There is a kind of waiting that looks a lot like work.
You rehearse. You prepare. You make yourself available. You tell yourself the right person will see what you can do, and then everything will begin.
I believe in preparation. I also know that being ready and being chosen are two very different things.
I once put it this way: I don’t have the luxury of waiting on someone to write the perfect role for TERRANCE DEAN. Opportunity is what you make it, and it’s imperative that I make mine.
That thought was never about doing everything alone. The most exciting work I have done has involved other people bringing their imagination into the room. It was about refusing to let the absence of an invitation become the end of the story.
When you work across music, acting, writing and performance, people often want a single answer to a simple question: What are you?
I understand why. A neat answer is easier to introduce. Easier to place. Easier to sell.
But I am interested in what happens when the answer is allowed to change shape. A song can lead to a scene. A scene can become an essay. An image can say something I could not get across onstage. None of those things asks me to stop being the others.
The challenge is not simply getting through a door. It is having enough room on the other side to be fully present.
Sometimes you find that room. Sometimes you make it with the people who understand what you are trying to do. Sometimes you have to begin before you can explain the whole thing to anyone else.
That beginning can be small. A page. A rehearsal. A photograph. A conversation with somebody who sees an opening where you saw a wall.
And then another door opens.
I want to keep making work that gives me somewhere to go next. Work that can hold the theatrical and the intimate, the beautiful and the strange, the parts of me that do not fit neatly into a single role.
Maybe the role was never waiting for me to find it.
Maybe I had to write it.
— TERRANCE DEAN