MUSE  Starting at age five, I trained in dance six days a week. With more schooling in dancing than a doctor has in doctoring, being the inspiration and vessel for a choreographer's vision was instinctive. As a self-fragmented adult, I began searching for my own muse—an object of desire to fill me with beautiful notions and drive to create.

In an attempt at finding a muse myself, I started to examine how we accept, exploit, romanticize, and consume the woman muse. In 2018, I performed a multidisciplinary solo titled MUSE—the manifestation of questioning, researching, constructing, then embodying archetypes of the muse, spiraling into her eventual psychoic unraveling (à la Giselle’s mad scene).

Much of the work's staging centered on how the gaze and projections of others affect one's humanity. What creates this irritable image of the feminine, and how organic is it actually? I began to believe that the muse , more than being real, is a myth built from man's psychotic segmentation.

At MUSE's climax, I invited the audience to vote on their ideal woman and became her, seducing them into participating in the objectification the piece critiqued. I summoned my creators onto the stage drew a red lipstick target on my body, and gestured for them to throw marshmallows at me. At the height of the piece's comedy, I descended into something hysteric, revolting, and erotic.

MUSE's end came with the realization that outgrowing certain archetypes could happen through occupying my multiplicity.  Thus, was born BAD ACTRESS.

Filmed by Samuel Kohlhaas at Links Hall in Chicago, IL