HWS News
11 November 2025 • Alums Savard '15, MAT '16 Performs Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome
Nicolas Shannon Savard ‘15, MAT '16 delivered a one-night-only performance of their solo show Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome.
HWS Theatre welcomed alumni artist-scholar Nicolas Shannon Savard '15, MAT '16 for a one-night-only performance of their solo show, Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome on Tuesday, Nov. 4 in McDonald Theatre in the Gearan Center for the Performing Arts.
Part storytelling, part recruitment meeting, part puppet show, all heart and biting wit, the performance of Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome was a comedic takedown of anti-LGBTQ politics in 2025. The solo show blended jokes and physical metaphor to poke the holes in the logic underneath the misinformation surrounding trans identity and community from the headlines to the legislature. Much like the transgender community, the show didn’t fit neatly into one box. The storytelling was once hilarious and heart-wrenching and has been described by past audience members as “the softest sucker punch,” “so truthful, so deeply resonant,” and “engaging, educational, and emotionally moving.” It’s at once a celebration of community and identity and a battle cry. In a culture where transgender lives are routinely made invisible, this is at once one 20-something genderqueer person’s story and the story of so many others.
"So many of my students who attended Nicolas's show commented how different it was from other theatrical performances they had seen," says Professor of Theatre Chris Woodworth. "At the end of the performance, audience members were invited to write words of encouragement to trans, nonbinary and genderqueer folks. I witnessed Nicolas read these cards as we cleaned up the theatre at the end of the evening. Seeing how moved they were by the messages left by our HWS community, I knew that this had been the exact right moment to bring this show back to campus."
Nicolas Shannon Savard (they/them) is a queer-trans multidisciplinary artist-scholar, educator, and the host of Gender Euphoria, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons. Recent episodes have featured Professor of Theatre H. May and Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectional Justice Joshua Bastian Cole-Kurz. They currently work as a front-of-house lead at the Little Kim restaurant in Ann Arbor, Mich. Savard earned their Ph.D. in Theatre from The Ohio State University (2021), studying applied theatre and queer and feminist theory, history and performance practice. As an educator and director, Savard aims to cultivate spaces and pedagogies that prioritize equity, accessibility and accountability and that draw upon the lived experience and cultural wealth each participant brings into the room. Their pedagogical practice-as-research employs digital humanities methodologies to design accessible, adaptable, collaborative learning experiences for theatre history, writing and seminar classrooms; the rehearsal studio; and beyond. Their writing and other media on solo and collaborative devised performance, disability aesthetics and LGBTQ-inclusive pedagogies have been published in the Journal of Consent Based Performance, Theatre Topics, and Texas Theatre Journal.
Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome was sponsored by HWS Theatre, with additional support from the Office of Academic and Faculty Affairs and Alumni Alumnae Relations.
