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 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, producer, dramaturg, and disability justice consultant. All of those titles are another way to ask questions: who gets to be in the room? Who gets to be seen? What happens when we stop building theatre around the assumption that there is only one right way to make it?
I am interested in making theatre that has something at stake, that is not afraid to leave a question in the air. My interpretation is grounded by the text on the page. I also find rhythm, metaphor, silence, and contradiction incredibly helpful in the process. Productions of plays are living, breathing entities in their own right. They're a collection of choices, images, sounds, bodies, rhythms, and relationships coming together. 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 leads an audience to wonder, to recognize something uncomfortable, see the world differently, and then question why they saw it that way in the first place.
I love diving into plays with complicated interpersonal dynamics. The plays that have left their mark on me examine what happens when people cannot love each other the ways they need to be loved, plays that force us to engage with aspects of humanity that we can't talk openly about, and when the personal is political and vice versa.
The room I always want to run involves everyone bringing their intelligence, histories, questions, and contradictions into the space. I strive to guide actors with clarity while leaving them enough freedom to surprise the room and themselves. I love helping my team find the pulse underneath. If the folks I’m collaborating with shift my understanding of something, I would call that collaboration a success.
I make theatre that is rigorous while being accessible and entertaining. I create work that trusts audiences to wrestle with complicated ideas because I don't think theatre exists simply to reflect the world at us. I think it exists to complicate our understanding of it while we’re being entertained: to make us notice what we haven't, to make room for what we cannot yet name, to permit us to sit inside uncertainty, and most importantly, to remind us that we, and our world, are not finished.