Projects

“The Voice” w/ Stand Up Europe

At the end of this month, I’ll be headed to Lisbon for Stand Up Europe‘s next Comedy Festival. And while it will surely be a weekend full of jokes, drinking, and classic comedic tomfoolery, this time I’m there to work!

I’ll be leading one of the several workshops the festival offers, focusing on an essential tool for every comedian: the Voice.

As comedians, we’re ultimately story tellers – just funny story tellers. Our instrument? The body and, maybe even more importantly, the voice.
A good comedian has good jokes, true, but good jokes still need good delivery. There are several key elements to the voice, and control of all them is essential. Volume, speed, pitch, inflection, and diction are all necessary tools of the comedian and all of these begin in the body itself. Beginning with posture and breath-work, we’ll build our voices back up again from scratch before learning to manipulate them in order to create characters, convey tone, and be understood.
Non-semantic cues such as pauses and inflection are crucial in engaging your audience but especially so when both performers and audiences are operating in a second, third, or even fourth language. When you’re working outside your mother language, you have a lot working against you, don’t let intelligibility get in your way! Learning to tell a story with not just words, but with voice, will enhance any comedian’s ability to land the joke, get the laugh, and tell their story onstage.

I’m always happy to be back with the team at Stand Up Europe as I’ve attended their festival as a participant twice before, on location in Frankfurt and Prague last year. A small team, they have built an incredible community of comedians from all across Europe and the world. Every workshop and mic is a friendly, encouraging, fun space to tell your favorite jokes and try new ones. Not to mention to meet a whole bunch of other artists and subsequently make a bunch of new friends!

Artists stick together. And upon planning a European tour, my friend and I (another comic) realized that out of 35 cities, we knew performers and show runners in 30 of them. When I last traveled – to Vienna – I applied for open mics before a friend of mine from the festival asked if I wanted a showcase spot. I said absolutely! He asked if I had 10-15 minutes which I did, then with a couple taps of his phone and a few minutes later he responded, “You’ve got 15min on Tuesday.” I had another comic here in Barcelona put me on his show despite never having seen me perform, just trusting that I knew what I was doing. These are the kind of connections that these festivals foster and these are the kind of connections both business and friendship that everybody needs.

New Gigs, who dis?

Coming to a bar near you, this New Year!

I start the year off with a new hosting gig here in good ol’ Barcelona. Joining a friend of mine hosting an open mic in the Gothic Quarter every Friday night.

Then this spring I head south to Valencia to join Narrativa Improv Fest as their light board operator.

Additionally I’m back to the drawing board…or rather the writer’s board covered appropriately in sticky notes and scribbles to reconstruct a play from the vaults of my hard drive.

We’ve got some more projects in the works, too! Including going for round two with an old student on her new work-in-progress solo comedy hour and a new mysterious creative project with a friend abroad…well, if Austria counts as abroad?

Stay tuned and catch me teaching corporate workshops and private lessons on communication, narrative, and presentation.

Coming Home

Left: a headshot taken my third year in uni (2019-20); Right: a headshot taken under a lighting grid I designed and installed (2025)

It’s been over 5 years since I’ve walked onstage as someone other than myself.

After a two and half year hiatus after uni, I began my stand-up career and returned to the stage as an improviser, musician, and vocalist. But I had yet to add traditional acting back into the mix…until today.
Today I take the stage in my original piece, Where We Die; a piece I’ve spent the last three months as director, dramaturg, and lighting designer. But tonight I’ll step into the role of Sophie, a broken young girl from America who has lost more than her sister in the last five years. Now she finds herself among strangers, and we’ll see if in them, she can find herself.

I feel somewhere between anxiety and pride to be stepping back under the lights. I’m grateful to be joined by five other incredible, hard-working cast members. And while I’m excited to get to play, I’m nervous to “put my money where my mouth is” as it were; with minimal rehearsals yet speaking the words I, myself, wrote, a pressure weighs on me to be more than good.

But this is what I’ve been trained to do. Beginning at the age of eight, I’ve been in countless productions of drama, comedy, varying lengths and intensities, some with song and dance, some with puppetry and movement. I’ve almost two decades of stage time with the years between age 13 and 21 being the most intense, doing 2-6 productions every year complete with rehearsal, memorization, and of course, performances. I know what to do when something goes wrong, when you miss a line, when you get lost. This, too, is a play I know intimately as it was birthed from my own brain, the characters splinters of myself.

I have no idea what awaits me onstage tonight, but I know that the curtain will rise, and it will fall.

Live Theatre…it’s ALIIIVE!

Opening image from “Where We Die” – photo by David Caldwell

What a ride this project has been – and it’s not over yet!
Where We Die SOLD OUT its debut show at the Barcelona Fringe on November 4th! But it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows…

Just days before our premiere, we unfortunately had to part ways with a cast member which resulted in some quick and dirty reconstructive surgery to the text. As we couldn’t replace the actor on such short notice, I made last minute edits to cut the character entirely from the piece. The cast pushed through but their nerves did, understandably, get the better of them in a couple of instances. But overall the show was well-received by audiences, some of whom quickly purchased another ticket to come back and see it again!

Last night was the first of our return run at The BCN Studio in Poble Sec and though the audience was thinner, the cast was phenomenal! With a little space to breathe, the actors found themselves and each other – the collaboration that’s needed in an ensemble show of this kind. I am very happy with all their hard work and am very excited to see it three more times!…well, I’ll see it two more times…

You can read our opening night review from Europeancomedy.com here.

“Where We Die” at the Barcelona Fringe

This fall catch us at the second ever Barcelona Fringe Festival October 31-November 9th with our performance November 4th at 20:00 of Where We Die in The BCN Studio.

Originally a thesis project, Where We Die is a new play from Brielle that made its staged reading premiere in February of 2021 in Salisbury, North Carolina U.S.A. Now it’s been edited and updated to be brought back to the stage this November. You do not want to miss this!

Outfitted with a brilliant cast, this play tells the story of seven strangers from around the world who get stuck together in the strangest of circumstances: Purgatory. Where the language barrier falls away, will these characters be able to come together across cultural barriers to solve the world’s problems – along with their own?