Alice Theobald: Perfection is a Lie (An Ode to your Potential)

8 Mar-5 Jul 2025

Overview

How do you know when you are ‘living your truth’? What does ‘living your best life’ really mean? What influences our definitions of success and failure, informing our future aspirations and personal goals?

Contemporary society relentlessly directs us towards self-optimisation, with the promise that by being our best selves we will find a route to authenticity, success, and happiness, a ‘journey’ that we can document and share online. But what does it actually mean to ‘ be yourself’ when you aren’t always sure who or what that self is? What influences our views on the kinds of lives we consider satisfying or successful and what impact does the pressure to achieve them have on our collective psyche? Rather than placing value on success and professionalism, what could we gain by embracing failure and amateurism and simply allowing ourselves to be happy that we are ‘good-enough’?

During her time as an Incidental Artist at Eastside Projects Alice has been building on research and ideas around authenticity, exploring how we understand the gap between professional and amateur, success and failure. Interested in the politics involved in borrowing from different disciplines and cultural movements – like DIY or Punk – she has been considering what it means to be un-trained or an amateur, and how success is measured in contemporary society.

Perfection is a Lie (An Ode to your Potential) is an immersive installation centred on an experimental documentary film directed, edited and musically scored by Alice. Filmed in the style of a cinéma vérité documentary it was shot during Summer 2024 over the course of a series of workshops at the Midlands Arts Centre with a group of year 6 children on the cusp of moving to secondary school, and a group of adults who Alice met when participating in the MAC’s Improv Theatre courses.

Led by Alice and Actress/Psychologist Sarah Wassall and built around different games, exercises and improv techniques, the workshops explored what these concepts mean at different ages with both groups invited to explore experiences and expectations of success and failure and think about what influences our views on the kinds of lives we admire, the pressures to succeed and the pros and cons of failing.

The film was conceived during a period of huge personal change for Alice – the loss of her mother while becoming a mother herself. Experiences that are both overwhelming and ordinary, conjuring profound feelings of love, happiness, fear and grief, of uncertainty toward the future and reflection of the past. This forms an underlying personal meta-subtext to the work as she confronts her own misgivings and feelings of self-doubt as an artist, performer, parent and ‘good enough’ human being.

This project is co-commissioned by Eastside Projects and MAC Birmingham and supported by a Wheatley Fellowship from Birmingham School of Art, Birmingham City University.

Alice Theobald was born in Leicester, UK in 1985. She lives and works in Birmingham, UK. She works across a wide range of media including live performance, video, installation, sound, text and sculpture and composes musical scores for her works. Her work fluctuates between script and improvisation and highlights the unstable relationship between art, communication and representation. Often conflating sentimental tropes, cliche and social archetypes with absurdist and dead-pan humour, Alice addresses accepted concepts of spectacle and emotion and uses performance as both starting point and subject matter to magnify aspects of everyday life and typically introspective thought. Borrowing from the vocabulary of cinema, television, theatre, literature and soundtracks, her practice is concerned with the desire for authenticity and commodification of emotion and what this might say about empathy, aspiration and how we (mis)communicate.