Katie Pearl
Performance Maker, Director
New Orleans, Louisiana; heading to Providence, Rhode Island soon, USA
Recent inspiring thing: “Say what you mean, literally and in all other senses.” Carlos Fuentes was paraphrasing Rimbaud when he said this, in a beautiful essay he wrote about his own relationship to language, and his language’s relationship to his creative identity. In Fuente’s opinion, language constructs culture, and cultures grows and deepens through contact with conflicting ideas. Isolation leads to death. I like thinking about this in terms of a creative culture. That’s why it’s so important to see things, to read things, to go to workshops. Not to “get ideas”, but to give your own ideas something to grow against. Staying in contact gives your individual identity a stronger, deeper language, and a strong, deep language allows you to say what you mean, literally and in all other senses.
My guilty pleasure: has and always will be reading pop culture trash magazines while waiting at the airport or standing in line at the grocery store.
The production that changed my life: Pina Bausch’s Nelken, seen at the Edinburgh festival when I was 24. I saw it two nights in a row.
Katie Pearl authors alternative, often site-specific performance and develops works for theater with playwrights and artists around the U.S. Katie is co-artistic director of PearlDamour, an OBIE Award- winning interdisciplinary performance company with long-term creative partner Lisa D’Amour. Katie regularly teaches at various universities, and has a small life coaching practice. www.pearldamour.com, www.katiepearlcoaching.com
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