A cybernetic play reading where the audience's agency as spectator sits at the forefront.
For my July 2026 residency showcase with Eyebeam--an interactive play reading of Blushing Milk [OTC], In Vivo that gives the audience increased agency via real-time voting devices. The audience's surveillance becomes the subject, placing the black performers and audience members on equal footing. Watch the trailer here
This version was complete with a custom-built web panel for managing lights, sound, and voting cues in real time. Starring Maya Man, BT Hayes, Greg Lakhan, and Sandile Mhlaba. Sound design by Ari Cleveland. The showcase was held at NYU Tandon @ The Yard. The reading was performed in two 15-minute intervals.
The custom ESP32 touchscreen voting devices serve as sites of agency and complicity, a small symbol of contradiction within so-called democratic processes.
Blushing Milk [OTC], In Vivo is also a full-length play, didn't you hear? The tagline: A biotech founder and a public health journalist walk into a Starbucks to discuss the merits of a drug supposedly ending racism. From the interview emerges a trial—of the pill and of each other, conducted by the architect of illusions neither could perceive.
Read my Eyebeam profile here
Photo credits: Cal Hsiao, Bryan Lai, & Luke Mu
Website poem & one-person show wherein I accidentally grew one (1) boob.
The first photo was from a 5min version at Todd Anderson's monthly Wordhack event, during the open projector.
Ongoing one-person show and research project where new approaches to bodily autonomy are engineered at will, and the distinction between person and place dissolves entirely.
DIY HRT is not for the faint-hearted, but enbies make do. Did you know the constituent parts of PVC are an endocrine disruptor?
Two researchers assemble approximately seven meters of PVC piping.
Paige Esterly produced yet another excellent ten-minute play festival at Caveat.
This play was starring Adeline Saunders and Venice Ohleyer. I directed it! It used a bunch of PVC pipe, which I suppose is kind of my signature plastic now.
The piece . . . played with language, you could say. #yungDavidIves
