Resistenze e Metabolizzazion Residency

I’m an international performance maker from Australia based in Tallinn, Estonia, working across physical theatre, devised theatre, live art, contemporary performance making and clowning.

I originally trained as an actor at Actors Centre Australia (2012), building a foundation in classical and contemporary text based performance and working across stage and screen in Australia and the United States. In 2022 I made a deliberate career shift, relocating to Paris to pursue a new artistic path in original performance making.

This shift toward contemporary performance making was not a departure from traditional theatre - it was a return to the body, and an expansion of what I believe theatre is. I went looking for new practices, new physical languages, new ways of making for myself, to push the boundaries of what traditional forms are capable of, and to find what lies beyond the obtainable.

The desire to interrupt and deconstruct inherited theatrical structures and rebuild them into something new - landscapes that could open a doorway into the imagination, into worlds that sit just beyond the reach of the everyday. And beneath that, a fundamental question about the nature of experience itself: what it means to experience, to be changed by it, and how performance can create the conditions for that to genuinely occur. I am not seeking to represent a state - but inhabite one. What happens to my body is actually happening. A body in genuine intensity, under genuine duress, existing in real time within a shared ecology of performer and audience, creates the same involuntary transmission as the greatest psychological drama. Not because it has been crafted to feel real, but because it is real. This is what I keep coming back to: the possibility of real states - work that does not portray experience but generates it, for the artist and the audience, simultaneously, in the same room.

This is my first residency in Melpignano. I arrive without any grammar of previous visits here - no muscle memory of the space, no shortcuts, no pre negotiated negotiated relationship with the territory. Only the unfamiliar which is both the difficulty and the gift of this moment.

There is something clarifying about beginning somewhere new. The absence of precedent makes every choice deliberate. I cannot rely on what worked before, because before doesn’t exist here. What I have instead is the discomfort of the present tense - and the question of what my practice looks like when stripped of its familiar scaffolding.

I am still learning what I came here to find out.

There is something to do with arrival itself as a condition of work: not settling, but staying in that threshold state long enough to see what it produces. The first residency is always the first draft - provisional, unresolved and honest in ways that later versions sometimes cannot be. The unfamiliarity of Puglia, its light, its particular weight of heat and history, doesn’t yet belong to me. But I am beginning to let it work on me.

St. Padre Pio -

In Melpignano I encountered the phenomenon of stigmata once again - specifically through the figure of St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, a man born in this region of southern Italy, who bore the wounds of Christ on his body for fifty years.

What interests me is the miracle itself, and the ecstatic states that accompanied it. Padre Pio did not simply receive wounds. He received them inside experiences of overwhelming intensity - visions, raptures, states in which the ordinary boundaries of the self appeared to dissolve entirely. The body in these moments, was not a passive surface. It was the site where something invisible became undeniably and irreversibly physical. Where love, understood not as sentiment but as a total consuming force - pressed through the skin.

This is what I keep returning to: the intimacy between ecstasy and flesh. The stigmata are inseparable from the trance states that produced them. The wound is the ecstasy made visible. And what precedes both - decades of prayer, fasting, suffering, a life given over completely to an invisible material - suggests that the body, under conditions of absolute dedication, becomes capable of things that exceed ordinary understanding. That sustained interior states can reorganise the flesh from the inside.

I hold this miracle as the question - one that the body understands before the mind does.

In response to this investigation I have been performing a prayer task above and in the local stone quarry - developing movement in solitude in the direct heat and stillness of Puglia. The material is being archived and developed into a contemporary movement film.

My practice prior this is rooted in psychophysical training, clown, the ecstatic, the durational and film making - has always demanded a threshold state before work could start.

Melpignano has proposed something different: that the threshold or frame itself creates the conditions, and that the body responds to the frame rather than the other way around. Melpignano has sent me material I couldn’t have planned for - a child’s story about a saint’s wounded hands that looked like lasagna, a fox under an oak tree, falling asleep in a church pew mid-prayer. I didn’t manufacture any of it.