story”