exit strategy
exit strategy is a New York City-based performance collective investigating and challenging the role of live performance in the contemporary world. Drawing on the founding members’ respective backgrounds in dance, martial arts, visual composition, and Grotowski-lineage physical theatre, exit strategy’s work pursues a state of primal, kinetic presence in performers and audience alike-often blurring the line between the two. Our work challenges the conventional expectation that audience members are passive witnesses to, not active participants in, events unfolding around them. Our process is heavily image-based, non-linear, sometimes nonsensical, with the goal of creating a world that bypasses the logic brain and works directly on the audience’s subconscious. exit strategy’s past and current productions explore themes of surveillance, conformity, discomfort, danger, humor, cruelty and our ability to hold all of these realities simultaneously as one. Some feedback we’ve gotten on past work (that we loved!): “hysterically nice,” “wonderfully unnerving,” and “so stressful I wanted to leave.”
Our Team
MaryKate Glenn (she/her) is a New York City-based maker and performer, coming to her practice from backgrounds in acting, psychoanalytic theory, and classical ballet. As a performer, she pursues primal, authentic impulse through the blending of the full physical, psychic and vocal instrument. As a maker, her current research investigates the absurd, the uncanny, and the assumed passivity of the viewer theatrical space. Previous collaborations include: La Mama ETC, Prototype Festival, Beth Morrison Projects, Transport Group, November Theater, Great River Shakespeare, Shakespeare in the Woods, and The Useless Room. She is a founding member of the experimental collective exit strategy, which recently debuted the performance piece How to Win a Gameshow at the Broedplaats Bouw Arts Center and 4bid Gallery at OT301 in Amsterdam, NL. They then continued development with the support of Target Margin in Sunset Park. She currently works bicoastally in the US, and abroad. BA Theology/Philosophy, Fordham Rose Hill Honors College. MFA CalArts. marykateglenn.com
Rupert Krüger (he/him) is an actor and movement director based in Brooklyn, NY. He comes to his work from a background in dance, martial arts and theater. His work explores the meeting point between the narrative of performance and the structure of martial arts, with a focus on mythic storytelling and durational performance. His current piece, Sailors, premiered this past January at Physfest NYC as a work-in-progress. Rupert holds Nidan (2nd Degree Black Belt) in Goju Ryu Karate, and is a practicing Aikidoka (5th kyu) under Sensei Ryūgan (6th dan). BFA Acting Syracuse Univ. rupertkruger.com
Jane Skapek is a theater director, filmmaker and installation artist who creates surreal and elegiac pieces to interrogate the space between physical and digitally imagined reality. Using archived and historical images, live camera, performance and dance, their work centers queer bodies and themes of constructed space. They have developed work in New York City at The Brick, the Tank, Ars Nova Antfest, and Target Margin, among others. Selected Associate and Assistant director credits include two national tours of The Lightning Thief, Jasper (off-Broadway, Signature Theatre), and Angels in America (Broadway, 2018). Skapek received two Fellowship awards during their MFA program at The New School: the Dough Hughes Directing Fellowship, and the Presidential Scholarship of Merit. In 2024, Skapek won best director at the LA International Horror Short Film Festival for their film directorial debut “Close to Home”, shot internationally in Panama. Most recently, their performance piece, How to Win a Gameshow (formerly SEMA) debuted internationally at the Broedplaats Bouw Arts Center, in Amsterdam. Currently, they are directing a queer, drag adaptation of Romeo + Juliet at The Voxel in Baltimore.