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DIRECTING

Highlights: In the Green

Zenith, a One Minute Horror Film

Official Selection of the 2021 NYX Horror 
13 Minutes of Horror" Festival

Highlights: Our Feet Off the Ground

Highlights: Our Town

Highlights: A Sad Tale's Best for Winter

Highlights: Puffs 

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PHOTOS

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Promo Photos by Andrea Decker

Production Photos by Francis Gacad

In the Green by Grace McClean

 

Directed by Anna Miles at The Wayward Artist

The West Coast Premiere of In The Green by Grace McLean, directed by Anna Miles, ran at The Wayward Artist in Santa Ana, CA from April 14, 2023 to April 30th, 2023 at the Grand Central Art Center.


In the Green tells the liberally and expressively adapted origin story of one of Medieval history’s most prolific voices: Hildegard von Bingen. Before she became known as one of the first recorded female leaders of her age through her work as a healer, mystic, composer, and finally a saint, Hildegard von Bingen was a little girl locked in a cloister’s cell with her mentor, Jutta von Spondheim, after demonstrating a preternatural sensitivity to the world around her.


This poetic and sonically sophisticated event, punctuated by elements of immersive storytelling, illustrates the divergent journeys of two exceptional women broken apart by trauma as they struggle to wrench themselves back together at any cost.

Promo Photos by Anna Miles

Production Photos by Zoart Photography

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

 

Directed by Anna Miles at the Woodland Opera House

Anna Miles' radical re-imagination of Thornton Wilder's Our Town ran at the historic Woodland Opera House in Woodland, CA from January 28 - February 20, 2022

 

A landmark in American drama, Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town tells the story of a small town at the turn of the century, Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. Narrated by the “Stage Manager”, we follow the Gibbs and Webb families, residents of Grover’s Corners, through twelve years of life changes — from the mundane in Act I, “Daily Life,” to the romantic in Act II, “Love and Marriage,” to the bittersweet in Act III, “Death and Eternity.” The play was revolutionary when it was first produced in 1938, challenging the conventions of realism and theatrical storytelling- this 2022 production honored that traditional of innovation and breathed fresh life and fresh revolution into this old classic, reworking the staging and storytelling to challenge the theatrical conventions of today. While Our Town is often professed to be a play about “universal truths,” a story about “all of America,” there’s only so much limited truth a story about a small white East Coast town in the 1900s can offer modern audiences. But with the help of a dedicated and diverse ensemble of creators, Anna and the Woodland Opera House reckoned with the text to tell a powerful modern tale of the complications of nostalgia and the need to continue always moving forward in our social progress.

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Promo Photos by Andrea Decker

Production Photos by Anna Miles

Our Feet Off the Ground

 

Created and Directed by Anna Miles

Choreographed by Emily-Mae Kamp

additional choreography by Lizzy Gimple and devised by cast

Produced by Beating of Wings: An Artist Collective

Our Feet Off the Ground, a brand new devivsed, immersive feminist dance show drawing from the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, ran for three performances only in May 2024 at site-specific outdoor locations: two shows at Hillcrest Park in Fullerton on Friday May 24th and Sunday May 26th, and one show at La Tierra de la Culebra park in Highland Park on Saturday May 25th. In keeping with Beating of Wings' tradition, admission to all shows was completely free. The show darkly reimagined such classic tales as The Little Mermaid, The Red Shoes, and The Wood Nymph,, intersecting their language and themes with the medium of dance as a vehicle for reckoning with the perils and passions of inhabiting a female body.

Developed collaboratively by an ensemble of performers and choreographer Emily-Mae Kamp under the direction of Anna Miles, the movement spoke with urgency and vulnerability, telling a story about bodies through the body: through its strength, its softness, and its resistance. Drawing on the symbolism of forests and wilderness, the performance invited audiences into a raw, physical world where desire, simultaneously frightening and enticing, stretched wide and threatened to become all consuming. The piece delved into what it means to want, to risk, and to survive within a culture that often tries to tame or silence female desire. Our Feet Off the Ground twisted and subverted familiar stories into something new and uncanny, encouraging audiences to challenge accepted cultural narratives: a reckoning and a release.

Photos by Scott Ray

Zenith, #NeverAlone and "Cassandra Q+A"

 

An Immersive Instagram Experience

Story by: Anna Miles, Chloe Cole, and Sabina Friedman-Seitz

Directed and Edited by Anna Miles

Scripts by Chloe Cole and Anna Miles (respectively)

Performed by Sabina Friedman-Seitz

Zenith comprises #NeverAlone, an immersive, interactive Instagram horror experience about influencer @cassandra_clemm's public unraveling (featured in the AV Club) and Zenith, the micro horror film about the opening of Cassandra's wellness retreat. The one-minute film was chosen as an official selection in NYX Horror's 2021 "13 Minutes of Horror" Film Festival, streamed on Shudder, and category winner in the 2022 Wench Film Festival. The four-minute film is currently being streamed by Red Tower Entertainment. 

Something is wrong with Cassandra Clemm, an influencer who has built her brand by peddling vulnerable and raw reflections on her mental wellness journey.  Her pathological need to perform her “self” has grown so strong that she no longer can control it -- and it begins to control her. Will any of her devoted fans recognize what is happening and help her before it’s too late? Or will they celebrate her honest depiction of her mental deterioration? Or will they turn on her once she can no longer supply them with the same hollow daily affirmations they’ve become reliant on? 

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Production photos by Max Herzfeldt and Miranda Clement, Publicity Photos by Chris Meissner

A Sad Tale's Best for Winter

 

A Feminist Adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

Written and Directed by Anna Miles

Workshopped with Noise Now at A Noise Within Theatre

Click here to read an excerpt from the script.

Click here to see our production pitch/press packet.

Is it possible to move forward – and to heal – in moments when catastrophic violence can’t be erased with forgiveness? With a merging of new and classic language, and through song, dance, and spoken word, A Sad Tale’s Best for Winter explores this question by interrupting and disrupting Shakespeare’s text. This new play brings the story into a world where a new generation struggles to undo the centuries of fear, pain, and violence in the hopes of creating a new, better world.Developed in 2019 as a partnership between Beating of Wings: An Artist Collective and A Noise Within’s Noise Now initiative, the project challenges the reverence of the classical canon and its dominance in theatrical spaces. It bridges classical theater and contemporary social critique, offering a space for new voices, new stories, and encouraging a more inclusive vision of theatrical storytelling. 

Production photos by Zoart Photography

Puffs 

 

Written by Matt Cox

Directed by Anna Miles

Produced by the Woodland Opera House

For seven years a certain boy wizard went to a certain Wizard School and conquered evil. This, however, is not his story. This is the story of the Puffs… who just happened to be there too. A tale for anyone who has never been destined to save the world. Puffs (or Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic), written by Matt Cox, offers a comedic and fresh take on a familiar magical world, retelling the story from the perspective of the underdog students in the "Puff" house at a certain wizarding school.

Production photos by Regan Wong, Featuring John Shartzer and Melissa Dunham

Daddy Long Legs: The Musical

 

Book by John Caird

Music and Lyrics by Paul Gordon

Directed by Anna Miles

Produced by Melissa Dunham

This two-actor folks-y musical tells the story of a young student and her mysterious anonymous benefactor as they fall in love through letter correspondence. Using the imagery of paper as a visual throughline, the set and all of the props were made out of paper to materialize the characters’ connection through language, writing, and education.

This two-actor folks-y musical tells the story of a young student and her mysterious anonymous benefactor as they fall in love through letter correspondence. Using the imagery of paper as a visual throughline, the set and all of the props were made out of paper to materialize the characters’ connection through language, writing, and education.

Production and Publicity Photos by Alaura Hernandez

It Was the Nightingale: Persephone's Play

 

Written and Directed by Anna Miles

Under the Mentorship of Lookingglass Theater Founding Member David Catlin

Click here to read an excerpt from the script.

A theatrical feminist retelling of the Hades/Persephone myth which transformed a story about rape and grief into a tale of female power and adolescent sexual awakening. The play was staged as an immersive, site-specific experience in an abandoned observatory at the top of a seminary school. Developed under the mentorship of David Catlin. 

Production Photos by Chauna Goldberg

Think of Me, Fred Weasley

 

Written and Directed by Anna Miles

Produced by Melissa Dunham

Adapted from the actual high school journals of Anna Miles and Melissa Dunham

Starring Anna Miles and Melissa Dunham with Mazie Rudolph on piano

For For 

F

Click here to read an excerpt from the script.

For more info:

https://www.beatingofwingscollective.com/think-of-me-fred-weasley

Think of Me, Fred Weasley is a two-woman show developed alongside Melissa Dunham, and is adapted from our actual high school and junior high journals, specifically inspired by my teen obsession with the Harry Potter franchise and Melissa’s with the musical The Phantom of the Opera. Through a lens both comedic and heartbreaking, this unique project reckons with the joys and despairs of growing up a girl. 

Production Photos by Flordelino Lagundino

Sisterplay

 

Directed by Anna Miles

Written by Griffin Sharps

Performed by Ashley Butler

A one-act adaptation of Electra in which an unraveling sister surrounds herself in a cacoon of fantasy (or psychosis) as she awaits the long-anticipated return of her mythic older brother. 

Photos by Chassey Bennett

She Wears Her Rage Gently

 

A Photo Series created for Beating of Wings: An Artist Collective exploring the boundaries and expansions of femininity; styled and directed by Anna Miles

She Wore Her Rage Gently is a photo series created, curated, and directed by Anna Miles, with photos taken by Chassey Bennett, for the launch of Beating of Wings: An Artist Collective in 2019. It challenges the societal tendency to diminish aesthetics and activities traditionally deemed as “feminine” by exploring and celebrating the multifaceted nature of femininity through intimate, chaotic, and ethereal imagery. This series invites reflection on how fluid femininity can be soft yet fierce, communal yet individual, grounded in tradition while simultaneously breaking norms. In She Wore Her Rage Gently, femmes refuse to wait until they are given space, instead clawing at it and claiming it for themselves.

 

 


Soft lighting and vintage tones lull the viewer into comfort, only to be disrupted by unruly bodies and confrontational composition. Traditional “feminine” garments are recontextualized as radical: lace and tulle serve not as symbols of fragility, but as armor, disguising unrest beneath elegance. Rage is wrapped in ribbons, fury hidden behind florals. Stereotypical models of sensuality are subverted into the political: intimacy is wielded as protest, softness as strategy. She Wore Her Rage Gently marks a return to primal power, recasting femininity as something that isn’t sterile, but instead raw, wild, and screaming. It reimagines the performance of girlhood as something done not for others’ comfort or entertainment, but as a ritual performed for the sacred self.


The series dismantles the patriarchal myth which conflates softness with weakness and documents the slow, often invisible burn of womanhood — the way rage simmers beneath pleasantries, the ways women have been told to shrink, soothe, and smile, and how they may choose, instead, to erupt. 

When “pretty” is all we’re given, what choice have we but to weaponize it? 

There is an exhaustion that comes from staying still for so long. Poise is poison.
We rise from the rubble, we explode out of the earth. At last we reject the redundancy of roses. We are chaos and creation, we are rage and revolution. We will no longer keep still - our bodies are blurred in their fury.

 They call it hysteria. We call it home.
 

Production Photos by Chris Meissner (Divine)

                        and Carly Bracco (Phoenix Songs)

Storytelling Shows

 

Divine: Songs for a New Moon

Phoenix Songs: A Night of Rebirth and Reclamation

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