A S.O.B. Story

Another summer is in the air. Pride is around the corner. A Summer of Bravery, Summer of Bedazzlement, a Summer of Belonging.

In the 1980s and 90s, many of us lived in a strange double exposure. Like many other groups of people, we existed, but not in the stories our own culture told about itself. Mainstream film and television rarely reflected our lives unless we were jokes, victims, cautionary tales, or coded shadows at the edge of the frame. Meanwhile, outside the screen, people were disappearing. Friends and lovers got sick.

Teachers lost jobs. Restaurant workers were dismissed. Apartments emptied. Possessions were sold; or burned. Families fractured under silence and terror, or shouting in the hospital to cut life support. Send the source of their shame to hell.

So, I became a bit of an S.O.B. Suspicious of bosses. Suspicious of binaries. Suspicious of belonging that required obedience. Son of a bitch, perhaps, but because I had seen what politeness and belonging will lie about. What it erases.

I came of age artistically inside the aethetics of what I thought was escape. Performance art, the avant garde, and live art were not hobbies to me. They felt like survival technologies. They were among the few spaces where a body could appear publicly without asking permission to be simplified. Presence itself was meaningful. To stand in front of another person honestly, with every contradiction intact, carried a latent authority.

I trained across many facets of the Western canon; Stanislavsky, Grotowski, physical theatre, devised work, screen acting. I was also pulled toward intercultural performance, toward forms that approached identity less as a posession and more as a field of relations, rituals, and exchanges. Part of me wanted to disappear into those forms. To dissolve everything that had become associated with fear, scrutiny, and social judgment. But strangely, through that very lens, I found myself looking right back; clearly.

What I treasured in performance art was the permission to be solid and porous. Political without delivering slogans. A body holds history, grief, sexuality, ritual, exhaustion, absurdity, tenderness, and violence at once. Live art taught me that identity is not a polished monument. You don't get one because it's your right. They don't come in boxes or from a "them" you invented just as they have invented you. Identities are unstable, negotiated, unfinished. Tested and revealed. To yourself (usually last).

That understanding shaped all my work in acting and actor training. I became interested in performance as revelation. Not confession. Emergence. The actor does not adopt or “play” at being a character. It isn't pretend to me. The role is a temporary structure through which unseen parts of the self become visible.

I suspect most people carry some version of this feeling. That there are aspects of themselves they have never fully encountered because those parts were never reflected back safely, never named, never witnessed clearly enough to come into focus, or acknowledged.

This thing, to me, is one of the deepest possibilities of performance; not display, but mutual recognition. Reconciliation, maybe? A moment where someone sees something in you that you can't keep on the leash but you also have not entirely understood it yet. Dare to let slip the hounds of war. As it turns out, the little bitch was telling the truth all along.