Overview
Johann (any/all pronouns) is an actor-deviser-director having performed over a decade in regional theaters, dance companies, amusement parks, and cruise lines around the world. They hold both an MA in Theatre Studies and an MFA in Physical Acting & Devised Performance. Johann’s most recent Actors’ Equity credit was performing the title role in the musical, Jelly’s Last Jam at Hatilloo Theatre (Memphis, TN) and was awarded the regions 2020 Ostrander’s Award for “Best Leading Actor in a Musical.” Johann is coming to Durham with his lovely husband, Bryan, and two cheeky felines from the University of Vermont where he was most recently an artist-in-residence directing and devising, what he calls, a “jazz queering” of the radio play version of It’s a Wonderful Life.
Currently, Johann is developing an original, devised music theatre piece, called Grandfathered In: a Concert of Scenes and Songs and recently presented a work-in-progress with an ensemble of professional artists in Sheafer Laboratory Theater. Grandfathered In is a queer meditation on ancestral grief and healing, joy, migration, and hope against the backdrop of a fallen city. The company of interdisciplinary collaborators present a theatrical cabaret of devised musical fragments and scenes set in the near future. They follow Daija (they/them), the fictional great-grandchild of Dunker and Fuel, who struggles to move on with their life after the paralyzing loss of a beloved caregiver. Through the magic of a queer incognito goddess in the form of mysterious heron, Daija is transported to a world of dream and confronted with ancestor beings on a psychic journey at the crossroads of the soul.
Being brought up in Mississippi, Johann is returning home to the South but more fully realized as a Black queer artist-scholar, a creative midwife for emergent artists, and a slightly witchy facilitator of embodied story-weaving through queer performance, worldbuilding, and folk songs.