Performances are often structured by visual images; performers speak directly to audiences and use objects to tell the tale. Imagine D’Amour leading visitors through a large neutral office space into a tiny room cum rainforest with leafy ceiling, paper-bark walls, and mossy floor.

Committed to the “potential of truly collaborative creation, from the ground up,” she frequently works with artists of many disciplines, including long-time associates Katie Pearl, Kathy Randels, and Krista Kelley Walsh.

D’Amour sees laughter as a tool for participation and peppers her works with jokes and serious silliness. Yet, unafraid of darkness, she often writes about exile and loss. Her riff on the character of Stanley Kowalski—a solo created for her brother to perform—is as much about Brando, her family, and a broken New Orleans, as it is about the archetypal character.

Is it possible to experience true intimacy in the theater? To dissolve the boundaries of the individual, if only for a moment? I know I’ll never truly ‘connect’ with the unknowable ‘self’ of another person. But I’m going to try anyway. When I make performance, I like to march into the unknown.