As our bodies move, we tell a story. Where we have been, where we are going, what we hold on to, what we let go of. When bodies move in masses, they tell a larger story. Hope, fear, war, famine, the search for a better life. What does it mean to be just one body moving in humanity’s great crowd? This is a movement piece. Prepare to be moved.

Role: Core Creative Team, Dramaturg, Ensemble Perfomer
MASS/Rabble was a devised, immersive, movement work, created by over 30 performers and designers, that explored questions of displacement, migration, borders, and community.  It was performed at the historic Baltimore War Memorial in April 2019.

This was an ambitious and challenging piece for Submersive to undertake: creating a largely wordless, non-narrative piece, collaborating with an international Butoh artist, and working with a much larger cast and audience than we have previously, in a space that was cavernous and a literal sacred place of ghosts.  We stretched all our artistic and community-building skills to make space for a complex weave of ideas, images, and inspirations, and our audience's response was both unexpected and overwhelming--so many have since responded with tremendous gratitude that they were invited to participate in such a different way, and that it moved in them in ways they didn't expect.

"THE GOODIES," a new ensemble-devised piece, directed by Susan Stroupe and produced by Iron Crow Theatre, closed on December 10, 2017.  THE GOODIES is a modern re-telling of the Salem Witch Trials, using the high-pressure world of a high school and systemic racism as metaphors to bring the complex history into our modern imaginations.  Devised and written by a cast of 8 women of color, THE GOODIES reframed the narrative of history to center on the teenage girl accusers, to give them a chance to be seen as more than hysterical liars.  In that process, the show both indicts and invites the audience to look for where we are all complicit, where we all dehumanize, and how we might use history to learn for the future.

From Stroupe's Director's Notes:
“The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”  William Faulkner’s simple wording encompasses the complex breadth and height of America’s relationship to its own foundation, and few events from our early days continue to haunt our imaginations more than the Salem Witch Trials.  As we embarked on this devising journey, we discovered that as much as we believe we have distanced ourselves from those literal dark days, the Puritans are much closer than we think.  We often associate the Puritans only with their theology, but in reality their philosophy of work and behavior is so close to our current desire to prove we are living a good life, that some phrases in the primary sources of our research could have been written by contemporary wellness bloggers. 
 
We also discovered that at the root of these events, so often explained away by a simple single source, stemmed in many ways from the complex pain of teenage girls wanting to have a voice in their society and being censored by authority figures.  The difficult reality was that their silencing and censoring wasn’t really because of lack of belief in them, but because their truth would bring the entire precarious social contract of Puritan society to its knees.  So we started from a place of believing those girls.  We found a deep kinship between those teenage girls of Salem and teenage girls of color in our own time, and grew this story from that seed.
 
In his play The Crucible, Arthur Miller simplified this history by making it about a Good Man (aged down), a Vindictive Teenage Girl (aged up), and government too blinded by doctrine to see what was right in front of them.  We do not intend to nullify Miller’s great work, but to add to it, and to suggest that if we continue to simplify our past, we will forever be haunted by it in the present.

Conceived by Lisi Stoessel, Musaeum invited viewers to the Grand Opening of the Exhibit of New Galapagos, a far-off realm visited by intrepid explorer HT Darling.  Dramaturgically, we have been exploring and deconstructing Enlightenment philosophy and the "natural order of the universe," working with ideas of owning narrative, seeking legacy and immortality, time and memory, undermining status quo structures, and seeking new ways to explore difficult histories of colonialism, misogyny, and appropriation.  The show weaves in narrative, puppetry, museum studies and practices, dance, and interactive environments to create one immersive experience.

HARRY AND THE THIEF, a play by Sigrid Gilmer (USA Ford Fellow), was directed by Susan Stroupe and produced by Strand Theatre Company in April 2016.  A comedy about Harriet Tubman, time travel, and revolution, it is a genre-bending dark comedy that reclaims, chews up, and turns the traditional slave narrative on its head. 
Read an interview with Stroupe here: http://www.theatrebloom.com/2016/03/reflective-history-an-interview-with-director-susan-stroupe-on-strand-theater-companys-harry-the-thief/

Role:  Co-Director, Original Deviser/Creator

The first of its kind in Baltimore:  a full-length, full immersive and ensemble-devised theatrical experience co-directed by Susan Stroupe and Glenn Ricci (Ricci, who came up with the concept, received a Rubys grant for the project), performed at the Pratt House at the Maryland Historical Society in a sold-out run in the spring of 2015, revived in the fall of 2015 for a total of 62 shows.  Mesmeric Revelations received numerous accolades, including Best Concept and Best New Work from the Bad Oracle's B.U.L.S.H.I.T. Awards, and was voted Best Theatrical Experience in City Paper's "Best of Baltimore."

Mesmeric Revelations, as a fully devised work, gave agency to the original cast of actors to create their characters and the narrative that shaped the show.  Over the course of a nine-month rehearsal process, all ensemble members researched together, trained together, and devised together, creating a show with a tight-knit ensemble built on on trust, listening, and attention to intricate details in each others' performances.  Mesmeric Revelations took a special look at the women in Poe's life, and much of the devising process revolved around deconstructing the male-gaze infused myths surrounding Poe's wife, mother, and later loves, allowing the actors to create full human beings out of women who have become mythologized and sidelined.

Read an interview with Stroupe and Ricci here:  http://www.theatrebloom.com/2015/10/a-dream-within-a-dream-an-interview-with-the-co-creators-of-the-mesmeric-revelations-of-edgar-allan-poe/

The All-American Genderf*ck Cabaret, written by Mariah McCarthy, directed by Susan Stroupe, produced by Glass Mind Theatre in April 2014.  A joyful, ensemble-driven comedy about living in and exploding stereotypes of gender in all the complex ways it manifests itself in our lives.  Nominated for 3 Bad Oracle B.U.L.S.H.I.T awards, including Best Director, Best New Work, and Best Ensemble (won).
What Weekly's article about the production and process:  https://www.whatweekly.com/2014/04/16/blurred-lines-the-ecstatic-gender-dance-of-the-all-american-genderfck-cabaret/

Role:  Festival Director

Brainstorm is Glass Mind Theatre's almost annual short play festival.  In the spring of 2015, following the unrest that came after Freddie Gray's unjust death, we decided to use that year's Brainstorm as a way to quickly respond theatrically to what was going on in our Charm City.  Theater is a slow process because it is so collaborative and has so many different kinds of artistic mediums in it, so responding to current events in a meaningful way is difficult in this work.  We knew that the structure already built into Brainstorm as a short play festival in which commissioned playwrights are given a few weeks to write a play based on a prompt, and a company of actors to perform all the plays, would allow us get the initial thoughts and complexities of artists ready to speak into the open, knowing that what we could contribute would not be the complete conversation, and in some regards would be a failing endeavor.  What resulted was an evening of plays that ranged from comedy to heavy drama, from realistic scenes to abstract surrealism to absurdism, and all coming from different angles of where we were at the time.   Nominated and won 1 Bad Oracle B.U.L.S.H.I.T. award, the Justice For All Award, for staging work for social change.
The review from The Bad Oracle:  https://thebadoracle.com/2015/06/13/brainstorm-5-fraughtimore-uprising/

Role:  Director

In one of my out-of-state projects, I worked with All-of-Us-Express Children's Theatre, the resident theater company of East Lansing, MI, to direct their summer production of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan.  All-of-Us-Express is a long-standing company with a well-organized Guild program, teaching practical theatrical skills of all sorts to children of all ages, so that each department of the show, including all designed elements, are primary created on by young people.  With a cast of 50 young actors ranging from 6-16, and a crew of almost as many, we created a production that highlighted the necessity of imagination and the grief that comes with growing up.  Reported to be the third best-selling production in All-of-Us-Express' 28-year history. 

From the director's notes:  "One central idea we discovered in our early rehearsals is that, in Neverland, anything can happen and anyone can be anything if they simply imagine it to be so.  Unlike the “real” world, where gravity, money, and society govern our everyday existence, the citizens of Neverland make their own rules.  People can fly.  Food is plentiful.  Everyone is accepted for who they are, even the pirates.  Even the violence of war comes from the imagination of what children think it should be like.  It is a magical place.
 
To complicate matters, however, is the underlying conflict of Peter Pan:  not the inevitable battle between Hook and Peter, but the unsettling question to the adults and young adults in the audience:  what do we lose between childhood and adulthood?  Why do we have to start seeing the world “as it is” and not how we wish it would be?  Why do we have to start following the rules of the real world?  Peter Pan irritatingly doesn’t answer those questions for us.  Instead, for both children and adults, it forces us to confront, when we walk out of the theater, how we might recapture the use of imagination, and how we can use our imaginations to make real the kind of world we want for our children, and their children, and generations to come."