Mitchell Polin (Artistic Director) is a Northampton, MA-based director/playwright whose work focuses on the notion of the “re-mix” as a formalized theatrical tool of process and structure. Falling somewhere between “Happenings,” ritual, and rock concerts, his work combines live music, song, video, found texts, movement, and storytelling into a fluid landscape of performance. Recent performances have appeared in such theaters in the United States as La MaMa e.t.c., who presented his multi-media adaptation of Ibsen’s A Dolls House, Mustard, and at Artifacts 20th Century Gallery in Florence, MA, who presented the first performance of May Flowers, an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and the Academy of Music in Northampton, MA which presented the World Premiere of Our Town Revisited. His past directed works have appeared nationally at Synchronicity Space, One Arm Red, The Stella Adler Conservatory, The Bank Street Theater, Dixon Place, Performance Mix Series/The Joyce Soho, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, The Ko Festival of Performance, Highways Performance Space (Los Angeles), The 2004 National Gay & Lesbian Theatre Festival (Columbus, OH), and Trinity College among others. International performance includes continuing work with actors of the Moscow Art Theater with whom he directed his original adaptation, Faust!!!. Past original works include, The Meeting (eight existential figures meet in an alien landscape), Capitalistic Acts Between Consenting Adults (an adaptation of Aldus Huxley’s novel Brave New World), Quad Antigone, Faust!!!, Widow of 18 Springs (an adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake), S (inspired by the film Slacker by Richard Linklater, and The Connection. Mitchell Polin is also the director of performance artist, Michael Burke, and choreographer, Lesley Farlow. In June of 2007 he presented his paper “Performing Monstrosity in Antonin Artaud’s Ecrits Bruts” at the University of Leeds’ conference of Performing Literatures; and in the fall of 2007 he presented his paper “Postal Performance and the Mail Order Happening” at the Performance Studies International Conference in New York City. In the fall of 2008 he participated in the “Writing Encounters” Symposium at York St. John University where he presented his paper, “Towards a Theatrical Remix.”
Polin is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at
Trinity College in Hartford, CT. He earned his M.A. in Performance Studies from New
York University in 1998. In addition he served as archivist for the Lee Strasberg Theatre
Institute from 1998-2000. Since 1998, in addition to his academic position, he has acted
as Artistic Director of the “Ordinary Theater.”