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.
2025 Live performance Resident Artists
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.
Our next two residencies will be in December 2025
|
Diasporic Clowns
Samson Syharath and Monel Chang December 4th - 26th at 7:30pm 
|
Kayla Hanson
SALOME December 11th - 13th at 7:30pm 
|
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.
