PearlDamour: Katie Pearl and Lisa D’Amour
We are an Obie-Award winning collaborative team who create performance both inside and outside traditional theater spaces. We are known for large-scale performances that mix theater and installation — such as How to Build a Forest, an 8-hour performance in which we assemble and disassemble a simulated forest on an empty stage over 8 hours – and intimate performances designed for small audiences — such as Bird Eye Blue Print, created for a set of small vacant offices in the World Financial Center in Manhattan. We’ve been commissioned and presented by PS122, The Kitchen, the Whitney Museum of Art and Longwood Botanical Gardens. Our work has also been presented by the Walker Arts Center, HERE Arts Center, the Fusebox Festival, ArtSpot Productions and has toured to many Universities throughout the US.
Our work has been honored with the Lee Reynolds Award (2011), an Obie Award (2003) and two “Best Site Specific Performance” citations from the Gothamist for Bird Eye Blue Print (2007) and from the Minneapolis City Pages for LandMARK (2005).
OUR AESTHETIC AND COLLABORATORS
Over our 20-year history of making work together, we have devised a body of work that digs in to the performer / audience relationship and searches for new approaches to narrative through the accumulation of text, image, physicality and architectural elements. We want our audiences to feel like they are inside of an experience, rather than watching something happen “over there.” We often create room for the audience to feel like they have slipped into the private headspace of a performer or character: an intimate, associative, surprising place.
Our work is intensely interdisciplinary – crafted by extensive collaborations with artists of other fields, including visual artists Krista Kelley Walsh, Charles Goldman and Shawn Hall; set designer Mimi Lien; video artist Jim Findlay; choreographer Emily Johnson, set designer Mimi Lien; composers Brendan Connelly, Sxip Shirey, Joel Pickard and Tom McDermott, and community engagement expert Ashley Sparks. Other past collaborators include ArtSpot Productions’ Artistic Director Kathy Randels who co-created and co-performed in our OBIE-winning Nita & Zita in 2003.
OUR FUNDERS
We are grateful for the funders and individual donors who have supported our work, including MAP Fund, Creative Capital, Association of Performing Arts Professionals, the Network of Ensemble Theaters, the National Performance Network, NYSCA, NEA Our Town, the Jerome Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, the Irving Linn Charitable Trust, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and The Moore Family Fund for the Arts of the Minneapolis Foundation and many local funders in North Carolina, Massachusetts and Oregon to support Milton. We have developed our work at SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Playwrights Center , New Dramatists, Voice and Vision, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Mitchell Center for the Arts in Houston and Appalachian State University in Boone, NC.
Teaching
Both together and individually, Lisa and Katie have taught short workshops or semester-long courses in creative collaboration, site-specificity, solo performance, and new play development at such institutions as Brandeis University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Iowa Playwright’s Workshop, Whitman College, Brown University and The Playwrights’ Center. They have also developed their work using student actors and assistants at the University of Iowa, the University of Houston, American Conservatory Theater, Appalachian State University, Brown University and Ithaca College.
If you are interested in a PearlDamour workshop for your group, please contact Katie: Katie-at-pearldamour-dot-com.
