Un/Packing
Production History
BorderLight Fringe, Cleveland, OH (2022)
Denver Fringe Festival (2022)
Association for Theatre in Higher Education, LGBTQ+ Focus Group-digital (2021)
St. Louis Fringe-digital (2020)
Un/Packing is an interactive, live multimedia, high-stakes, choose-your-own-adventure-style solo performance where the audience must guide trans performer, Nicolas Shannon Savard, through a journey across space, time, and gender. They tell stories of surviving toxic masculinity: the hilarious, the heartbreaking, the terrifying. With over 20 characters packed into one suitcase, there are dozens of paths to choose along the way. Quite literally, it’s a different show every night.
Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome
Production History
The Lab Series at The Ohio State University-Columbus, OH (2018)
Hobart and William Smith Colleges-Geneva, NY (2018)
Camp Lilac Fundraiser-Cleveland, OH (2019)
Wild Goose Creative-Columbus, OH (2019)
Kansas City Fringe, Loretto Chapel-Kansas City, MO (2019)
Indy Fringe, Indy Eleven Theater-Indianapolis, IN (2019)
A Virtual Performance, Camp Lilac-Cleveland, OH (2020)
Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome is an hour-long solo performance exploring a variety of aspects of what it means to be transgender in America in 2019. Making a critical intervention into popular news media narratives about transgender lives (and the LGBTQ community at large) which cast them as deviant, dangerous, burdensome, and tragic, Savard pokes fun at the powers that be and finds a radical joy in disrupting heteronormative traditions and rites of passage. It’s part militaristic recruitment meeting, part puppet show, part physical theatre, part confessional, and part stand-up comedy. Much like the transgender community, the show doesn’t fit neatly into one box. The storytelling is at once hilarious and heart-wrenching and has been described by past audience members as “the softest sucker punch.” It’s at once a celebration of community and identity and a battle cry. In a culture where transgender lives are routinely made invisible, this is at once one twenty-something genderqueer person’s story and the story of so many others.
Nicolas Shannon Savard 