INTO THE PLASTISPHERE
2023
Creator / Director / Performer
Into the Plastisphere reimagines our relations to waste, accumulation, and sport in a trashy arena. The plastisphere is a human-made plastic ecosystem, here imagined as a microbial community of athletes in bodily pursuit.
This physically laborious dedication reflected an ongoing process of recognizing vitality while investigating posthuman community, with collected waste serving as the primary inspiration and material. Attunement to waste materials and processes emerged through assembled garments and exhaustive, uncertain, and incomplete athletic choreography. Collaboratively devised text and choreography were enlivened through acts of sport, while relationships wove between place, object, activity, garment, and body.
The plastisphere treasures that which has been discarded and loves the unlovable. At its core, Into the Plastisphere negotiates community, serious attention, maintenance, and respect.
Presented at LIVE ACTS Vol. II Festival, SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.
Performer-collaborators:
Colleen Bayati, Marissa Burton, Raunuck Chand, Blake Hobson, Samantha Li, Daniel McDougall, Tamlin Vetter
Costume Design Lead: Daniel McDougall
Technical Director: Ben Rogalsky
The Asymmetric
Motif: Group 1
Point Groups
EXCAVATING WHAT YOU’VE
ALREADY DONE
2022 - current
Creator
excavating what you’ve already done is an ongoing solo project exploring the body as a site of consumption.Through movement, sculpture, photography, and sound, the work considers what ephemera and intanglibles the body takes in, carries, accumulates, shares, and discards. Each iteration approaches this inquiry through a different form, allowing materials, gestures, images, and sound to build on one another over time.
The project remains intentionally unfinished, functioning as an evolving excavation of consumption, residue, and the relationship between body and material.
Bilateral Sym-
metry: Group m
Playing Cards
and Walnuts:
Groups 2 and
2mm
The Triskelion
and the Green
Pepper: Groups 3
and 3m
The Swastika and
the Greek Cross:
Groups 4 and
4mm
Flowers and
Pentagrams:
Groups 5 and 5m
Solomon’s Seal and
Snowflakes:
Groups 6 and
6mm
LIVE IN HELL
2026
Co-Director / Creative Producer
LIVE IN HELL is your next problematic fave – a comitragic solo show featuring a self-obsessed and definitely not sexy She-Devil. She welcomes the audience to her own personal hell, built from objects emerging from a comically large cardboard Amazon box. Through pathetic practical magic, crowdwork, and trauma-informed puppet therapy, the She-Devil confronts her own iconoclastic celebrity status as the ultimate scapegoat, unboxing her makeshift hellscape and unravelling her psyche. The She-Devil pretends to read a seminal feminist text, gets off on the horrors of the world, and finds solace in her pet rat while her anti-monologue devolves into maniacal self-talk. LIVE IN HELL confronts the failure of moralism and the many (un)necessary evils of everyday life, implicating the audience in the death machine that is "business as usual.” Replete with original songs, joyful transgressions, and crappy splendour, LIVE IN HELL is irreverent, indulgent pageantry at its absolute worst.Presented at the 2026 Vancouver Fringe Festival and the 2026 DTES Heart of the City Festival
Recipient of the Playwrights Theatre Centre Kathleen Flaherty Prize
Supported by Playwrights Theatre Centre, Margaret Mitchell Fund for Women (Vancity Community Foundation), Communities and Artists Shifting Culture (City of Vancouver)
Lead artist and performer: Marita Michaelis
Co-Directors and Creative Producers: Lauren Han and Alexandra McDougall
Dramaturg: Davey Samuel Calderon
Stage Manager/Lighting Designer: Maddy Woodley
Video Designer: Avideh Saadatpajouh
Sound Designer: Justin Perdomo
Costume Support: Shizen Jambor
The Asymmetric
Motif: Group 1
JUST LIKE HEAVEN
JUST LIKE HEAVENA heavenly affair for all you gorgeous, gorgeous, earth angels. This perfect evening will include performances by local artists, ethereal pole dancing, holy jello shots, and an appearance from God herself. Featuring the blissful, beatific Misty Blue, Samantha Li, Liz Milton, Rosemary Morrison, Isabel Nihte, and Liam Wilkins. Expect a silent auction full of earthly delights. Dress code: the best version of yourself.
✩꒰(ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ)꒱✩
March 22, 7-10pm
Progress Lab (1422 William St)
A fundraiser for LIVE IN HELL at the Vancouver Fringe Festival MainStage 2026.
The Asymmetric
Motif: Group 1
THE ANNUAL DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE HEART OF THE CITY FESTIVAL
Directed by Jami Reimer
The tongue of the frog is of the softest known biological materials on this planet. It is this softness that yields the stickiness needed to pluck a fly from mid air, slough skin in perpetual acts of self-consumption, and stretch voice in promulgating chorusing networks.
Joined by bioacousticians, Jami’s field recorder, and an amphibious choir, this work invites full swamp submersion as we listen episodically through the shapeshifting life (and afterlife) cycle of the frog.
Speak in tongues! Breath through your skin! Inherit the earth!
The exhibition of a graduating project represents the culmination of a candidate’s studies, and is presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.
This research moves on the traditional homelands of the Guarani, Pankararé, and Pankararu peoples as well as on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Watututh, and Musqueam nations.
The Asymmetric
Motif: Group 1
AL BERTA
Bilateral Sym-
metry: Group m
Playing Cards
and Walnuts:
Groups 2 and
2mm
The Triskelion
and the Green
Pepper: Groups 3
and 3m
The Swastika and
the Greek Cross:
Groups 4 and
4mm
Flowers and
Pentagrams:
Groups 5 and 5m
Solomon’s Seal and
Snowflakes:
Groups 6 and
6mm
SOFT TONGUES: A BIOACOUSTIC OPERA
Directed by Jami Reimer
The tongue of the frog is of the softest known biological materials on this planet. It is this softness that yields the stickiness needed to pluck a fly from mid air, slough skin in perpetual acts of self-consumption, and stretch voice in promulgating chorusing networks.
Joined by bioacousticians, Jami’s field recorder, and an amphibious choir, this work invites full swamp submersion as we listen episodically through the shapeshifting life (and afterlife) cycle of the frog.
Speak in tongues! Breath through your skin! Inherit the earth!
The exhibition of a graduating project represents the culmination of a candidate’s studies, and is presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.
This research moves on the traditional homelands of the Guarani, Pankararé, and Pankararu peoples as well as on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Watututh, and Musqueam nations.
The Asymmetric
Motif: Group 1
MAYOR OF OZ
Directed by Jami Reimer
The tongue of the frog is of the softest known biological materials on this planet. It is this softness that yields the stickiness needed to pluck a fly from mid air, slough skin in perpetual acts of self-consumption, and stretch voice in promulgating chorusing networks.
Joined by bioacousticians, Jami’s field recorder, and an amphibious choir, this work invites full swamp submersion as we listen episodically through the shapeshifting life (and afterlife) cycle of the frog.
Speak in tongues! Breath through your skin! Inherit the earth!
The exhibition of a graduating project represents the culmination of a candidate’s studies, and is presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.
This research moves on the traditional homelands of the Guarani, Pankararé, and Pankararu peoples as well as on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Watututh, and Musqueam nations.
The Asymmetric
Motif: Group 1
THE WELCOMING
2022
Performer / Devising Ensemble
Invitations. Greetings. Hospitality. A live performance of welcoming acts.
The Welcoming is a series of welcoming-acts observed, collected, and reshaped live by performance students. In questioning what makes a welcoming welcoming, we also looked beneath the mat, behind the door, for those acts and ways of being that we might call unwelcoming. What could we learn about hospitality by taking on the inhospitable? What’s revealed in our greetings when we play them rude, sticky, or foul? When we welcome others, feel welcomed, or unwelcomed, we typically start with some kind of acknowledgement of each other: “I see you, come inside”; or, “I don’t see you, you’re unwelcome here.” Through this dance of recognition, we experimented with perceptual modes for feeling out those forms of invitation and reception in our live art practices and everyday life.
Presented at the Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (February 24-26, 2022).
Director: Ryan Tacata
Devising Ensemble: Emma Savic Kallesoe, Rebecca Kabesh, Deborah Koesyonoe, Brittany Martyshuk, Alexandra (Ali) McDougall, Marita Michaelis, Michele Shen, Tamlin Vetter, Samantha Walters, Liam Wilkins, Alexander Zavorotny.
Live Band: Bingo Switch: Brody Halfe (Vocals/Guitar), Zac Daniels (Vocals/Guitar), Christian Abt (Bass), Liam Wilkins (Drums)
Sound Artist: Derek Phillips
Scenic Textiles: Liam Murley
Lighting Design & Production Design Faculty Lead: Kyla Gardiner
Production Manager: Dominik Wu
Technical Director: Theo Ewanchook
Stage Manager: Gabriella Hu
Assistant Stage Manager: Jenny Min
Assistant Lighting Designer & Operator: Yvonne Liang
Sound Operator: Flora Jiang
Scenography Team: Flora Jiang & Leo Chang
Point Groups
The Asymmetric
Motif: Group 1