Almost three years in the making, this adaptation of Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan was created by Cornerstone and the celebrated Long Wharf Theatre to reflect the history, haunts and happenings of the City of New Haven. The cast included New Haven residents, Cornerstone actors and invited artists. My choreography drew from the city's diverse rhythmic palette—salsa, jazz, street—as I created musical numbers that could both engage the audience and propel the story forward. For more, see The Good Person of New Haven.

An adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, A Community Carol featured residents of the D.C. neighborhood of Anacostia performing alongside the resident acting companies of Cornerstone and Arena Stage. Performed for 30,000 people on Arena's mainstage, the production included two children in the cast who were the first deaf performers in Arena's history. I choreographed choruses of firefighters, construction workers, fast food workers and children, who propelled the story forward through musical numbers. A dance highlight was the exuberant, 1940's celebration at the Fezziwigs with the full cast.

Recipient of a Helen Hayes Award, this gender-bending adaptation of García Lorca's The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife was performed by members of the Cornerstone professional ensemble. Each of the four actors played all four major roles in the play, quick-switching throughout the action so that the audience could experience different versions of the same character. The dances that I choreographed—character studies through movement set to music—brought all four actors together to explore each character in depth. This project is where I crystallized my approach to combining movement and theater. Working with the actors to find the unique gesture or movement that could reveal the essence of the character.

50 Americans from 12 towns and cities came together to create a new adaptation of Shakespeare's romance, exploring rural and urban America. Performed outdoors and involving Cornerstone's tour bus as scenery, the play went on a 10,000-mile national tour back to each participant's hometown and to major cities. This project was the subject of Insignia Films' 1999 documentary Cornerstone, which premiered on HBO Signature.

This humorous and disturbing musical adaptation of a Carl Sternheim play traced the particularly American phenomenon of an immigrant family's rise from rags to riches. Lynn Jeffries' masterful forced-perspective set inspired me as I developed the stylized movement. Both reflected the off-kilter world of this mythic family.

Cornerstone created an hour-long version of Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen with over 200 students at Seward Park High School on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It contained dialogue and song lyrics in Bengali, English, Mandarin and Spanish, and was performed for both student and general audiences. I worked with the students as I would with professionals, organically developing the movement and musical staging from a character's intentions, the conflict of a scene, or the play's themes. I continued to work with the young cast after the show closed, directing them in a moving and exuberant performance for the Public Theater's annual outdoor block party.

This epic adaptation of Aeschylus's trilogy, The Oresteia, was set on the Walker River Paiute Indian Reservation in Nevada. The playing space encompassed both the interior of the theater (a converted welding shop) and the surrounding desert, and the performance spanned daylight and nighttime. My choreography included working with a group of young boys to create the Chorus of tribal elders, a group of young girls to form the Chorus of Clytemnestra's slaves, and matriarchs of the tribe to develop the Furies. Buzz, the tribal Chairman, played Agamemnon.