ABBY PAIGE

I’m excited to share that the LeAb Iteration Lab will be in residence at Vermont Stage Company this spring, in conjunction with their new Ghostlight Residency program!

The LeAb is the name of my creative partnership with Leah Souffrant, dedicated to performance research. As a poet, teacher, and visual artist, Leah has an abiding interest in how to perceive and articulate everyday experiences; as a performer, I am always interested in exploring how performance works as an art form and what we are called upon to do both in and in front of an audience.

I’ve had some of the most powerful experiences of live performance in my life during the past five years. Since the profound isolation of the pandemic, I have found it especially meaningful to sit in audiences and watch theater, listen to music or discussion, or otherwise share a group experience. I have become aware of how performance work in my body — how my breath changes, my heart beats faster, my whole being responds, not just to the performance in front of me, but to the bodies in my proximity, all engaged in the same moment of witness.

During the past few years, the LeAb has been a pathway to ask questions about these experiences and to share those questions with audiences. Using silence and repetition as our primary tools, Leah and I have been collaborating since 2023 on a performance that has now been performed in different iterations in Vermont and New York City. We’re looking forward to continuing to develop this piece under Vermont Stage’s roof and to presenting a new iteration in Burlington audiences in May 2026.

Click here to learn more about the Ghostlight Residency.