Jay Ruby founded The Carpetbag Brigade as an ensemble physical theater in the small town of Prescott, Arizona in 1998: the company relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004, and is now co-directed by Kristen Greco. Performing both indoors and outdoors, the company's work fosters a sense of psychic intimacy through mythic stage images, poetic dialogue and otherworldly spectacle.

Since 2002, Carpetbag has been best known for its acrobatic stilt dramas. The company has evolved the stilt medium to incorporate pioneering new partnering techniques, and draws inspiration from such disparate physical vocabularies as Butoh, circus and Contact Improvisation.

The Carpetbag Brigade’s commitment to presenting work in both urban and rural environments has brought the company to such diverse venues as the Ford Theater in Hollywood, the Hoopa Indian Reservation, the Lincoln Center's outdoor summer performance series, the InFringIng Dance festival in Nanaimo, BC Canada, and the Universal Forum of Cultures in Monterrey, Mexico.