Leap in the Dark

Leap in the Dark Productions:

Physical theater pieces with a female gaze

What I love about theater is that the Audience can look anywhere.
The eye is naturally drawn to what is really happening, what speaks to them, which is different for everyone.

Leap in the Dark Productions:
A bi-coastal experimental theater company
Established 2013 by Melissa R. Randel.

Creative collaborations unite visual artists, performing artists, and technicians in the revelation of the human experience, onstage.

Leap in the Dark Mission Statement:

Theater is my passion, revelation of the human condition, my goal.

When an Actor allows the exquisite world of the body
to wrestle with the complexity of the heart,
we cannot look away.

This, to me, is the highest form of entertainment.”

The History
of
Leap in the Dark Productions
"
Living is a form of not being sure,
not knowing what next or how.
The moment you know how,
you begin to die a little.
The artist never entirely knows.
We guess.
We may be wrong,
but we take leap after leap in the dark."

Agnes de Mille
American dancer and choreographer

Compression, constraint,
and

resistance

have been fantastic catalysts for my work. When I was coming up in the arts, no one told you you were good if you weren't. And even if you were good - they still wouldn't tell you. They told you what was wrong and pushed you harder, to make you better. This kept a fire in my belly at all times. The resistance I've met throughout my life, has shaped me irrevocably as an artist - for which I am grateful.

I have also functioned like a weed - if you pull me from one place, I'll pop up somewhere else. When I was five, my mother taught dance in our basement. and in a prescient bit of casting, assigned me the role of Poison Ivy in the Dance of the Flower Fairies. I wanted to be The Rose. But it was an important, early lesson, training for the life I would lead. Weeds are tenacious and resilient and I have had to be both.

Working in academia was a forge for Leap in the Dark Productions. In the cracks and crevices between semesters, I returned to acting in other people's plays, and when that wasn't enough, I began writing and generating my own work.

The premiere of The Hat in the 2013 NY International Fringe Festival launched Leap in the Dark Productions.

Leap in the Dark Production Collaborators:
SITI Company - SITI Lab Series
Production Design - David John Attyah
Jazz trombonist - David Gibson
Drummer - David Anderson
Composer - Bill Fulton
Costume Design - Jesselynn Desmond, Fred Lloyd,
Graphic Design - Tanya Flemister
Lighting Design - Brandon Baruch
Production Stage Manager - Ashley Regan