Meet The Company
HELEN GOODRUMExecutive Director
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Helen Goodrum serves as the Executive Director of The Carpetbag Brigade Physical Theater, bringing to the company a globally informed career as a performer, choreographer, educator, and creative leader. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honors) in Dance from Roehampton University in London, UK, and has cultivated a dynamic professional path across the fields of dance, circus arts, and physical theater.Helen has contributed her expertise to organizations including Crimson Coast Dance (Canada) as Production Assistant, Earthdance (USA) as Development Assistant, and the Margot Fonteyn Academy of Ballet, where she served as Deputy Artistic Director. Her early introduction to stilt performance sparked a deep exploration into the intersections of dance, aerial arts, and acrobatics, an inquiry she furthered through training at Greentop Circus (UK).
Internationally recognized for her innovation in acrobatic stilt dancing, Helen has been a driving force in expanding contemporary stilt-based movement vocabulary. She is a two-time recipient of the AIDF Arts Council Grant, supporting her ongoing research and creative development. As a longtime core member of The Carpetbag Brigade, Helen not only performs and collaborates on major projects but also shapes the company’s organizational vision and cultural leadership through her role as Executive Director. Helen co-directs and teaches at the Global Stilt Congress, an international convergence of stilt practitioners dedicated to training, exchange, and artistic evolution. Her teaching and movement philosophy draw from extensive somatic and therapeutic training: she is a certified Rolfing® Structural Integration Practitioner. Her movement perspective is further informed by her long-term engagement with the Axis Syllabus International Research Community, her background in Contact Improvisation, and her work as a circus aerialist and acrobat. When not on tour or in the studio, Helen runs her health and wellness practice, Artful Healthcare, in Prescott, Arizona. |
JAY
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As founder of The Carpetbag Brigade (TCB), Jay Ruby has shaped the company’s artistic ethos since its origins in Prescott, Arizona in 1997. Under his stewardship, TCB hosted the free, all-ages festival Tsunami on the Square, evolved into an international touring ensemble based in San Francisco, California. Renowned for its pioneering use of acrobatic stilting in nontraditional venues, TCB’s distinctive style reflects Jay’s integration of acrobatic stilts, butoh, contact improvisation, and physical theater.During his tenure guiding the company’s creative trajectory, Jay facilitated the development of its major touring works, including Mudfire and The Vanishing Point, which toured throughout North and South America and Europe across a wide variety of cultural festivals.
Jay has led collaborations and conducted workshops with numerous performance companies, including Flamchen, NaCl, Hand2Mouth Theatre, Sojourner Theater, Wise Fool, Bright Night International, Crimson Coast Dance Society, and Pandoum Theater. He organized and presided over TCB’s four-month residency at UNESCO’s Universal Forum of the Cultures in Monterrey, Mexico in 2007, and continues to convene intensive seminars to share and transmit the core practices of TCB’s work. He currently supports The Carpetbag Brigade as a volunteer and continues to contribute to its creative community. Jay holds a B.A. in Psychology from Antioch College and studied theater in Berlin at Theater Zerbrochene Fenster, later continuing his training with Roberta Carreri of Odin Teatret in Holstebro, Denmark. His artistic education is further enriched by work with David Clarkson of Stalker Theater, Diego Piñon (Ritual Butoh Mexicano), Contact Improvisation pioneers Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith, and travels exploring ritual and performance traditions in Bali and Mexico. Jay practices Ashtanga Yoga and Vipassana meditation. |
ALICIA GERSTEINPerformer
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Alicia Gerstein first learned how to walk on stilts as a child at Bread & Puppet Theater, and much later began exploring techniques combining physical theater, acrobatics, and dance, with Nemcatacoa Teatro (Bogota, Colombia) and The Carpetbag Brigade. She performs as part of both of these companies, in Colombia and the US. She has been a puppeteer for many years with Bread & Puppet Theater (Glover, VT), Great Small Works (Brooklyn, NY), El Teatro Indigena de la Sierra Tarahumara (Chihuahua, Mexico), and other puppet theaters. Alicia also works as a teaching artist in public schools in New York City, where she lives.
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CAMILO ANDRES JIMENEZ MORALESPerformer
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Camilo Andrés Jiménez Morales began his artistic career in 2001, with a community artistic creation process with Kerigma in Colombia. He joined the Colombian stilting ensemble Nemcatacoa Teatro in 2011. He studied Theater Direction at University, which allows him to understand the dramatic construction of the body and image, preparing him to become the Artistic Director of Nemcatacoa Teatro for the last 5 productions in Colombia. His focus is theater from the body and movement; he has developed gymnastics and parkour training over the past several years to be able to adopt movements from these disciplines to stilts. Camilo lives in Bogota Colombia and has performed with Carpetbag Brigade international for the past decade.
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© Carpetbag Brigade Physical Theater
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