JUANITA ROCKWELL

Juanita Rockwell

ABOUT ME

I’m a writer and director with over a hundred works of theatre, opera, radio, multimedia, puppetry, music theater, dance theater, and site-specific projects presented on five continents. In each work, I create a structured relationship among the elements of language, sound and silence that guides the story and fosters alternatives to conventional narrative. I’m drawn to explorations of impermanence and change in our lives and in our world, where fragility and loss exist in balance with resilience and the space where something new can emerge.

Meanders

I’m drawn to stories that juxtapose multiple narratives into a cumulative narrative experience created by the viewer. 

So my artistic practice has been to MEANDER down a series of paths and see where they diverge and connect. 

BAKER ARTIST PORTFOLIO

This portfolio has an artist statement with more narrative about specific projects – and I’m proud to be in the company of hundreds of my amazing fellow Baltimore artists.

 

FULL CV

And my FULL CV lists out the whole shebang of my artistic history.

"Some moments in the theatre make me so fully glad to be human and alive in the room with the art breathing and dwelling in fullness with us. I watch so many artists in the mainstream swiping up awards and praise and then there are intimate corners of pure art like The Suitcase/Der Koffer...I thought of shopping in places once bombed in Serbia, the suitcase as buried child...the silence of nights after betrayal or bliss...Thank you Juanita Rockwell and Ljiljana Jovanović - for this respite and challenge you made to my nostalgia and the shards of home unavailable to the 70.8 million refugees especially to the half who are children. Beautifully clear in every way. May we survive these dark rooms and find some tiny boat..."
Ruth Margraff
playwright/librettist (Mirror Butterfly, Temptation of the Fresh Voluptuous)
"Few plays upend the notion of time -- both as we experience it in life, and as we experience it in the theatre -- as majestically, as insightfully, and as unexpectedly as BETWEEN TRAINS.  Whether reading it or seeing it live, I marvel over its wordplay, its musicality, and the rich life of its characters.  This is a new-century classic just waiting -- in the space where all great works of art lie in wait, just beyond the edge of our consciousness -- for audiences to discover it." 
Gabriel Stelian-Shanks
Artistic Director, The Drama League of New York
Between Trains Juanita Rockwell
Between Trains Juanita Rockwell
"Nonstop. Roundtrip. Glows and blinks and twinkles like Tinkerbell, passing over No Exit, picking up Alice in Wonderland…with Buddha sitting up there in the peak seat. Filled with necessary confusion, clarity, compassion, humor, wonder, and hotdogs (one with everything, of course). Between Trains is as satisfying and gloriously mystifying on the page as it is on the stage."
Sara Pritchard
author (Help Wanted: Female, Crackpots, Lately)
"Juanita seeks out new ways to tell a story, as well as looking for the story that has yet to be told. She knows that how you tell the story IS the story. If her play needs iambic pentameter, a chorus of puppets made of Chinese take-out boxes, or dancers and a giant ball of red yarn, then so be it.  Her explorations of the role of song and music in her plays are equally adventurous in finding new connections between music and narrative, and between song and character."
Donna DiNovelli
screenwriter and librettist (Madeline’s Madeline, Stag, The Good Swimmer)
"Juanita Rockwell has inspired me to look at structure and language in playwriting in an entirely new way. She uses concrete techniques to free your mind from conventional thinking and supports those techniques with a holistic mind-body approach. Her breadth of knowledge from the classics through modern theatre and her wealth of experience as a collaborator and creator of experimental theatre places her in the forefront of expertise."
Juliette Dunn
actor, playwright and educator 

Coming Workshop