IN DEVELOPMENT

SHARP NEEDLE

WRITER + DIRECTOR—Anne DeMelo
DRAMATURG—Sabrina Zanello Jackson

Concept Ideation—Carnegie Mellon, 2022
Developmental Workshop—The Mercury Store, 2024

SHARP NEEDLE melds theater, opera, and film into a new, multichannel work for live performance. The piece draws on grateful dead folktales, ‘80s pop, the final scenes of Shakespeare's The Winter’s Tale and Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, and Appalachian narratives of the natural world, using these source texts as a jumping off point to examine relationships between creator and creation, lover and beloved, life and death, observer and observed.

SICKBED

WRITER/PERFORMER—Gelsey Bell
DIRECTOR—Anne DeMelo

Developmental Workshop—The Mercury Store, 2025 [UPCOMING]
Residency—the cell theater, 2026 [UPCOMING]

sickbed is an aural experience that tells the 4.5-billion-year story of Earth’s history, using the phenomenological scale of the listener’s body in a sickbed. Events such as the creation of the moon, the emergence of life, the journey of plants and then animals onto terra firma, and previous mass extinction events are layered onto a meditation for and of the human engagement with chronic pain and disability.