UC San Diego

DEEP ROLES is a thesis exhibition that investigates performance as both subject and inheritance. At its center is A Doll's House, a 23-minute documentary film in which I direct my parents, both former actors, as they return to the Henrik Ibsen play they performed together thirty years prior, using the script as a starting point for examining our family dynamic, and the distance between former and currently performed roles. Drawing on psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou's theories of "limit consent" and "exigent sadism," I argue that discomfort and risk are the primary strategies in my practice; notably in the documentary process itself, where the act of filming becomes a form of exigent sadism that imperils all parties in the service of transformation. I situate these works within a broader inquiry into the mechanics of liveness, improvisation, and scripts – both theatrical and behavioral – to think through how they structure our encounters with one another. My training in clown, specifically through the pedagogical practice of via negativa, informs my aesthetic sensibility throughout, as does group relations theory, which illuminates how power, projection, and authority are negotiated within any working group. The works of visual and performance artists Andrea Fraser and Nikita Gale, both of whom engage group relations as method and aesthetic, serve as key points of reference in my research, alongside filmmaker William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm as a predecessor for meta-theatrical, destabilizing documentary practice. Through this constellation of psychoanalysis, performance theory, and autobiographical inquiry, DEEP ROLES asks what it means to perform for, with, and against the people that came before you.