During the pandemic, with housemate and co-instigator Michele Minnick, I organized and co-created two events focused on our little neighborhood of Sabina-Mattfeldt, which we affectionately refer to as “the holler.” Calling ourselves Team Holler Joy, we organized two events: A Night of Joy in the Holler: an antidote to election and Covid stress, and Out of the Shadows, a Team Holler Joy Solstice Celebration, seen in this photo by Aaron Levin.

For both events, we gathered a team of neighbors, some with artistic and other skills to contribute, others who wanted to help by building fires and providing warm beverages. Both events complied with the current Covid guidelines, fully masked, and appropriately distanced.Our next event will likely be in April, on Earth Day, with other events to follow. These productions offer us an opportunity to build community with our neighbors, and also to experiment with new forms, skills and technology.

For Joy in the Holler, we planned the event with co-conspirators Jean Grae and Gavin (Quelle) Tenille for the evening of election day as an invitation to unglue from our screens and the results coming in. There were three fire pits with refreshments, distributed around the neighborhood; a silly hat parade led by a resident flugelhorn player; street ping pong; and a singalong of The Times They Are a Changing with the extended Scally family, including son Alex (Beach House). One mom from the neighborhood rallied the kids for some sidewalk chalk drawing and other activities. We erected a community drawing board for people to write or draw their dreams for the future, which people continued to enjoy and embellish for several days after the event. Jean and Quelle shared old jazz 78s on their vintage gramophone, and Jean DJ’d a socially distant dance party in their yard from their porch.

For Out of the Shadows, a guided audio tour of the neighborhood and visual art installation with videos of musical contributions from the Team Holler Joy Jazz ensemble, we provided an event that was both virtual and live, and followed the tightened safety protocols put in place in mid-December. With neighbors who made up our Visual Design Committee who created an array of natural and constructed decorations for our neighborhood field, we created a path made of lights where participants traced a spiral path back into and out of 2020. At the center of the spiral there was a fire for people to burn their “shadows,” challenges from 2020. Upon emerging from the spiral, they whispered their wishes onto red ribbons and hung them from a well-loved tree. People made cookies that were sent home to each household. We invited colleague Ursula Marcum to perform a shadow puppet show and Glenn Ricci (both of Submersive Productions) to provide additional music. Our festival of light was an opportunity to embrace the darkness, literal and metaphorical, and to welcome the coming light of spring. We were graced with an unusually long lasting snowfall a few days before, the convergence of Jupiter and Saturn and a bright sliver of moon in the sky, so the elements conspired to make it a wintery and beautiful evening.

Here is a link to our audio tour (you may need to copy and paste into your browser): https://youraudiotour.com/tours/1185/

Here is a link to Ursula Marcum's shadow puppet piece, The Return: https://youtu.be/xU0AcwLbwUQ

BACKWARDS FROM WINTER is a portrait of one woman’s journey through loss. We begin with the frozen landscape of grief in winter, traveling backwards through the sharp pain of losing her beloved in an autumn storm, through the summer’s heat of their passion, to the heart-opening birth of their love in spring.

Structured as a fractured inquiry into grief and healing, the narrative strips away layers of memory as it moves backwards in time. Images emerge with their own peculiar logic, just as certain details of traumatic memory remain vivid while others fade away. The character of Woman is bound by the specific events of her loss, even as the emotional intensity is fused with seasonal rhythms of time.

The poetry for each scene of the libretto is formed in three Tanka verses, a Japanese precursor to Haiku with a syllabic structure of 5-7-5-7-7. This form is used in each scene and was the strict structure we imposed on the literary conception of the work. Each scene is linked by a further Tanka to the next scene so the whole monodrama has a 3-1-3-1-3-1-3-1 structure with the last deconstructed Tanka acting as a postlude. The music was conceived in similarly strict fashion using only the resources of electric cello, electronically processed soprano voice and computerized sound. The cellist also sings, hums and intones words, lending an extra layer of dramatic friction to the music, as does audio filtering and/or processing of the soprano voice.

The opera premiered in May 2018 at Symphony Space in NYC; produced by the Center for Contemporary Opera and directed by Jennifer Williams. The following month, Foundation IHOS Amsterdam produced a second production as part of the Dark Mofo Festival and directed by Konstantin Koukias.

CD available from Ablaze Records:  https://www.ablazerecords.net

THE SUITCASE/DER KOFFER is a multilingual music theatre work in which a woman finds a suitcase filled with history and remnants of a home that now exists only in memory. Neither concert, nor opera, nor play, nor performance art, the work is influenced by all these forms, as three performers present objects, documents, events and images from the lives of the displaced, real and imagined.

Conceived by Ljiljana Jovanović, a composer and theatre maker, and Juanita Rockwell, a playwright and director, the two are working with Chris Roberts (mezzo soprano), Georg Wissel (alto saxophone), Duśica Cajlan-Wissel (piano) and Allison Campbell (scenography and puppets). The composition includes sung and spoken text, improvisation and sound exploration through prepared alto sax and extended piano techniques. The live performance is layered with projection puppetry and pre-recorded sound material, including the voices of children in many languages, bringing us fragments of other stories, other suitcases. 

The Suitcase/Der Koffer premiered at Monteabaro Recital Hall, presented by Rep Stage at the Horowitz Center for the Visual and Performing Arts in Columbia, MD, in 2019. Performances were also presented at An die Musik, Baltimore, and Howard University's Childers Hall, with development support from Towson University and Photo by Lauren Scott.

Wendell wakes up naked in a train station: a place that's in between and nowhere, a place filled with goodbyes and the possibility of adventure, an empty place of anticipation and boredom, in equal measure. A Bardo, to use the Tibetan word.
Everyone Wendell meets is waiting for something or going somewhere, but she's just looking for a way out. This play with songs, inspired by Buddhist Sutras on the nature of Mind, asks what happens during the in-between moments in our lives. We may have no control over what happens to us. Yet at each moment, we can choose our response, and the quality of our lives rests in that moment of choice.

Between Trains received early partial readings at Ligmincha Institute, under the guidance of Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. It received a staged reading by Creative Mechanics at Theatre Access, NYC in 2005, and a 2006 workshop at Teatro Abya Yala as part of a Fulbright residency in San José, Costa Rica. Rockwell was awarded a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award for the script, and the play's first fully staged production was at the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts with University of Maryland theatre students directed by Leslie Felbain in 2008. The 2010 professional premiere was at Gas & Electric Arts, Philadelphia, directed by Lisa Jo Epstein, funded in part by a National Endowment for the Arts Access to Excellence Grant. A 2014 production, directed by Rockwell, was produced by the Towson University Theatre Department, Baltimore, MD. Between Trains was published by Blue Moon Plays in 2014 and a recording of songs by the Towson University cast was produced by the Towson Theatre Department at Mobtown Studios, Baltimore.

Blue Moon Plays at Have Scripts:  https://havescripts.com/product/between-trains-play-script/
Songs from Between Trains at Bandcamp:  https://juanitarockwell.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-between-trains

LITTLE PATCH OF GROUND is a darkly comic play with songs set in the bloody aftermath of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  But in this reimagined world, a gravedigger's daughter named Cecilia can't keep up with the rate of humanity's carnage. The earth is so full it's spewing bodies back above ground, starting with Ophelia and Laertes, just as Cecilia's prodigal brother has come home. These two pairs of orphaned siblings must confront impermanence, responsibility, and the open space left in the wake of loss, as they explore new ways of being in a world where the rules have all changed. 

Awarded a Ruby Artist Project Grant in 2015, PATCH received a concert reading in 2016 at Baltimore's Single Carrot Theatre, co-directed by Juanita Rockwell and Tom Shade, and featuring Temple Crocker, Benjamin King, Daniel Nelson and Sarah Lloyd. 

BROKEN was commissioned in 2015 by Interrobang Theatre for Heavy Hors d'Oeuvres, an evening of three new works by Baltimore playwrights. This short play with a song is structured from the point of view of Lorraine, a woman in her eighties, but since her stroke, she sees herself as a twenty-something in her favorite outfit from the 1960s. She sees her husband Harry as the young soldier she once had a crush on, and her female home health care aide looks like her favorite grandson Theo, now a chef in Amsterdam. Once a passionate cook herself, Lorraine's words get jumbled on the way in or out, but she's happy to hold imaginary conversations with her grandson on another continent, as food takes on the mythic proportions of Julia Child, MFK Fisher and other luminaries of cuisine. As Lorraine's health fails, Harry takes her off her feeding tube as he and Theo sing her to her rest with a recipe for the perfect ginger cookie. The premiere was directed by Katie Hileman.

THE CIRCLE is a site-specific performative audio walk, pulling time, space and audiences together by combining a 70’s-inspired narrative and sound with today’s urban structures and surroundings. We tap into a surreal story of a woman tripping through past and future memory, weaving in anecdotes of DC's Dupont Circle in the 1970’s as seen through the eyes of the young and restless. Drawing on the living architecture of the neighborhood as another kind of time machine, the project also explores a secret teenage world of in-jokes, escape fantasies, self-absorption, heartbreak, and the magic of possibility.

For the performance, audience members meet at a specified location near Dupont Circle in DC and, earbuds in, are guided through the neighborhood while listening to prerecorded audio. Performers, images and installations appear around them at specific points in the audio experience as they weave through past and present, in and out of buildings both historic and gentrified, ending at Dupont Circle's famous fountain.

The second in the Banished Footsteps series conceived by director Carmen Wong, The Circle premiered in 2013 with a second run in 2014. Available as a self-guided audio walk through the Dupont Circle neighborhood, as a download from banishedproductions.bandcamp.com

In THE WORLD IS ROUND, Gertrude Stein's Rose (is a rose is a rose) goes on a journey and finds herself in a play of language and music in this opera for 5 singers and an orchestra of 14.
Libretto and direction by Juanita Rockwell, music  by James Sellars, premiere conducted by Michael Barrett. Sets by Sarah Edkins, lights by Igleu Glickman, costumes by Priscilla Putnam. Produced by Company One Theater, Juanita Rockwell, Artistic Director, at The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, 1993.
Photos by Igleu Glickman

In PLAYING DEAD, Valia has always been good at playing along and playing the system. His girlfriend is willing to play out his kinkiest freaks (albeit not with much enthusiasm) and his mother is happy to cook and clean for him (as long as he doesn't cross her). He figures his  job playing the corpse in crime scene reenactments is a daily innoculation against death and the world's brutality. But then the ghost of his father shows up, crying murder most foul at the hands of his widow and her lover, it looks like something is rotten in the state of Russia.

This translation was commissioned as part of the New Russian Drama Project produced by The Center for International Theatre Development and Towson University. Rockwell's translation was based on a literal translation and extensive consultation with Yury Urnov, who directed the premiere at Single Carrot Theatre in Baltimore. The production was named one of the year's ten best by Baltimore's City Paper.

In directing Lisa D'Amour's 21st century riff on Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," I worked with Set/Costume Designer Elena Zlotescue, Sound/Light Designer Terry Cobb, and the talented staff and students of the UMBC Theatre Dept.