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.
Rooted in music, letters, movement and poems from then and now, this theatrical concert explores the American Civil War soldier’s tale, the war’s impact on the nation and the internal struggles that make love a battlefield everyday.
What are the eternal things that can bind people together, and how do we cling to those roots when the storms of life bare down?
In this concert piece, music drives
a story that takes us from the trenches to first dates and lullabies in between.Interwoven with dance and movement, with splices of English, Russian and Spanish poetry, this piece crosses the threshold of language and storytelling to shed light on the fires within us all.
In The Mind of a US Marine: Training, Fighting, & Returning
March 2014
Co-Producer, Co-Writer – with Sublime and Ridiculous, Jane Gauntlett
Dana Foundation, BAW “Brain Awareness Week,” Joria Productions – Garment District, NYC
Michael Vitaly Sazonov 