KOREY PIMENTAL
Welcome
Hello! My name is Korey Pimental, he/him/his, and I'll keep this short and sweet:
I'm a disabled, queer theatre director, producer, dramaturg, and disability justice/accessibility consultant. I'm originally from New Bedford, MA, where I got my start directing, producing, and acting in art galleries and church basements. It was there I founded and worked as Executive Artistic Director of The Glass Horse Project (operational now under Reverie Theatre Group) and spearheaded the City of New Bedford's first and only Free Shakespeare in the Park program (now celebrating its 10th summer). I also worked as an Education Coordinator for a local performing arts center where I got to be a teaching artist for K-8 students. I graduated from The Theatre School at DePaul University with an MFA in Acting. I now call Chicago home, and have jumped into the professional theatre scene with both feet to the full-extent of my artistry. Currently, I serve as the Associate Artistic Director at Circuit Theatre and the Director of Development at Redtwist Theatre.
Artistic Statement
I believe theatre should make the world a little harder to take for granted.
I am a director, dramaturg, producer, and disability justice consultant. Those titles may look like separate jobs, but to me they are all asking the same questions: who gets to tell the story? who gets to be in the room? who gets to be seen? And what happens when we stop building theatre around the assumption that there is only one right way to make it? I am interested in theatre that has something at stake. Theatre that is deeply felt, deeply considered, and not afraid to leave a question hanging in the air.
I love text, rhythm, metaphor, silence, contradiction, and when the moment of a simple action means something completely new for the the theatrical space. A production is not simply a story being told: it's a living, breathing entity in its own right. It's a collection of choices, images, sounds, bodies, rhythms, and relationships that ask an audience to participate in making meaning. I am interested in plays that ask more questions than they answer. Whether contemporary or a classic that is ready to be engaged with anew, I want to make theatre that creates space for an audience to wonder and grapple with the current moment. To argue with themselves. To recognize something uncomfortable. To see the world differently and then question why they saw it that way in the first place.
I am drawn to stories about power: who has it, who wants it, who is denied it, and what people are willing to do to get it back. To stories with complicated interpersonal dynamics and what it means when people cannot love each other the ways they need to be loved. I love stories that force us to engage with the aspects of our humanity that society has taught us we can't talk openly about. I am interested in the collision of the political and the personal and when people have their backs against the wall and need to find a way out.
For me, collaboration is everything: I want actors and designers to bring their intelligence, histories, questions, and contradictions into the room. I want to listen closely enough to recognize when a collaborator has found something I could not have found by myself. I strive to guide artists with clarity while leaving them enough freedom to surprise the room and themselves. I love helping artists find the pulse underneath, and I love when that thing changes my understanding of something, because I believe that’s the point. Theatre should be alive enough to surprise the people making it.
I want to make theatre that is rigorous without being elitist. Political without becoming a lecture. Accessible without being reductive. Funny without being afraid of darkness. Beautiful without being afraid of ugliness. Poetic without being precious. Work that trusts audiences to wrestle with complicated ideas because I don't think theatre exists simply to reflect the world back at us. I think it exists to complicate our understanding of it: to make us notice what we haven't, to make room for what we cannot yet name, to give us permission to sit inside uncertainty, and most importantly, to remind us that the we, and our world, are not finished.