BATS!, a solo work which premiered at the Marquee Lounge, Creative Alliance, in Baltimore in 2018, is a multimedia performative contemplation of fear and madness in American culture, structured by personal experiences of psychosis, anxiety and depression. The piece was produced by Submersive Productions (of which Michele is an associate artist), and features sound and video projection by Glenn Ricci, puppets, object and environment design, and puppetry by Ursula Marcum, original drawings by Chelsea Demitras and original text and songs for accordion and voice by Michele Minnick. The piece was performed for audiences of 20-28 people in the intimate space of a small bar. Michele's performance persona, Dr. M., (who, like Michele, is a doctor of philosophy), engaged audience members directly throughout the show about their experiences, moods, and sense of what is real.

Lamatown, a new play written by Clotilde Tavares, with music by Gabriel Souto, was co-directed by Henrique Fontes and Michele Minnick as part of NatalEmCena, a municipal grant for the production of plays in multiple outdoor locations in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil in 2014. Michele led the cast through a 2-week Rasaboxes workshop at the beginning of rehearsal, developing a vocabulary for the creation of the larger-than-life characters, and tools for shaping scenes which had to project in outdoor spaces.

Vital Matters originated with an ensemble of students at Kennesaw State University in the fall of 2019. It is an ensemble laboratory for exploring our relationship to ourselves, each other, and the non-human world in this moment of climate crisis. We use the environmental/immersive theatre framework of The Performance Workshop (originated by Richard Schechner), and Somatic Movement approaches such as Jamie McHugh's Somatic Expression to enable deeply embodied engagement with existential as well as immediate social and political questions. It also draws upon the ideas in the Climate Lens Playbook, a working document developed by Una Chaudhuri and others dedicated to exploring the ways performance can address climate change. In this pilot version of the project at KSU, we invited our audiences to share some of the questions we had been exploring for ourselves. The basic framework of Vital Matters, which addresses both local and global aspects of climate change, can be adapted to different communities in different environments.

A core practice of The Performance Workshop is the Rasaboxes, a form of actor training based in the classical Indian theory of "rasa." I have been developing and teaching this work for the past 20 years, and find it particularly relevant to this project, which engages us directly in our relationship to the earth and the elements. Rasa means juice, flavor, or essence, and in the wellness and culinary practices of Ayurveda, pertains to the tastes of foods, their elemental qualities, and their capacities to balance our physical, mental and emotional selves. In theatrical context, rasa refers to aesthetic enjoyment--specifically, the flavor of emotions performed and savored by performers and spectators. Rasaboxes training offers a playground for performers to investigate, express and apply the eight basic emotions (and their combinations) described in the Natyashastra through body, breath, voice and movement. Engaging with the full palette of rasas, including the ninth rasa, shanta (an opportunity to practice peace and equanimity) in the context of work with climate change provides opportunities for experiencing and expressing all the vital energies that allow us to sense, feel, and express our relationship to the material with our whole being.

Vital Matters is about what is vital in both senses of the word; what makes us feel alive and gives us the necessary energy to move, act, and relate in a time that can be paralyzing and isolating, and what is most important and urgent right now. Rather than address this urgency through the business as usual intensities of politics and activism, this project is an invitation to slow down, connect with self, other, and the natural world. The rhythms and textures of water, air, earth, trees and stones, the smell of essential oils, the taste of home cooked foods open up a space within the chaos to remember what "home" is to us, what is sacred to us, to connect with one another through our differences.

The performance at KSU, which took place in a large dance studio, was based around a combination of personal material students generated during The Performance Workshop and research on climate change. The 50-minute experience unfolded in an immersive environment that included both group performance and intimate experiences the performers created for 3-5 audience members.

I directed and choreographed this project with students in the theatre and dance department of James Madison University in 2019. I worked closely with Japanese theatre artist Naoko Maeshiba to understand the subtleties of Mishima's text, simultaneously working closely with designers to develop a vision for the show. I cast the ensemble before casting roles, and then conducted a weeklong workshop together with composer/sound designer Nathan Leigh, in which the actors were introduced to the Rasaboxes, elements of Butoh, the waltz, hiphop, and other movement elements that would be crucial in devising the opening for the show, the building of character and scene work, and the waltz sequences. Sophomore Caroline Buddendorf choreographed a hip hop sequence that was the centerpiece of "the park scene," a prologue to Mishima's play, for which the actors developed their own characters. The show was framed by the presence of four actor/percussionists, whose live soundscape and movement accompanied the scenes between Poet, Old Woman, and other characters, and accentuated elements of the recorded sound design. The Poet's death was choreographed with an additional character, Morita, who had figured prominently in the playwright's life and suicide. The result was a layering of contemporary music and movement idioms with historical images and themes surrounding the writing of the play in the 1950s, and an oblique reference to traditional Japanese theatre forms that make use of percussion as an integral part of the dramaturgy.

Lungs, by Duncan Macmillan, directed by Michele Minnick at The Kitchen Theatre, Ithaca, NY. This play follows the life of a couple (She and He) from the moment they first start discussing the possibility of having a child to the end of Her life, when He is already gone. It is clear that environmental degradation and climate catastrophe are the backdrop of the lovestory. For this play, which is written without any indication of time or setting, and which involves radical shifts from one life moment to the next-for example from a heartwrenching breakup to their first reunion several years later-the Rasaboxes served as an essential framework for making quick transitions between emotional states and moments in time. The staging was breath and movement-based, a choreography of intimacy over many years.

Kid-Simple: A Radio Play in the Flesh by Jordan Harrison, Directed by Michele Minnick at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), 2013. Set by Greggory Schraven. Lights, sound and projections by Adam Mendelson . Costumes by Rebecca Eastman. Kid-Simple tells the story of Moll, a girl inventor who wins the school science contest with her noise machine, only to have her invention stolen by an evil shape-shifting mercenary. What follows is the fable of her adventures to save sound as we know it. The play requires over 1,000 live Foley sounds, and all actors except those playing Moll and the Narrator, to play multiple roles. We used the first week of rehearsal to do a Rasaboxes workshop, which gave us tools for creating each character, and shaping the mood of each part of the play.

ReDress is a solo work commissioned by Vertice Brasil, a Florianopolis-based branch of the Magdalena Project, an international network of women theatre and performance artists (https://themagdalenaproject.org/). It was first performed at the Vertice Brasil festival in 2012, under the title "Mulher, Sem Titulo," (Woman, Untitled). I have since performed it in Ecuador, Uruguay, and Natal, Brazil.

Born of my personal frustration with gendered street harrassment, and my pedagogical urge to address my undergraduate students', particularly my female students' cynicism and dismissal of feminism as a thing of the past, I created ReDress as a way to bring attention to connections between verbal sometimes seemingly "harmless" harrassment on the street and the continuum of violence against women.

The performance always takes place in a public square or other public place of foot traffic and meeting. It begins with an image, of myself, in a red dress, red heels, white sweater and hat, sometimes coat, and a suitcase, walking onto the scene and setting up my space. Once I have made a circle around myself with corn meal or a similar substance, and set up my things, I gather a crowd around the circle and explain to them with written signs what I'm doing there. I've come to make visible the everyday violence of street harrassment, and do so by inviting the women in the crowd to step inside the circle and write things that have been said to them in public places that made them feel violated, lesser, afraid.

I end the piece by having the audience (men and women) write hopes for the future, which I pack up in my suitcase. Before I leave the scene, I tell them that this is a performance I do not want to do, but that I will keep doing until it is no longer necessary. I leave them with my calling card, and invite them to take some for their own use, to inspire their own resistance. With each iteration I have also become interested in how this figure, the woman dressed elegantly with nasty comments written all over her body, then interacts with the local landscape. I have enlisted photographers to document me in different parts of the city.