For Chalk Circles, LA based artist Emily Mast presents a new performance in collaboration with Mikaal Sulaiman, a former actor trained in Lecoq technique. Mast uses the duration of the exhibition to develop a performance with Mikaal in which he recounts and performs his own personal history with performance. Sulaiman will retrospectively and subjectively consider his own career inside the institution of theater and share it with the audience. Three iterations of the piece will be presented: one at the earliest stages of its inception, one halfway through, and one “ finished” piece at the end of the exhibition. In this project, Mast “directs” Sulaiman in the telling of his own life’s story. She functions as an ethnographer and biographer interested in learning about what theater means to someone who has had success with it and pointedly chooses to refuse it.