Looking at this rehearsal documentation, what strikes me is how Astrid understands that authenticity isn’t some precious thing you excavate from your soul like a goddamn archaeological dig. It’s messier than that. It’s the collision between what you’re trying to say and the violence of actually saying it.
Her piece traffics in that space between performance and confession, and refuses to apologize for the discomfort. There’s something almost pornographic about watching someone work through their own mythology in real time: not pornographic in content, but in that raw, “should I be seeing this” intimacy. And Antoine Hunter gets that the most honest thing you can do is acknowledge the frame, admit you’re constructing something, that every gesture toward truth is also a kind of theater.
There’s a refusal to let either side win. Not life, not theater. The work lives in the friction, in that grinding uncertainty. It’s the kind of thing that makes you uncomfortable because it won’t give you the catharsis you think you paid for.
The vulnerability isn’t in what’s revealed but in the attempt itself, the spectacle of someone trying to locate meaning in the performed gesture. Astrid doesn’t ask whether we can distinguish between the authentic and the artificial. She assumes we can’t, and then asks what the hell we do with that failure.
The real transgression here is honesty about dishonesty, performance about performance. It’s a meta-exercise that never feels merely academic because there’s too much at stake, too much sweat and doubt in the room. This is someone wrestling with questions that don’t have answers, doing it publicly, making you watch. That takes guts. That takes everything.
