The Open Space Residency is designed for emerging and mid-career artists seeking a nurturing environment to explore and experiment with their new work. It serves as a dedicated space where artists can physically engage and test their creative endeavors. Shaking the Tree provides artists with an open platform to share the fruits of their labor and showcase the work they have produced.
2026 Live performance Resident Artists- Summer
Photo Credit: Ada Matusiewicz
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Of feather and bone
Sophia Tweed Ahmad July 23rd - 25th 7:30pm The great blue heron rises, a spell drawn from still water — guardian of the forgotten memories only music can recall. A dance work by Sophia Tweed Ahmad in collaboration with Musician Didi Wyss. Sophia Tweed Ahmad is a freelance movement artist, vocalist and costume maker. Over the years she has been exploring the intersections of dance, the voice, and costume design. Her movement training stems from Contemporary Dance, Contact Improvisation and Capoeira. She completed her first professional dance program at the age of 26 at Area Dansa in Barcelona, Spain in 2023. Her choreography has been presented by Ten Tiny Dances, Performance Works NW, Stripart Festival & Choreoscope Dance Film Festival. Find her at Capoeira Rodas, teaching Soft Acrobatics and working with multicultural youth. |
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MSM
Dylan Hankins August 13th - 15th 7:30pm Did you hear that they closed down the locker room sauna? Yeah. I guess there was too much cruising going on. Isn’t that crazy? Turns out what seemed like just a normal gym locker room was actually a sociopolitical war zone, a clandestine battle between perversion and respectability, between homosexuality and heterosexuality, between love and betrayal. Mistaken identities. Missed connections. Comedy. Circle Jerks. High drama! So, they’ve decided to just shut it all down. Now what are all the cruisers gonna do? From the madcap mind that brought you Sprawl, Faena, and Alarums and Excursions comes a new erotic satire: M.S.M. CONTENT WARNING: graphic sexual content, strong and offensive language |
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Sirens
Joellen Sweeney August 20th - 22nd 7:30pm A love song beckons us below the surface. A warning throbs along the shore. The Priestess weaves and calls the waves in, one by one by one. SIRENS, a new choral-theatrical work by Joellen Sweeney, evokes the sensuous life and precipitous loss of global coral reef ecosystems. Woven from harmony and memory, SIRENS offers a space to grieve ecological losses and to practice how to love without possessing. |
2025 Live performance Resident Artists
Take me to your leader, a show about the Seoul of a Clown
Monel Chang (장윤정)
December 4th - 6th at 7:30pm
In Take Me to Your Leader: The Seoul of a Clown, beauty, ritual, and absurdity collide in a one-clown fever dream. From the haunting rhythms of pansori to the fluorescent glow of a K-beauty altar, Monel Chang (aka Moldy Melon) shapeshifts through characters both divine and deranged: a folk diva, a skincare-obsessed disciple, and a dictator throwing themself a birthday party.
Part satire, part spiritual exorcism, and entirely clown, this genre-defying solo performance unpacks the obsessions that bind us — from perfection and purity to power and control. With live sound, ritual gesture, and a face full of toner, The Seoul of a Clown invites audiences into a surreal search for identity, laughter, and liberation.
Monel Chang (장윤정)
December 4th - 6th at 7:30pm
In Take Me to Your Leader: The Seoul of a Clown, beauty, ritual, and absurdity collide in a one-clown fever dream. From the haunting rhythms of pansori to the fluorescent glow of a K-beauty altar, Monel Chang (aka Moldy Melon) shapeshifts through characters both divine and deranged: a folk diva, a skincare-obsessed disciple, and a dictator throwing themself a birthday party.
Part satire, part spiritual exorcism, and entirely clown, this genre-defying solo performance unpacks the obsessions that bind us — from perfection and purity to power and control. With live sound, ritual gesture, and a face full of toner, The Seoul of a Clown invites audiences into a surreal search for identity, laughter, and liberation.
SALOME
Kayla Hanson
December 11th - 13th at 7:30pm
SALOME is a new feature screenplay by Kayla Hanson, adapted from Oscar Wilde’s Salome and excerpts from The Bible, and presented as a staged reading. This adaptation folds in themes of revisionist history, Filipino folklore, comedy, and of course, the all-consuming, deadly power of a teenage crush. This performance will also include a dance video (but it’s not the dance you’re thinking of).
Kayla Hanson
December 11th - 13th at 7:30pm
SALOME is a new feature screenplay by Kayla Hanson, adapted from Oscar Wilde’s Salome and excerpts from The Bible, and presented as a staged reading. This adaptation folds in themes of revisionist history, Filipino folklore, comedy, and of course, the all-consuming, deadly power of a teenage crush. This performance will also include a dance video (but it’s not the dance you’re thinking of).
Allie Hankins
By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY
July 11th -13th at 7:30pm
By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY
July 11th -13th at 7:30pm
By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY, is a solo work engaging the biomechanics of voice and the entanglement of movement, memory, and sound. In this piece, analog tape recorders with looping tapes of varying durations create unexpected rhythmic patterns, rich textures, and an imperfect, wavering chorus of voices. Throughout the performance, the recurring sonic fragments are paired—and continually re-paired—with dances, actions, and images, generating an ever-evolving soundtrack that layers and distorts the audience’s associations with time, memory, and meaning.
The soundscape, composed of echoes and reverberations from past performances, rehearsals, and experiments, creates an intricate tapestry of wails, laughter, overtones, and unexplained sounds—blending lamentation, dreamscape, intricacy, and humor. MELODY becomes an excavation and repurposing of the performance series’ own shadow or ghost. At once methodical and mundane, otherworldly and mysterious, the work exists somewhere between an elegy and a manifesto; between a reckoning with the past and a vision for the future. Refusing to settle fully into any single world, MELODY invites audiences into a liminal, continuously shifting space of reflection, transformation, and possibility.
The soundscape, composed of echoes and reverberations from past performances, rehearsals, and experiments, creates an intricate tapestry of wails, laughter, overtones, and unexplained sounds—blending lamentation, dreamscape, intricacy, and humor. MELODY becomes an excavation and repurposing of the performance series’ own shadow or ghost. At once methodical and mundane, otherworldly and mysterious, the work exists somewhere between an elegy and a manifesto; between a reckoning with the past and a vision for the future. Refusing to settle fully into any single world, MELODY invites audiences into a liminal, continuously shifting space of reflection, transformation, and possibility.
2024 Live Performance Resident Artists
spur(s)
Featuring the work of Elsa Dougherty, Isabel Strongheart McTighe, Rose Proctor, Sofia Leonila Marks
Featuring the work of Elsa Dougherty, Isabel Strongheart McTighe, Rose Proctor, Sofia Leonila Marks
Part summoning, part slumber party, spur(s) is unrelenting in its hunger and playful in its contradictions. Facilitated by Elsa Dougherty, performers Sofia Marks, Isabel McTighe and Rose Proctor weave sweaty, over-the-top confessionals with uninhibited dance explosions. A ferocious ode to girlhood, genderful myth, and all that lies just beyond the horizon. Admit the truth. Profess your bitterness. Indulge in your (obvious) personal shortcomings.
Veronica, In Bed
Directed by Štěpán Šimek
Written by Briana Ratterman Trevithick
Featuring the work of Musica Universalis (Laura Kuhlman, Esther Saulle, Paul Martin Beck, and Jeffrey Reynolds), Joellen Sweeney and Duffy Epstein
Directed by Štěpán Šimek
Written by Briana Ratterman Trevithick
Featuring the work of Musica Universalis (Laura Kuhlman, Esther Saulle, Paul Martin Beck, and Jeffrey Reynolds), Joellen Sweeney and Duffy Epstein
Veronica, In Bed, is a dynamic work-in-progress showing that merges Briana Ratterman Trevithick's fresh script with historical texts by Veronica Franco herself. This production digs into the tangled relationships between sexuality, power, and survival through the life of Veronica Franco, a 16th-century poet courtesan, and in some ways an early Renaissance "influencer." At its core, it is an exploration of our timeless need for connection, examining how our methods and means of connecting evolve, yet the underlying human drive remains constant.
Featuring key staged selections guided by director Štěpán Šimek, the performance combines Renaissance music and opera, the captivating vocals of Joellen Sweeney, puppetry, and cutting-edge media elements by Trevor Sargent, including live video feeds, projections, social media, and AI manipulation. Audiences will be transported between eras as they explore the tools of power and survival, as well as the persistent desire for influence.
Featuring key staged selections guided by director Štěpán Šimek, the performance combines Renaissance music and opera, the captivating vocals of Joellen Sweeney, puppetry, and cutting-edge media elements by Trevor Sargent, including live video feeds, projections, social media, and AI manipulation. Audiences will be transported between eras as they explore the tools of power and survival, as well as the persistent desire for influence.
horseplay
Featuring the work of Kai Hynes & Annabel Cantor
Directed by Tim Wagoner
Featuring the work of Kai Hynes & Annabel Cantor
Directed by Tim Wagoner
horseplay is a reframing of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play Equus that imagines a tilt in power away from the logical and patriarchal, toward the emotional and utopic. It is an interconnected world in which the barriers between the sacred, mundane, and profane are thin. It is a misty field at night in which a horse can also be a god, a teacher, a friend, and even a lover.
