Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dee Dee Batteast. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Dee Dee , appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

In the Fall of 2016 I decided to leave my tenure track position as a full-time professor at big state university and pursue acting full-time. At the time I submitted my letter of resignation we were about two months away from the presidential election. I had been teaching full time in central Indiana for 4 years. I was hopeful that by the time I packed my car and moved to Chicago that we would have our first female president. However I wasn’t as naive as some of my colleagues who announced arrogantly whenever the topic came up “that 45 was never going to win”. Unlike them, I knew and understood white America. As a six foot tall black woman living in centra Indiana I was highly visible and becoming increasingly uneasy as I drove past the flags and signs on the lawn. I could see it coming (the election results) if anything I was in denial, but along side that denial was a voice screaming GET OUT! I knew it was time to go but I was scared. I was afraid of staying and I was afraid to leave. I didn’t have a plan. I only knew I was starting to feel trapped. At the time of my resignation I was the only black professor in the entire College of Fine Arts (Music, Dance, Theatre and visual arts) at my university. I still don’t have the emotional bandwidth or energy to talk about the toll that took on my body. There were beautiful moments of community, art and teaching breakthroughs and then there were other moments.

When the time came to leave, it may have looked like a “choice” from the outside but I knew it was necessity. I could feel myself disappearing my joy, curiosity and energy was in danger. As in artist I need all three of those things to survive. If you take the artists out of me I don’t know who’s left and I hope I never meet her. I was also lucky in that I was old enough to have witnessed friends, family and mentors become “trapped”. I was old enough to know people who had been trapped for a decade – and who had apparently accepted that the trapped place was now home. So with no savings and a dangerous dictator being sworn into the highest office in the land I packed my 2010 Toyota and moved to Chicago and started all over.

There have been many highs and lows since I left full-time academia. There have been lot of tense financial bear traps. And I have never regretted the decision not even once. Everyday I ask myself would you rather have security of freedom and the answer comes back the same. I choose freedom. The big “leap” continues to teach me the same lesson over and over again. Choose yourself. You are personally responsible for your own happiness. You are responsible for protecting your art. You are allowed to do anything and every thing necessary to protect yourself and your art. Fear is a tool to keep you standing still. Fear of what other people think, fear of failure, fear of making a mistake. Whenever possible I examine how much fear has seeped into my decision making and I try to evaluate the decision ignoring any factors that are fear based. I’m not always successful at eliminating fear based decision making but I’m better every year at the work of separating facts from fear, And that work is worth it. The work of saying fear will not control me, putting that work into action in 2016 has forever changed me. I am a better artist, a better teacher and a better human all around for the work I have started doing (and continue to do) around fear, .F$%k Fear.

Dee Dee , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I did my first play when I was twelve years old and I was hooked. When I was 11 my father passed from a massive heart-attack and I really spent the majority of my time after that in the house. My grandmother around that time decided that she wanted to audition for her first play. She was in her late 60’s I wasn’t properly a teenager yet – but she dragged me along hoping to get me out of the house and it worked. We did our first play together and I never stopped.

This also means I don’t ever remember making a conscious decision to commit my life to theatre. I just remember that being in a theatre was the first time after my father’s death that I gave myself persimmon to smile and or care about something deeply. I didn’t have a word for it then but what I found during my first play was community and service. I didn’t want to be a “star” I wanted to be in service to something outside of myself. I enjoyed spending time in a room with other people are sorting the same problem, the problem of what it looks like to be human.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My goal or mission in my personal creative journey is to expand creative spaces to look and sound more like the world we live in. The truth is that the theatre world is still incredibly white, thin, straight, and cis. And sure, theatre is trying. We are all very good doing the work of saying “we are trying” and following up with examples. We are less successful at actually implementing meaningful and lasting change.

So my goal is to expand the way our stories look and sound. I want more larger bodies. I want more queer bodies. I want more Black and Brown and Asian American and Pacific Islanders in the art we all consume as a whole. I believe that the purpose of art is to expand our empathy and understanding of one another. We care about the people in the story. We should all be more worried bout the fact that 70% of the people we are asked to care about all look the same. Im interesting in expanding and diversifying the classics. I grew up on the same education as my white friends and counterparts. I loved Shakespeare, and Chekov and the Greeks. I love them because they were all I was taught aside from the few black plays offered to me outside of “A Raisin in the Sun” and a couple of August Wilson pieces mixed into the curriculum. I also loved the classics because they are big and beautiful. I never paid much attention to the fact that I was not repressed in them. I just loved them and I learned how they moved and I saw myself in them. I saw my friends in them. My brain naturally did the work of seeing where I fit, and where my friends find into the worlds I was learning about. I am now dedicated in my work of doing that for others. I do it when I’m teaching and when I’m directing and when I’m acting. I firmly believe we have to start watching and caring about people who don’t look like us. We are an empathetically deficient people in the US. I believe art is empathy building work. I urge everyone, specifically if you consider yourself to be an artist to self examine the stories you’re consuming. Does everyone look like you? If so why? How do you think this affecting your brain?

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

That anxiety and my ego have nothing to so with the work of storytelling. I had to learn that bullying myself wouldn’t make my work better. I folded both of these un-learned-lessons into two separate personal mantras:

#1 .That’s not the work

#2 If I worked today, I win.

I learned both of these lessons while in academia. The first one I learned while teaching. You can learn a lot about yourself while teaching others. If you’re doing it right you don’t end up teaching them what you know, but rather what you wish someone had taught you when you were in the same place in your training.

That’s not the work – is a phrase that I coined while teaching because I was seeing a lot of anxiety in my students. I recognized that same anxiety in myself and my work when I was younger and even now. I would get this terrible, handwringing, I can’t catch my breath feeling that would flood my body every time I stood up to share a scene or monologue in class. I told myself that’s all just apart of acting. The anxiety that my director or teacher didn’t like me or that my scene partner wasn’t memorized and was going to make us look bad, I told myself that’s all apart of acting. I started to hear these “excuses” from my students while they were working often before they even started the work. It was all stuff getting in the way of the real work. in the end the work is simple its you in a room with a story. The rest exists, and we allow it to occupy so much time and energy because it’sitsa way to avoid the real work. It’s a way for fear to trap your progress. I know why it’s there and I know that it’s natural. I also know that it has nothing to do with the art. I try and teach my students to recognize the feeling and politely ask it to step aside to they can get to the work. So whenever they brought their anxiety to my doorstep, I hate this play, sorry I’m tired, or my scene partner couldn’t meet with me this week, and those things become bigger than the story I just say, “Okay, but that’s not the work”. And we get back to the business of storytelling.

If I worked today I win –

This came from a moment I had when I was in grad school. When you’re in graduate acting training you have to do this thing called Juries. “Juries” is a kind of round table check-in that you have at the end of each semester. You sit in a room with all of your faculty members and they give you feedback on how they think your training is going. One day in class several months before juries we had a guest artist come to class and they asked our class to volunteer to stand up and work Shakespeare monologues. The week before the guest artist arrives our class had all been chastised for our reluctant participation in class. We were slow to raise our hands. We didn’t seem excited to train. So the day the guest artists / Shakespeare expert showed up and asked for volunteers I stood up terrified (that’s not the work), and proceeded to deliver a pretty mediocre Constance from King John. Immediately after I finished I was flooded with shame. I kept thinking “I’m better than that” and “I’m totally gonna hear about this in Juries” I went and got two beers at the theatre bar, and somewhere in the middle of my 2nd beer /shame spiral a tiny voice entered my mind and it said “If it’s gonna be this painful every time you work – you’re gonna quit.” I realized that I was in training and if I was perfect every time I stood up to work I would be Viola Davis already. I decided that day at Linda’s Bar (now defunct but much beloved bar in Chapel Hill NC) that if I was the one who volunteered to do a thing as vulnerable and complicated as Shakespeare at 11am on a Tuesday that I owed NO ONE an apology. I don’t have to apologize for not being perfect in the work. I just have to be willing to work and have the courage to stand up. If I worked today I win, period. And when my Juries rolled around it was the first thing that the table of exclusively white men threw out. Why would you do that? You’re better than that. And I told them my new philosophy and there was silence for a moment and then one of them just said “Okay, can’t argue with that.” And in that moment I felt this incredible power and agency of my art and I gave myself permission to hold on and whenever possible to expand that feeling.

If I worked today I win.

Contact Info:

• Website: N/A
• Instagram: @deedeebatteast
• Facebook: DeeDee Batteast
• Linkedin: N/A
• Twitter: N/A
• Other: I would like to apologize to the readers for behaving like a 80 year old woman who has zero to little virtual footprint. I’ve always been a proud analog type human, however in the year 2024 I know better and I will do better. I need to do better. My brand is “human” but I can and will find a way to show up more virtually. Today is sadly not that day.

Image Credits

Tyler Core should be credited with the 1st and 3rd phot0