I'm Kat.
Profile
My work is immersive, site-specific, participatory, devised, physical, and rooted in equity and justice. I like to play on the dialogic nature of theatre in liberated public space. I collaborate with multidisciplinary artists, local grassroots organizations, early-career artists, community members, and academics. Drawing on my training as a theatrical director, social practice artist, dramaturg, burgeoning installation artist, teacher, facilitator, community organizer, and event coordinator, I value joy in the process of creation and the experience of participants.
Art Work
Working in parks, theatres, libraries, community centers, neighborhoods, museums, festivals, and classrooms across the country in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Ohio, over the past eight years I have created immersive original work, community workshops, direct actions, and traditional theatrical works. I am interested in memory; its connection to place and the ways it connects people. My favorite artistic memories to date are FixaPlate the debut work of my production company Mixed Metaphors Productions, the direct action/protest art piece The People’s Platform theatrical community workshop The Line, festival performances like The Four Fruits of Hope and Art of Burning Man: Cosmic Creature Collective, multi-medium work like The Tempest and The Taming of the Shrew, youth created work like My Own Worst Enemy and Adventures of the Page Turner, community dramaturgy work on Oslo.
Pedagogy
I have been an educator for 10 years. I am fortunate to have worked at colleges and universities like Johnson C Smith, Winthrop University, and Old Dominion University. As a teaching artist, I have created programming for organizations like Children's Theatre of Charlotte, Triad Stage, Cleveland Public Theatre, Virginia Stage Company, and the Peninsula Fine Arts Center.
As an educator, I draw from my directorial and devising work to create scaffolded syllabi and collaborative learning environments that facilitate imaginative investigation, deconstruction, and creation. My pedagogical practice draws from the philosophies of Paulo Freire, Freddie Hendricks, and Michael Rhod to equip students with knowledge of our discipline contextualized through the investigation of historical and living systems that create culture. By utilizing systemic thinking, students can investigate their placement within our field and the larger culture, deconstructing the naturalization of those systems and developing new equitable ways of making theatre art and being human. The work of the classroom is destined to be embodied outside of the classroom. The training of young artists must extend beyond theory and into an embodied justice-based arts practice. As Rhod says in Theatre for Community Conflict and Dialogue: The Hope Is Vital Training Manual, "Information is not enough. It is useless without the power to act."
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statement
I would like to acknowledge that Charlotte NC, often my subject, exists on Catawba land. I also want to briefly acknowledge who I am and the biases and beliefs I bring into my work. I am a cis-gendered heterosexual, upper-middle-class, post-graduate-level educated white millennial woman from Charlotte’s east side. I believe that gentrification is the enemy of equity, that Black lives, dreams, and futures have always and will always matter, I believe we live in the continuation of colonialism, I believe in community care and mutual aid and I believe that art can be used to create the conditions of justice.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are more than central concepts to my pedagogy; they are the backbone of my practice as an artist and my worldview. “Theatre can help us build our future rather than waiting for it,” the active pursuit of an antiracist, decolonial, liberated future called for by Augusto Boal is achieved through play, embodiment, and collaboration. Working as an educator and social practice theatre artist, I have been on a continual journey of understanding oppressive systems and building my ability to recognize and deconstruct those systems inside and outside the classroom. My work has taken me to rural working-class North Carolina, Cleveland, Ohio’s Eastside, and in neighborhoods across Charlotte’s racially and economically segregated neighborhoods. The diversity of socioeconomic status, sexuality, race, and culture strengthens the work of the theatre artist by creating deep roots of equity and liberation. It is my job as an educator to guarantee that the next generation of theatre-makers are dedicated to the deconstruction of oppressive systems inside of the theatre world and are equipped to use theatre as a tool to create an equitable future.
Education
MFA Social and Environmental Arts Practice, Prescott College – 2021
“Arts-Based Community-Led Transformation Training,” Center for Performance and Civic Practice Intensive, Chicago –2018 Facilitator Training, The Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities - 2016
MA Theatre History, Criticism, Dramaturgy: specialization Feminist Theatre Theory, University of South Carolina - 2014
BA English/Drama, with an emphasis in Directing, Queens University of Charlotte – 2010
Contact
Email - kathren.martin@gmail.com
Tel - 704-650-4936