About

Rachel Bowditch (PhD/Full Professor of Theatre in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University): She is a theatre director and author of four books, On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man (Seagull/University of Chicago Press 2010), Performing Utopia co-edited with Pegge Vissicaro (Seagull/University of Chicago Press 2018), Physical Dramaturgy: Perspectives from the Field co-edited with Jeff Casazza and Annette Thornton (Routledge 2018), and Inside the Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises co-edited with Paula Murray Cole and Michele Minnick (Routledge 2023). She is one of the seven core Rasaboxes teachers. https://rasaboxes.com/

https://www.routledge.com/Inside-The-Performance-Workshop-A-Sourcebook-for-Rasaboxes-and-Other-Exercises/Bowditch-Cole-Minnick/p/book/9781138680029

Rachel has been creating original devised, site-specific work for over three decades.  She spent the first 18 years of her life growing up internationally--Rome, Italy; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Jakarta, Indonesia, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Israel, London, and Paris. She fundamentally believes theatre is a transformative art that has deep healing potential. As a theatre director and visual artist whose canvas is the street and the stage—she paints visual, visceral poetic portraits through bodies, light, sound, media, and costumes. 

She has presented her artistic and scholarly work nationally and internationally (Singapore, Buenos Aires, Argentina,  Bogota, Columbia, Berlin, Germany, London, Haikou, China, Santiago, Chile, Mexico City, Montreal, Canada, and Barcelona, Spain), Since 1996, as the Artistic Director of her theatre company Vessel, her mission is to explore innovative and inventive intersections between physical theatre, dance, visual arts, and multi-media technology creating theatre that is visceral, physical, visual, and dynamic dealing with challenging topics from addiction, suicide, mental health, execution, transnational relocation, sustainability and the climate crisis.

Her original, devised work has been presented at theatres and venues such as Childsplay, Mixed Blood, Northwest Children's Theatre, the Denver Center, Mesa Arts Center, Phoenix Art Museum, IDEA Museum, Scottsdale Public Art, HERE Performing Arts Center (NYC), the American Living Room Festival (HERE Performing Arts Center, NYC), the Ontological-Hysteric Downstairs Series (NYC), the New York International Independent Film Festival at Madison Square Garden (NYC), the GenArt Summer Arts Festival (NYC), the HOWL Festival (NYC), the New York International Fringe Festival, The Kitchen (NYC), Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Phoenix Fringe Festival, the ASU Art Museum, Phoenix Zoo Lights, Biltmore Waldorf Astoria, Kierland Commons Westin, Taliesin West, and Tempe Center for the Arts among others.

Her scholarly work has been published in TDR (The Performance Review), Performance Research, Theatre Topics, the Journal of Media and Religion, Ecumenica, and Puppetry International as well as book chapters in Festive Devils in the Americas edited by Milla Riggio and Paolo Vignolo, Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man edited by Samantha Krukowski, and Focus on World Festivals edited by Chris Newbold. She wrote the catalogue essay for two Berlin-based artists, ROMER + ROMER (translated into German) for their Burning Man: Electric Sky exhibit in Berlin in 2019 at Haus am Lutzowplatz, where she also gave a lecture. 

She directed by American Mariachi (a Denver Center commission) by José Cruz Gonzalez for an industry reading at the Colorado New Play Summit 2016 at the Denver Center. Bowditch received wide critical acclaim for her work directing Childsplay’s 2011 production of The Sun Serpent. With a $25,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant, she directed the world premiere of The Sun Serpent with Childsplay written by José Cruz González and composed by Daniel Valdez (Teatro Campesino) at the Tempe Center for the Arts in October 2011 and remounted a bi-lingual version at Mixed Blood in Minneapolis in 2014. The production was featured in American Theatre (January 2012) and TYA Today (2012). It received 11 Arizoni Award nominations and won 6 for Best Direction, Best Costume/Masks, Best Lighting, Best Sound, Best Set, and Best Overall Professional Production in 2011.

Other original devised directing projects include: Shooting Columbus, an immersive site-specific performance examining the consequences of time travel and the current resistance of Native people in the face of continual oppression by the United States government produced by Borderlands Theatre in Tuscon, Arizona in March 2017. Created and devised by Fifth World Collective, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists from the state of Arizona, Rachel Bowditch (European American), Adam Cooper-Teran (Yaqui, Chicano), T Loving (Black, Cherokee), Ryan Pinto (Hopi, Omaha, Northern Ute), and Denise Uyehara (Okinawan and Japanese American), the show presented poetic imaginings of a radically different past to foster dialogue about a radically different future. A central question this project asked was, “How would your life be different if Christopher Columbus had been assassinated?" The project was funded by a national MAP Fund grant, a Network of Ensemble Theatres Grant, an Arizona Commission on the Arts grant and a Herberger Institute Faculty grant.

She also received a Herberger Faculty Project grant for The Conference of the Birds, an original adaptation of Farid ud-Din Attar’s 12the Century Sufi Poem--a two-year devising project that culminated in a 6,000 square foot raw industrial space, the Unexpected Gallery in downtown Phoenix (February 2017). This immersive performance allowed the audience to move through seven unique environments as they followed the Hoopoe through the seven valleys of Attar's poem.

Her show Bone Portraits was voted as one of the best shows in Phoenix for 2009 for “Innovative Design and Staging” by the Arizona Republic. Her innovative use of multi-media in Caridad Svich’s The House of the Spirits was featured in Live Design (November 2014) and Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal and her original work The Ophelia Project were featured in Live Design (October 2008) and American Theatre (January  2009). Bowditch was named one of the 100 most creative people in Phoenix by Phoenix New Times in 2012. In November 2013, she directed Asylum, an immersive site-specific performance at the historic Ice House, the first immersive performance of its kind in Phoenix. Asylum was mentioned in the Arizona Republic’s “Best of 2014” as the “Best Arts Laboratory” in the Valley.

Prior to ASU, as an artistic associate of Richard Schechner’s 2nd New York-based theatre company East Coast Artists, she had a lead role in Yokastas (2003) and Yokastas Redux (2005) directed by Richard Schechner at LaMaMa Annex (reviewed by the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Time Out New York). As one of the seven nationally certified rasaboxes instructors, she has studied and assisted in rasaboxes presentations and workshops with Schechner, Cole, and Minnick since 2002. As an education associate of RoseLee Goldberg’s Performa (author of Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present), she was the liaison between Performance Studies International at New York University and Performa Performance Art Biennial ‘07 in 2007 and worked with Performa for several years organizing Performa ’05 in New York City. She also has worked as an actor with award winning psychologist Paul Ekman (Author of Emotions Revealed) and was featured in his March 2005 National Geographic article on the mind.

Her artistic work has been featured and reviewed in The Director's Vision by Scott Shattuck, Digital Media, Projection Design, and Technology for Theatre by Alex Oliszewski and Daniel Fine (Routledge), the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Theatre Journal, Newsweek, American Theatre, The Sun (NYC), The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Live Design, Rolling Stone, Vogue Italia, U.S. Airways Magazine, Channel 12 News, Channel 8/PBS, ABC 15 News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minneapolis Daily Planet, Aisle Say Twin Cities, TYA Today, the Phoenix New Times and the Arizona Republic among other publications. In 2018, she was a Fellow at the Harvard Mellon Institute for Performance Research in “Public Humanities,” and was featured as one of the “Top 100 Creatives,” by Origins Magazine in 2015. 

She received her BA in Theatre (Directing) from Skidmore College, a certificate of completion from Ecole de Jacques Lecoq International School of Physical Theatre in Paris, France, and her MA and PhD in Performance Studies from New York University.  Additionally, she trained at the British American Drama Academy in London (BADA) (1996), Suzuki and Viewpoints with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company (1996), Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre (1998), and is one of the seven core Rasaboxes teachers (2002-present). From 2018-2022, she held the position as the Coordinator of Graduate Studies for Theatre in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University overseeing 8 graduate programs: MFA in Theatre for Youth, MFA in Dance, MFA in Directing, MFA in Performance, MFA in Dramatic Writing, and MFA in Interdisciplinary Digital Media as well as the PhD in Theatre for Youth and PhD in Theatre and Performance of the Americas. From 2014-2022, she directed the MFA in Performance program that focuses on devising, actor-creator methodologies, and new work development. 

During her sabbatical in 2016, she completed the month-long Dell’arte Bali Program where she studied Balinese dance, Kecak, Wayang Kulit, and mask carving with master mask maker, Nyoman Seitwan to continue her life-long obsession with masks and mask performance.

Her most recent work, Anthropocene is a high-impact original devised physical theatre performance that examines how human progress has led to a new and dangerous geological age. Anthropocene brings together movement, text, innovative media, and sound design to tell a story about the escalation of consumption and how we are hurtling towards an unsustainable future offering a sobering and provocative glimpse of our world spinning out of control. Through innovative, powerful storytelling and theatre, Anthropocene is a call to action and a part of the urgent global discourse around the climate crisis. An August 2021 United Nations IPCC report declared a code red for humanity, imploring, “What we do over this coming decade is literally a matter of life and death. Which brings us back to the realization that people alive today will determine humanity’s future–averting planetary disaster is up to us.” A central question the project asks is, “What is the theatre of global emergency? [...] How do we transform ‘climate grief’ into ‘climate action’?” 

In 2024-2025, she is an Atlas of Creative Tools Fellow, a part of Liz Lerman's Principled Innovation Initiative. 

To see more of her directing/performance work, visit: www.vesselproject.org

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