Teaching Artist, Performer, Theatre Maker

I believe in social practice, experiential learning, and radical kindness 
to get us closer to ourselves, and ultimately, to each other.

          Ever since I was a little kid I loved finding out how things worked.  Whether through observation and deduction, or trial and error; I was a curious learner, and that curiosity enriched my life.  It made me the person I am today: ever curious, always learning.

Photo by Emma Mead

I still enjoy discovering how things work, but today my investigations involve the human experience, and most especially matters of the heart, mind, and body. While my curiosity as a theatre maker thrives in conversation and collaborative fieldwork, source-material research and devised work; my wonder as a teaching artist lies in the human brain and body’s ability to learn and grow despite injury or trauma, and their heart’s ability to discover resilience in the face of such obstacles, along with a fantastic sense of rhythm, flow, and joy in spite of it all.

Socially Engaged Art:
The Artist’s Responsibility

I create documentary style theater with a social impact.  Utilizing movement, music & words to tell a story where each discipline can take the reins of storytelling, along with immersive theatre techniques, I hope to bring an audience closer to a story by curating a cross-pollination of performance techniques within a theatrical experience, where they can then come together in a new way to cross thresholds of understanding.  I try to shine a light on stories that are not often told, or sometimes misunderstood.

Theatre may seem like an ephemeral artistic avenue, but I enjoy the challenge of shining light on certain stories in order to forge a collective memory, creating a communal experience — hopefully yielding a greater empathetic understanding of transcendental truths in the process.  I believe there is a larger domain at play in the context of intimate art making within a community, and every artist has a responsibility as a citizen to practice art through the paradigm of education, beneficence, and justice.

(Photo 1, Allison Hilario, Rusty Riegelman, David Buffam, MVS.
Photos 2-9: Jennifer Delac, John Ramsey, Rusty Riegelman, JM Tolani.
Photography by Sam Nichols)

Hello, if you’d like to connect, drop me a line below!

 Michael Vitaly Sazonov ©2023