Jeanette Plourde

Life became richly alive the semester of Yale in London. I spent the fall seeing the world around me – and myself – more clearly. Immersed in art, architecture, theatre, literature, history, and politics of my classes and the city around me, I experienced every moment as extraordinarily vibrant. When my classmates and I were not in seminars, which often took place in art galleries, on the streets, and in the theatre, we were visiting art galleries and exploring architecture ourselves. Over pints of cider, we talked about what we were studying and experiencing with what I felt to be a new energy and immediacy. On my own, I was seeing as much theatre as possible. In London I became captivated by the sophistication of the art form, experiencing as an audience member a richness of performance, design and direction I had never known existed. I began to comprehend profound possibilities of the art to engage both intellectual and creative imagination. When I returned to New Haven, I found that my last year and a half at Yale in New Haven would be even more meaningful than I’d previously imagined possible – as my perspective of myself and the world around me had expanded so greatly.

Jeanette Plourde creates physically-driven theatre and experimental performance as a director, performer, and devisor. She is particularly interested in the intersection of theatre, language, movement, and performed events, and her work often challenges rigid distinctions between them. As a freelance director, she creates site-specific and site-derived theatre for theatres and festivals throughout the United States. Jeanette has studied at the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School in Paris, has trained intensively with SITI Company in New York, and was recently a participant in the La MaMa International Symposium for Directors in Umbria, Italy. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.