Responding
Responding, as I have come to understand it, is not a passive act. It is an interpretive practice shaped by identity, positionality, experience, and the structures surrounding both the artistic work and the person encountering it. Meaning does not move in a straight line from artist to audience. An artist can make deliberate choices about what a work holds and how it is communicated, but once that work enters the world and is witnessed, its meaning is also shaped by the experiences, identities, assumptions, and contexts of those receiving it. Learning to attend carefully to that space between intention and interpretation has become central to my development as both an artist and a scholar. That development is visible from two distinct but interconnected vantage points in my work: as an artist reflecting critically on how my own work conveyed meaning, and as a researcher evaluating how an actor constructs meaning from their embodied artistic experience.
I encountered this tension directly in a performance I created for Cross-Cultural Awareness for Creative Arts Therapy and Arts Education at NYU in May 2022. The work emerged from a professional experience I was actively navigating and explored themes of power, hierarchy, compromise, cost, and collateral. Because I wanted the audience to experience the complexity and competing levels of consciousness I was holding, I layered music, dialogue, visual art, text, and shifts in environment rather than relying on a single mode of expression. The form was not separate from what I wanted to communicate. The artistic choices were themselves carrying meaning.
What became more significant, however, was what happened once the performance no longer belonged entirely to me. As I performed, I found myself watching the audience receive the work, describing the experience afterward as though they were the performance and I was the witness. During the discussion that followed, I became acutely aware of the distance between what I had placed inside the work and what individual audience members chose to see. Some interpretations surprised me. Others frustrated me. I began questioning how knowing me personally affected what my peers perceived, whether an audience can ever fully separate art from the artist, and how much responsibility I carried for what they did or did not understand.
My initial impulse was to imagine what I might change. I considered extending the performance, introducing a future version of myself, or making the trajectory more explicit. Yet I was equally concerned that doing so might make the work more palatable rather than more meaningful. That distinction has stayed with me. Responding to artistic work does not require that every viewer arrive at the same interpretation, nor does an unexpected response necessarily indicate a failure of communication. This experience taught me to recognize the audience not as the final destination of artistic meaning, but as an active participant in its construction. [See Appendix: Performance Reflection]
My more recent work in qualitative inquiry gave me a new way to examine this process of interpretation. In Mini Assignment D, completed for RESCH-GE 2140: Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Professor Heddy Lahmann in April 2026, I used reflexive thematic analysis to examine an interview with a professional actor and educator reflecting on their experiences navigating actor training environments in higher education. Rather than treating the participant’s words as information to be simply reported, I examined patterns of meaning across the interview and developed five distinct themes: institutional normalization of harm, racialized experience in training, the absence of structured well-being support, the distinction between discomfort and harm, and self-medication as coping. My analysis of that interview echoed what I had first encountered while witnessing my audience in 2022. In both instances, I was attending carefully to what was being offered, examining the meanings that emerged through the encounter, and recognizing my own role in the interpretive process.
What that process made clear is that interpretation is never neutral. The person interpreting brings a history, an identity, a set of values, and a disciplinary perspective to every encounter with artistic or human experience. My positionality statement for Mini Assignment D names this explicitly. My identities as an actor, therapist, and educator shaped what I noticed in the participant’s account and what I understood as significant. Rather than attempting to erase those perspectives, reflexive analysis required me to identify them and remain transparent about how they shaped the meaning I constructed from the data. That transparency became part of the rigor of the interpretive process. [See Appendix: Mini Assignment D]
Across these two experiences, what I am demonstrating as a responding practitioner is not simply that I can receive and react to artistic work. It is that I understand interpretation itself as an active, situated, and identity-informed practice. Whether I am witnessing an audience construct meaning from an artistic offering or analyzing an actor’s account of their embodied artistic experience, I am attending to what exists in the space between what is offered and what is received. Meaning is shaped there, through form, context, identity, experience, and the position of the person interpreting. That understanding is foundational to my culminating study, which asks how actors themselves describe and make meaning of their well-being across the rehearsal and performance process.