Interdisciplinary artist Virginia Grise makes work filtered through a political and historical lens. Interested in aesthetics of disorientation and disruption in the service of change, for Grise, there is no separation between political and aesthetic choices. How she tells stories is as important as the stories she chooses to tell. Liberating herself from conventional rules, norms, and structures, she employs non-linear narrative, deliberate repetition, poetic language, and the collapsing of time and space in her performances as an attempt to imagine freedom.
As a founding member of a todo dar, a production company committed to creating convivial spaces for collective dreaming, she makes theatre in places theatre doesn’t normally exist: an empty lot, a prison, in the middle of the desert, under a freeway.
She has performed internationally – from Cuba to Rwanda – and now she’s returned to Texas where she grew up, to do work in the Southwest. Presently, she is a Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mía Theatre and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.
photo: Netza Moreno
