Terence Nance: Has Nothing to be Unapologetic About

We sit down this week with the incredibly multi-talented artist, director, and musician, Terence Nance, to get inside his head about things like his HBO series, Random Acts of Flyness, that airs out, in almost a stream-of-consciousness, many of today’s most salient issues like systemic racism, white privilege, gender, and masculinity. Not knowing it all is especially important to Terence’s work, “I think of making stuff as conversation; why would you get into a conversation if you knew where it was going to go? Why would it be interesting to talk to somebody if you knew exactly what they were going to say back to you?”. He also explains why honesty within his family and close relationships is what makes him feel the most vulnerable, but he goes there anyway so as to set an example to his nieces and nephews, and why he sees beauty as a scale of disarming people and emitting ease, rather than as an aesthetic quality. But most fascinating to us is how Terence unpacks attributes that we give to words such as unapologetic. “People have been using the word unapologetic a lot and I don't know that I have a relationship to that word because that means that I would have had some sort of expectation that I am to apologize for something...I've never felt any kind of dialogue with an audience or anybody making the show that made me feel like there was anything that would offend or necessitate an apology or a caveat of any kind.”