BAD ACTRESS I have dubbed my encounters with self-amnesia as “bad acting” – forgetfulness of my own good, and in turn, becoming less alive. I started to take note of these moments and even caught myself resisting new roles by proclaiming “I cannot fill in the blank, because I am a bad actress!” Occasionally, we are short of the skills required to move into our own liveness. On and off of the stage, we are performing, but the question is: How do we become "good" actors? The task of becoming a better actor, staging life as the performance and the performance as the space between, is the work that I am calling BAD ACTRESS.

Like MUSE, BAD ACTRESS is a practice of playing with expressions outside of the lexicon of dance. But, distinct from MUSE, I envisioned assembling a group of actors to join me on stage. Following a quarantine in virtual solitude, I yearned for a cooperative imaginative process where we could play and be seen. So, I inaugurated it by soliciting a group of multi-talented artistic collaborators: Lua Borges (filmmaker), Haley Dennis (writer and movement artist), Leo Chappel (theater artist) and me (bad actress). I believed each individual had a key to an expression I had not yet embodied and the work to follow would be uniquely gratifying through the material of being ourselves together.

Ambitiously, I unsubscribed from coveted artistic vocabulary or genius. What would a process of engaging with the forces of change, rather than virtuosity, in performance look like? I knew flirtation and play had to be embedded throughout. Play became our attachment behavior. In it, we found the defeat of the ego was a victory for the self. We flirted with thinking, moving, and observing performance as a form of being, using the self and trusted other as a renewable resource. We convened in studios, living rooms, the YMCA, and parks. But, the process was the place where we met, like this magnificent blind date, it could work or it couldn't, but so often worked. Together, we cultivated both new and invented theater practices to assist us with investigating persona.

My hope was to create a space that arrived at a more just cohabitation with self and other, to engage with wholeness and recognize the moments we disappear.  This experiment became the material of the first iteration of a live performance at SAIC in April 2023. The wisdom in this practice was also adapted to other projects SIREN, TETHER, touch of recession, and Where’s South?.