Jesse’s role: Director and Co-Creator
Jesse's role: Director, Co-creator
Project: devised participatory performance
Push Thru is an original production by the True Colors Creative Action Crew, an ensemble of LGBTQ and allied artists collaborating to create new public actions rooted in The Theater Offensive's concept of OUTness. Using music, movement, and spoken word, the performance exposes how we "push thru" expectations, assumptions, and fear in order to reach each other.
The True Colors Creative Action Crew (CAC) is an assortment of performers/artists (musicians, actors, drag queens, poets, dancers, social organizers, etc.) who use theatrical and social justice approaches to share the concerns, joys, and resiliency of LGBTQ people through an interactive performance. The CAC tours to schools, communities, and organizations in the Boston area.
For more information:
Jesse's role: Production Designer & Stage Manager
Project: produce a live and online leadership training program at Harvard Kennedy School.
Jesse's role : Director, Co-creator
Project : Interactive theater experience
"Once upon a time, many years ago, we promised to never grow up. We would never care about grass stains, a chipped tooth, or gum in our hair. We’d go to sleep whenever, wherever we’d want, make friends with anybody we’d like, always have candy before dinner, and never have those boring, unimportant adult conversations. Little did we know then about heartaches, layoffs, or the death of dear friends, and chances are, if someone had told us, we’d have kept that dear promise more than we have.
“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it,” wrote J.M. Barrie on his famous children’s novel “Peter Pan” (1911), and this time we better listen. From Wednesday to Saturday, a collective of international actors, artists, dancers, and even a puppeteer will come together to remind us of the unbridled joy, innocence, and imagination of childhood days with their interactive, walk-in theatre performance Now Now Neverland. Over the last months, the artists have loosely created a piece around Barrie’s darling Peter Pan fairytale, and have turned Neukölln’s Colonia Nova space into an imaginatively designed Neverland, for continuous performances during which visitors are welcome to engage, interact, and choose their own personal adventure into a world where nobody will ever truly grow up."
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About the project:
Now! Now! Neverland! is an immersive theatrical event based on J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Developed and devised with 15 artists over one month, the experiment engages the games and rituals of Home and Neverland, inviting everyone to make believe.
Originally performed at Colonia Nova, Berlin, July 2013.
Jesse's role : Organizer, Austin Interfaith, Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)
Project : Affordable housing residents create model redevelopment
"It turns out that a lot can happen when people start paying attention. Under the ever-watchful oversight of Austin Interfaith, developers wanting to redevelop the Section-8 Oak Creek Village Apartments recently struck a deal with existing tenants that many are hoping will serve as a model for other developers. With a Housing and Urban Development contract set to expire, and developers eager to capitalize on prime Bouldin Creek real estate, things didn't look good for the current residents.
But now, though the project is still waiting on federal tax credits (another steadily diminishing resource), developers have agreed, privately, to retain every affordable housing unit that would be lost, relocate tenants if needed during construction, and maintain the new affordable units for the next 35 years. If they fail to provide the promised affordable units, they cannot exercise the entitlements granted by the revised zoning.
Housing advocates hope the Oak Creek project will serve as a model, one that promises to benefit developers, increase density, and retain affordability in the urban core. "This kind of thing is what we need in Austin, if we are going to maintain any level of deeper affordability in Austin," noted Planning Commissioner Danette Chimenti. "This is precisely the kind of project that we need."
-Elizabeth Pagano, The Austin Chronicle
For more information, visit: Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)
About the project:
Residents of Oak Creek Village, 173 affordable housing units threatened by redevelopment, saved their homes in Austin, Texas. In the process, they developed an innovative restrictive covenant between their newly formed Tenants Association and the property owners. The covenant protected the residents during reconstruction, and created provisions for childcare, a community center, extra security and a better relationship with management in the renovated housing. Through a major citywide campaign, they prevented redevelopment until the agreement was signed. In doing so, they not only saved their homes, creating a new model for affordable housing and positive gentrification, they built the power to shape their city. They are still working together.
Press for Oak Creek Village
As Austin Becomes More Expensive, Some Fight to Keep It Affordable, Austin American Statesman pdf
For One Austin School, Funding Hangs on Affordable Housing, KUT
Oak Creek Village Strikes a New Deal, Austin Chronicle
Oak Creek Village Redevelopment Approved by Austin City Council, Community Impact News
Exiled From Main Street, Austin Chronicle
Video Testimony of Leaders at City Hall, Austin City Council Recorded Session
Jesse's role : Organizer, Austin Interfaith, Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)
Project: Create Austin's first autonomous, community led public school
The Innovation School Project was a local organizing campaign to create the first public school in Austin, TX to be led by it's own neighborhood community - parents, teachers, staff, neighbors, students and administrators collaboratively. Funded by a grant from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), it involved intensive organizing within the Austin school district. Together local Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) organization Austin Interfaith and local AFT affiliate Education Austin developed a team of local leaders and a strategy to create the first "campus based in-district charter school." That's the technical term for a local, public school, overseen by the elected school board, that transitions it's governance so that key decisions about curriculum, scheduling, budgeting, and more are made collaboratively by a board of parent, teacher, staff, administrator and community leaders.
For more information, visit:
www.thesinnovationschoolproject.com
http://www.austininterfaith.org/innovative_schools
Press about the Innovation School Project:
Switch to Charter Means More Innovation at Travis Heights, Austin American Statesman
How Travis Heights Elementary Could Change Schools in Austin, KUT News
AISD's First Homegrown Charter School Promises Real Life Lessons, KVUE & KHOU
workshops, trainings, experiments on power
ongoing development
Jesse's role: Performer
Project: engage public in events and social media for the Sert Gallery
