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. 

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Our 2026 Residency Application is Closed

We are excited to share our 2026 resident artists with you!

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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.

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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).

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Allie Hankins
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.

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2024 Live Performance Resident Artists

spur(s)
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. 

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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

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.

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horseplay
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.