A Milestone! Free Headshots!

Hi Friends,

The biggest development for me in the past few months is that I have been making real steps towards making money from professional photography.

To begin, I had my first paid photography gig! I shot some production photos of Studio Conservatory Directing Student Doug Robinson’s scene from Psychosis 4:49.

4:48 Psychosis, Directed by Doug Robinson

Next, I invested in a really good camera, which I have been having a lot of fun with.

Then I went to Street Meet DC, where I was able to work with models and meet other photographers in the DC area who have more experience than I do.

Model Jennifer Gonzales at Street Meet DC

Then I downloaded Lightroom and Photoshop and started teaching myself how to edit photos, which has always been fun for me, but now I feel like I am really getting good at it.

Before and after editing. Model: Priscia at Street Meet DC

All of this has been made possible because of my friends and family who have donated to my GoFundMe Campaign which is 140% funded! (and is still running if you want to donate too!) To celebrate this miolestone, I am offering free headshots for the rest of April and May!

So now the newest section of this website is the Headshots and Modeling section, which I hope to expand over the next few months through going to more public photography events and working individually with models.

Cheers,

Patrick

End of Year Reflection

Hi Folx,

It has been quite a year. I took on a producing director role for Theatre Prometheus and I took more production pictures than I have ever taken. I wrote some plays and worked really hard on submitting them and then I stopped writing plays and submitting them. I lost my job that was making a lot of my theatre-making possible and the day after, I got a headshot that I can use to make me look professional.

So things will change this coming year. I don’t know what is going to happen. It could be grad school. It will almost certainly be a new job. I hope to begin writing again. One of the biggest things on my check list is to get a bigger, better camera and lighting equipment. Maybe, I’ll start offering headshots? Maybe I’ll start actively looking at doing more promotional/production photos for theatres in the area? Maybe I’ll move across the country or the world to do what I want to do?

Be on the lookout.

Patrick

This is my favorite production photo that I took of Anon(ymous)

1 2 3 is NEXT WEEK

Hi Folks!

This is going to be a super short post because I am super busy right now, but I wanted to plug the show that I've been production managing.  1 2 3: a play about abandonment and ballroom dancing has a truly beautiful script that focuses on not one, not two, but THREE strong women protagonists who go on a journey of relying on each other, fighting with each other, and reconciling with each other. Or not. (Gotta keep a little mystery so you'll go see this play.) AND I CANT FORGET THE BEAUTIFUL BALLROOM DANCING.

Amber James as 3, Kazi Jones as 1, and Amber Baker as 2

Anyways, I took a few promo pics and thought I would post them here so you could see what amazing work our artists are putting into this show! I'm stunned by the emotional depth and skill of the actors. I saw a preview last week and I was floored. Y'all must come see this play. TICKETS HERE!

Amber Baker as 3 and Kazi Jones as 1

Ring In Spring!

Hi Friends!

Wow... Has it really been since January since I posted anything? Well a lot has been happening between now and then:

• I submitted a bunch of plays to a bunch of theatres (all coming back negative--so far!);
• I applied for a directing gig (which I didn't get either);
• I stage managed at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage (video of that here);
• I got thanked at the Helen Hayes Awards because, last year, I stage managed for a show that won both Best Director and Best Leading Actress(!);
• I turned 25 (!) at a magnificent triple birthday party; 
• and, unfortunately I stopped writing and submitting plays so much because of all of these things but especially because;
• I became Theatre Prometheus' Interim Producing Director! 
  
  While I don't think production management isn't my true calling, it has been great to take this position within a wonderful little theatre company that is doing important work. I've leaned into production management so much that I applied for a full time production management position at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, which would be an absolute dream. Woolly is very much my favorite theatre company in DC.

My housemate, Yannick Godts, did the promotional art for 1 2 3!

Anyway, my newest project, aside from production managing 1 2 3 with Theatre Prometheus, which everyone should see this summer, I was took production photos of Agora Dance's Ring in Spring fundraiser event at Capital Fringe. I've worked with Agora for a while a stage manager, but they didn't need an SM for this show., so they asked if I could take some pics. I had a lot of fun, like I always do with Agora, but I also got a great work out! I forget how much of a work out taking pictures can be. Just keeping up with Catherine, David, Melissa, and Olivia was tough, but, then I had to do a bunch of squats to get the angles right. Anyways, I guess the moral of the story is that you should never let anyone get away with telling you that art is easy.

Catherine Roth (featured) is a superbly talented and wonderful human being who is both a dancer and Managing Director for Agora Dance!

Well, that's my update for now. I hope that it's not 5 months until my next one.

Peace and blessings,
Patrick

New Play!

So I'm writing this with a brace on my wrist because I'm a fool who uses his phone too much. However, in spite of a bad case of phone thumb, I have been writing a good bit outside of this blog. I finally added a scene to a play that I started writing 3 years ago and I feel like I've really rounded the play out. The play is called Tiles and it's as abstract as my work gets (you can find a sample of it on my New Play Exchange profile, along with all my other plays that I've determined to be relatively fit for public consumption). I'm very interested in hearing feedback about it because times have definitely changed since I began writing it, so if you're interested in reading the whole thing, just let me know! Here are some questions that I have about it:

• What resonates with you about this play? 

• What are you left wanting more of after reading this play? 

• What images stick with you after reading this play?

• What, if any, contemporary social issues came to mind while reading this play?

Me getting feedback from Adam Bock and Donna DiNovelli on my play Blueberries at NTI as seen in Broadway World (My first, and only photographic, appearance!)

I really want to talk about the New Play Exchange (NPX) but I feel like I have to talk more about the process of how I wrote this play. I wrote it in my final weeks at the National Theatre Institute (NTI) at The Eugene O'Neill Theatre Centre after a semester of intense artistic development. NTI was the first time that I had any of my creative writing presented in front of any group. The students and faculty at NTI gave me some of the best feedback I had ever received. I wrote this play after an intense brainstorm session with other student playwrights who came up with tons of fragmented ideas. They all, eventually left the group and I was left alone in an internet-less room with days to write and write and write--this is still my favorite condition to write. I ended up presenting the first few scenes (which are now the second though fourth scenes) to my classmates as a solo-performance piece. After these performances, I wasn't sure how finished it was and I didn't know what to do with it. Until now.

NPX - Join it (if you like to write and read plays)

Now I'll talk about NPX. I've heard of playwrights who have real successes on NPX, but I can't claim to be one. Nevertheless, it makes me feel like a real playwright--I escape impostor syndrome every time I upload a new play there. My play joins a group of plays that are accessible to other playwrights and basically every director and literary manager that is interested in producing new work. It's only $10/year, so if you're a person who writes plays, wants to read and produce new plays, and can afford this price, you should definitely join.

Now, I know I said that I would write more about my experience doing production photos, but I can only write so much with my hand as it is. I promise I'll write more about it soon. I'm also actively pursuing doing more production photography, so you or anyone you know has a production that needs a photographer, let me know!

Formative Years

As a writer, I struggle with titles. I often begin with a title and that informs my work, but if that title no longer works with the story, I have a difficult time finding a new title that really works with it. But today, I feel like I need to start with a title that focuses on some really important times of my life. These are the times in my life in which the people and places shaped my mind around art. I can't talk about all of my instructors and environments which were instrumental in developing my artistic talent or this post would go on forever, but I will try to narrow it down.

My first artistic instructors were actually musical instructors. I wanted to play the cello from an early age, so, much to my disappointment, my parents got me a violin and told me that if I stuck with this for two years, they would buy me a cello. So I did. My one-and-only cello instructor's name was Lisa. Lisa was the first instructor who taught me about proper artistic form. The two main reasons for proper form when playing the cello are to get a good tone and to actually be able to play more difficult pieces. Left elbow down will lessen your agility and if your bow isn't drawn across the string in the right place, your sound will go flat. These are simple skills that need practicing. But I didn't like to practice so it took much longer for me to learn new techniques. This began a pattern for me with all of my musical instruction throughout the years.

I don't have many pictures that I took from my formative years, but I like this one from Locarno, Switzerland.

I later abandoned cello for voice (although my old cello still sits in my closet). I had various voice instructors through high school and college and, while I ended up with a singing voice that I think is really great, my instructors had to really pull it out of me because I wouldn't practice what they wanted me to. It wasn't until college that I found a voice teacher that could identify what I really needed in order to sing well. I needed to both strengthen my singing muscles and relax the tension that I hold in my body. Strengthening and relaxing at the same time is difficult--and I found that I needed a voice instructor as well as yoga, pilates, and dance instructors in order to develop the skills to do it. All of these teachers, together but separately, taught me to integrate knowledge, practice, and ways of doing art. 

This is me in a high school production of The Tempest. Shiny. So. Shiny. Photo cred: my mom.

But before I get too far ahead of myself, let me circle back and take a chance to thank the teachers in high school who taught me to feel comfortable with language. The drama instructor in my 11th grade year and I had a special bond. When we first encountered each other, I had been acting for quite some time, and she could see that in me. Her humor, experience, and intelligence got me excited about performing. She also got me to come close to mastering a monologue from Hamlet, which is still one of my favorite plays. I can still rattle that monologue off upon request. I also credit my 12th grade English teacher for being the first person that guided me to being comfortable with writing. The American system of teaching academic writing, to me, felt constraining. Ms. Whisenant freed me of the constraints that previous instructors had put on me. She imparted upon me this knowledge: A piece of writing does not need to follow any given structure; you can arrange a piece of writing however you would like to--however it makes sense to you. I started to be able to clearly put my thoughts on paper getting As on my papers instead of Bs and B-s.

For a website that mainly features my photography, it seems weird to not mention how I started taking photographs until now. But I've never had any photography instructors--I kind of wish I had; my high school had a great photography department. My history of photography begins like this: Just before I moved overseas for my parents to go to Turkmenistan and myself to go to boarding school, the Circuit City in my town was having it's closing sale (ah yes, the mid-2000s collapse of Circuit City was devastating, but apparently it's trying to make it's third comeback?) and my mother bought me a pretty basic Nikon DSLR. So it was my toy to play with when I started adventuring. My camera would hardly leave my hip whenever I would go on any sort of adventure. I learned to love to take pictures of flowers and landscapes and betraying peoples' trust but earning it back swiftly when I took candids that turned out to be really good. Each adventure in Switzerland, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Italy, Russia, Hungary, Israel and more gave me new insight about how I saw the world through the camera. 

Look! It's a new type of photo! I started taking production photos for a theatre company that I do some production management for and this is one of the best. (Pictured: Aron Spellane, left, and Keanu Ross-Cabrera, right)

As I look back on my art, I realize that I have come a long way. My pictures better composed, focused, and exposed. My singing voice is strong and comes easily without too much warming up. Writing comes relatively easily, but, honestly, I haven't done much creative writing in quite some time. I was focusing on promoting a script that I started writing many years but just finished a submit-able draft this past year instead of actually writing. I now feel quite out of the habit, but I still feel like I need to promote this script more. But that's what 2018 is for. That's why I'm making this website. That and my photos. And as a way to write more frequently. So maybe 2018 will bring better professional things than 2017. Here's hoping.

January 1, 2018 - Another Beginning

At the beginning of every year I, and most of us, I think, have to come to terms with the fact that the last number that I write on the date has changed. I write the date so frequently for work and business and general life things and the days change with the sun and the months change with the moons (essentially) and so I am used to them. Admittedly, I pay little attention to the cycles of the moon and there are days that I am unaware of the sun at all; like today, actually--I don't believe I stepped outside. I didn't go outside today because I believe the weather didn't even come close to being above freezing. I just didn't want to deal with that--much like how I do not want to deal with writing a new number on the date. So my my quarrels with the new year are legitimate on a psychological and physical "no one's body should be exposed to sub-freezing temperatures for an extended period of time" level but also petty on a realistic level.

The only evidence that I was a star on the Spotswood Elementary School stage (that's me on the right, obviously). Photo cred: one of my parents?

And so are my earliest memories of doing art. 
My earliest memory of acting was an elementary school production of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (possibly pictured above). It was just as silly as it sounds, but, looking back on it, it was kind of racist because it cast the only brown girl who was interested in acting (also pictured above), a friend who I have known since kindergarten, as Pocahontas. I believe that she pointed it out at the time (she was and is brilliant). It also asked young audiences to deal with depression and suicide without a lot of context or support. I "played" Meriwether Lewis, who committed suicide after the expedition, and I, as the character, had to announce to the audience that I did so at the very end of the play.

This isn't me but this is pretty representative of what being in the Orff Ensemble meant

I also remember quitting elementary school choir by going out to recess instead of going to choir and not telling the choir instructor. I think a student came out and tried to retrieve me and the other boys who had jumped ship (it was a very gendered abandonment, if I remember correctly), but we just refused to go back in and there was nothing they could do about it, since choir was voluntary. I mostly left choir because there was a new music director and she was kind of terrible. The previous years we had a director who was GREAT! She directed what was called the Orff Ensemble--an ensemble of glockenspiels and marimbas (like in the video above) and other percussive instruments of the like. We were so good that our school won a prize for like 10 or 20 thousand dollars from Oscar Meyer (for some reason??????????????????) and the Wienermobile (pictured below) came to our school and I got a tour.

Fun fact: I've been inside this terrifying thing

The two memories I have of being involved with visual arts are of my elementary school art teacher telling me that I should wash my hands with warm water because it gets the germs off better (a fact that has stayed with me for life) and my middle school art teacher telling me that I couldn't draw. So, I did what most little boys do when they get told they can't do an art form--I quit drawing and I quit painting. I came back to drawing and painting in recent years because I was forced to take a visual art course, which I really actually enjoyed, but since I didn't develop an early habit of it, it's hard for me to pick it up again. 

I find it interesting that the majority of my early memories of art are negative, because I, mostly have stuck with being an artist. There were periods of my life where I told myself that I wasn't going to be an artist, but I kept singing or acting or writing anyways, even if the art I do is just for myself, it still counts as art and it is still very important to me. I'm excited to begin sharing my work in a more public setting and, though I hope it will turn into getting jobs for photography or writing, it's mostly for myself--to organize my work and define who I am and what I do for myself. I think my next blog posts will be about my photography or my work as a theatre artist in a little bit later period of my life. Maybe high school.

December 26, 2017 - A Beginning

I'm sitting at my dining table, slightly hungry for only having a spring roll and christmas cookie for dinner, listening to the beautiful music from The Shape of Water (what a great movie) soundtrack loudly because I have the house to myself for a few days, writing this. I'm proud to have my own website now. I will focus on highlighting my personal work here, but, because of the writing that I do, the professional and personal collide. 

An introduction to my work:

I am a man who wears many hats; I am beginning the journey as a writer, performer, theatre director, producer, and, most recently, professional photographer. I have always loved artistic hybrids--my first professional theatre job was as a stage manager for performances called Artistic Blind Dates (ABD) in which groups of 3 artists who work in different media collaborate to make short performance art pieces. As a stage manager, and later, a producer, I worked with video artists, acrobats, dancers, choreographers, writers, food artists, opera singers, and more. Each group challenged me to think beyond how I learned how to create art. Some of the works were obscure, opaque, or unfinished, but I say, "bring it on!" Audiences should be questioning all art. Art should not be easy for audiences. Good art changes people and change is difficult. I try to use my hats to make people see things that they wouldn't usually see, feel things that they wouldn't usually see, and feel things they wouldn't usually feel. 

This is a picture from a particularly moving ABD featuring Claire Alrich, photo cred Teresa Wood, 2016

I am trying to leave the life of a stage manager. There are a few companies or artists that I will still work for in this capacity, but my heart has always been on the artistic side of things and I have the means now to pursue them. 

An introduction to who I am:

My current headshot, courtesy of Jim Cassatt, 2015

I suppose the way to separate my work from who I am and to contextualize what you see here is to establish a strong autobiography. My audiences should know that I am a queer white cis-man from a upper-middle class family.

Why queer? I haven't really found an established sexual orientation that fits how I feel. The closest that I have found is bi-romantic and heterosexual, but I'm more comfortable embracing a more fluid identity than branding myself with those labels.

Why white? Well, the easy answer is because of my parents and their parents and their parents... etc. The more interesting and true answer is that race is something that white people created to make money and get power off the backs of the people we now call "of color." But I can't deny my whiteness. Race, like gender, is a sauce we are marinated in from birth and the stereotypes of race stay with us, no matter how much we deconstruct them. 

Why cis-man? This has similar easy and interesting and true answers as the previous question. Sex is biological, but more fluid than most know because the idea of a sexual binary is cis-hetero-patriarchal propaganda that aims at keeping transpeople and intersex people down. Gender is a spectrum but I like to think of it more as a color wheel spectrum where there are definite colors but there are 360 degrees of extremes and less like a linear spectrum that relies on a binary of blue and pink on each end. There are times, albeit very infrequently, when I feel more feminine than masculine (another reason I'm queer), but I am almost entirely masculine presenting, so cis-man is accurate.

What's up with my family? My mom works for the State Department and is currently stationed in Baghdad. My dad is back in school for music therapy. My sister is a pharmacy tech who is applying to go back to school for nursing. I'm based out of Washington DC now but I've done and will continue to do a lot of travelling because of my mom's job. I was born in Harrisonburg, VA, a small college town in Western Virginia, and stayed there pretty statically until I was 16. My parents met there when they went to a small religious liberal arts college. They got married right out of college and started out with pretty much the skin on their backs. I believe that their first home together was a little trailer on a pig farm. My mom went on to get her graduate degree and is having a successful career as a Nurse Practitioner. My dad is more of a jack of all trades--he's a very talented musician and tinkerer who makes and plays his own instruments. It took him 30 years into his marriage with my mother, but he's finally pursuing a career that he feels passionate about that will allow him to use his talents and knowledge for good. 

My high school's logo

Where did I go when I left Harrisonburg at 16 years old? My mom joined the State Department as a medical officer when I was fifteen. Her first post was Turkmenistan. When we found out that this was the case, I had less than a semester to figure out where I was going to go to school. The State Department provides a very generous stipend for high school students whose parents are in Turkmenistan, so I could basically choose to go to any boarding school in the world. (I should have mentioned earlier that my mother has a travel bug that has crawled into her brain, which is why she joined the state department. I have that same bug.) So I chose to go to boarding school in Switzerland. It's a stereotypical white person thing to do, I know, but I haven't read Catcher in the Rye yet, so I'm trying to lean away from it. The two years I was at boarding school were successively the worst and best years of my life so there is too much to tell to go into detail in this already very lengthy post, but this step was truly the beginning of my journey towards forging an international identity--which was kind of cut short in college, but that is a story for another day. 

I believe I will wrap it up for today. I think I'm going to talk about my earliest experiences with art in my next post, so stay tuned for a discourse on a surprisingly dark dramatized Lewis and Clark story, a middle school art teacher who told me I was bad at art, and other reasons I can't remember my childhood. 

Fun stuff, right? Photo cred Jim Cassatt