Rough & Tumble Productions
Philadelphia-based | Co-Directed by Lillian Mae Ransijn and Dylan Smythe
Rough & Tumble Productions creates gut-punching performances wrapped in glitter and grief. Our creative practice is rooted in the belief that the body tells the most honest and immediate story—particularly when exploring emotions that mainstream American culture often suppresses or oversimplifies. We prioritize authenticity over comfort, asking "Beyond social conditioning, what are you REALLY feeling?" while maintaining playfulness and wonder.
Rough & Tumble is the primary laboratory for my long-form artistic research, allowing me to investigate embodied storytelling over time—how physical risk, consent, humor, and vulnerability operate in performance. This research directly informs my work as an intimacy coordinator, movement director, and educator.
Selected Works
Make Bank (2023)
An immersive, site-specific collaboration with world-renowned Philadelphia muralist Meg Saligman, occupying the Manufacturers' National Bank building in Old City (closed to the public since 1985). Audiences entered a transformed space—the den, cave, and sewer of Saligman's newest four-story mural—and moved through interactive art-making stations, video installations, and encounters with zany characters including "The Teller" and "The Butoh Financier." The work explored the intersection of art-making and currency, labor and desire, fetish and finance, through physical comedy, choreographed chaos, and bijouterie-burlesque. Philadelphia Fringe Festival / FringeArts.
Magic Trash Day: Down in the Dumps (2023–present)
A 40-minute physical theater experience for young audiences (ages 4–10) and their families. The show follows Terry, a child navigating big feelings, who meets a blue-nosed clown named Sadness. Together, they journey to The Dump—a magical realm where discarded feelings become treasures and difficult emotions transform into spectacular adventures. Developed through workshops with children at PlayArts in Philadelphia, the production uses minimal dialogue and strong visual storytelling, with trash-art design by Mehgan Abdel-Moneim and original music by Dot Rose Levine. The physical vocabulary emerged directly from how children actually embody and process their emotions, creating an immersive experience that speaks to young people's full emotional lives with warmth, wisdom, and wonderful absurdity. Cannonball Festival / Urban Movement Arts.
Good Grief! (2022–present)
The culmination of five years of artistic research across Philadelphia, San Diego, Baltimore, and Atlanta. This dance-theater work premiered as Rough & Tumble: Pickled Peaches and Herring at the 2022 Philadelphia Fringe Festival and has since toured to Le Mondo in Baltimore and Providence Fringe Festival. The piece fuses contemporary dance and physical theater to explore inheritance, family myth, and bodily memory—transforming both makers and audiences by making the unbearable bearable through communal witness and delight.
Rough & Tumble: Show & Tell (2018)
A dance-theater solo directed by Francesca Montanile, exploring my relationship to pleasure and my mother's body. Philadelphia SoLOwfest.
Rough & Tumble (2019)
A 7-minute dance-theater solo distilled for the 2018 version for the ONE Movement Project's tri-city collaboration (Atlanta-San Diego-Philadelphia). Wearing a sequined green romper and set to Missy Elliott and Lamb's "I'm Better," I embody what I call the "snake in the grass"—putting my grief and sexuality in direct relationship with the audience. Through movement and voiceover, I share my perception of my mother's dying body and ask whether grief can be something powerful, feral, and unapologetic. The work builds to physical exhaustion before breaking into stillness— my thoughts about my mother's last moments known. Circadium (Philadelphia), UC San Diego, West End Performing Arts Center (Atlanta).
Good Grief Cabaret (Annual, 2022–present)
An annual cabaret fundraiser and community gathering that transforms grief into celebration. Hosted by drag and burlesque artists and produced in partnership with Threshold Collective and MAAS, the Cabaret features Philadelphia's finest performers across drag, cabaret, burlesque, comedy, dance, poetry, and clown—alongside a silent auction, live raffle, and partnerships with care practitioners like the Threshold Collective.
This event creates space for processing loss and remembrance while celebrating "ephemerality, connection, elegy, eroticism, and transformational delight." Come lavishly languish with us, ole chum.
Ongoing Research: Grief Snake Skin
Grief Snake Skin is an ongoing interdisciplinary research project on the perception of skin and how grief lives in the body over time. Through performance, installation, and physical practice, the work asks how shedding, repetition, and transformation can be ritualized in contemporary performance contexts.