The veils between worlds are thin and we can easily slip through.

In response to a year of breaking open and realities colliding, Bales led and devised a performance with ten other artists that considered portals, gateways, and the movement between realities, past and present, real and speculative.

To begin the process, artists were provided with a trove of decaying travel trunks to use as an initial prompt. Shape-shifting between times and dimensions, each artist conjured personal visions of what is and what could be. These individual visions aimed to question the viewer’s sight, embody the present impossible, and transport us into the collective unknown.

In Plain Sight(site) became a singular theatrical experience comprised of these different visions weaving in and out of each other. Set in an interdimensional transit station, alien bellhops led audiences between different performances as they rose and fell across the space and eventually swelled into a cacophonous finale.

The performance was meant as an opportunity to collaborate and create within the means and constraints of our current environment and with the resources at hand. As a distanced performance in the time of COVID-19, audiences gathered in masks on the sidewalk outside the performance space and witnessed In Plain Sight(site) from the large storefront windows and open doors of the venue.

•  Performances
  2020. Le Mondo | Baltimore, MD

With a mixture of carcinogenic chemicals and an abundance of plastic bags, dry cleaning is the ultimate un-clean. Like the living dead, dry-cleaning generates a dead zone in the natural world, lingering long past its time. Laure Drogoul’s installation was the culmination of a 2 year project to research the after-life of human made materials related to domesticity. Bales performed within the installation during the run of its exhibition at Current Gallery.

During the performance, otherworldly Sisyphean cleaning clerks (Laure Drogoul, Joe Meduza, Matthew Williams, and Carly J Bales) hopelessly and endlessly fold, weigh, and bale the universe's trash.​


Performances
2020. Current Space | Baltimore, MD

Written and directed by Carly J. Bales, Life or Theatre? explodes the work and subconscious of the 20th century expressionist painter Charlotte Salomon on stage, fusing her autobiographical prose and expressionist painting with classical music, cinema, and theatre into a singular expression of her self – a demand by a young woman to exist in a world that demanded otherwise.

​

• A daring, experimental work of visual and aural bravado
• This is the most engaging, provocative piece of performance art I have seen in some time. [...] Stunning and achingly beautiful, timely, relevant, poignant and poetic...
• It’s compelling on many levels, capturing a struggle to define a self within imposed identities, all while trying to physically survive in a destructive world. It’s not a happy play, but it’s real and it’s important.

Performances
2018. Annex Theater | Baltimore, MD

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A lifeguard embarks upon an obsessive quest to find the origin of hate, the root of denial, and the basic human weakness that causes us to fear death - and finds it in Michigan. Carly Bales stars in and Cricket Arrison directs this strange murder mystery cum bureaucratic nightmare by Lisa D'Amour. The performances were designed for a roving audience of only twelve members per night.

Performances
2017. Late Night Theater Series | Baltimore, MD

A ship wrecks on this island that rests between galaxies – somewhere between the rational waking world and the magic dream world. Inhabitants from both these worlds collide as a sorcerer is now forced to confront their past life and conquer their deep-seated lust for vengeance. Bales performed the role of Trinculo in this beautiful rendition of Shakepeare's The Tempest.

• “A perfect marriage of Annex Theater aesthetics and stellar Shakespeare performances”

• “A beautiful piece of art… a much-needed dose of beauty“
• “Unlike any [production of The Tempest] I’ve seen before”
• “WOW!!! We saw The Tempest last week and we were BLOWN AWAY by the visionary directing and incredible cast. You did amazing work with a challenging script. We’re still talking about it a week later. Can’t wait to see more productions. Thanks for making top quality theater so affordable.”
• "Most entertaining of all is the drunken partnership formed by Margulies’ Stephano and Bales’ Trinculo"
•  "Bales’ physical comedy is spot-on" "[Bales and Marguiles] elicit laughter in every scene they touch."

Performances
2017. Baltimore Annex Theater | Baltimore, MD


Awards
2017. Best Design | Annex Theater | Baltimore Magazine

Bales was commissioned to adapt this play from Matthew Thurber's cult comic series, 1-800-MICE, alongside director Sarah Jacklin. This expansive and psychedelic comic series was transformed into a free-wheeling, anticapitalist satire seeped in dream logic and inspired by the aesthetics of exploitation film and the Theater of the Ridiculous. Bales also performed the role of Aunty Lakeford, a new-age megalomaniac bent on cultural dominance and immortality.

•  “One part American wholesomeness, one part latent oblivion, and two parts holyfuckingshit. [...] This play may be as close as some of us will ever come to seeing a Jack Smith theater/performance piece in the flesh.”
• “[Bales’ performance] rides the knife’s edge that separates the deadly serious from the utterly preposterous, where you laugh at reality’s absurdities to keep from flinging yourself under a bus”
•  "Taking on the challenge of adapting and staging a bizarre comic with a cult following like 1-800-MICE was a risk, but it is one that paid off beautifully. 1-800-MICE is a smart, absurd comedy that manages to be thought-provoking and topical while hurtling you through space at the speed of a meteor headed straight for Earth. Loosen your grip on narrative realism and go take this ride."
  
  
  Performances
• 2016. Baltimore Annex Theater | Baltimore, MD.

Bales directed this world premiere from Chicago-based playwright, Savannah Reich. Walking the knife's edge between comedy and horrific tragedy, this piece was heavily inspired by teen melodrama films of the 1950's - 1980's, screwball comedies, and the different ghosts that haunt each of our lives.  Featuring ghosts, doomed girls, dance numbers, possessed mothers, and the 1985 hit song, Head Over Heels.


More about the piece

The Ghost lived in the woods, Minding Her Own Business and definitely Not Haunting Anyone, until one day she saw a Pretty Girl and followed her home. It totally wasn’t even a thing. The Girl was probably not even going to notice.

Stupid Ghost is a dark comedy about ruining the lives of the people you love.


Performances

• 2016. Baltimore Annex Theater | Baltimore, MD

Bales directed the sold-out run of this dark, genre-bending comedy written by Mac Wellman. Part after-school special, part sci-fi horror, the play was like riding the waves of late-night television straight into outer space. Commissioned for the Late Night Theater Series.

•  “[Carly Bales is] our DIY theater’s most go-for-broke performer, who appears to have encouraged the cast to reach for the preposterous—and then see what might lie just on the other side of that.”

Performances
2016. Psychic Readings | Baltimore, MD


Awards
2016.  #1 Play | Top Ten Stage of 2016 | Baltimore City Paper

Strange intimacy and transgression transference. Closeness in the open. Participants are asked to pay a small fee. In exchange, the artist will eat their sins and absolve them of any guilt. Over time, the residue of the sins accumulate into a new form and body.


Performances

• 2016. Labbodies Retrospective exhibition, curated by Ada Pinkston and Hoesy Corona. Spacecamp | Baltimore, MD
• 2016. Fields Festival performance series, curated by Cricket Arrison. Fields Festival | Darlington, MD
• 2014. Of screens, remainders, and holds..., curated by Andrew Glenn Shenker and Michael Benevento. Current Gallery | Baltimore, MD

A series of experimental and often collaborative performances exploring the boundaries of gender and power.

New Rituals of Power
With Emilia Pennanen:

•  Performances
  2016. Fable, for Parts and Pieces curated by Noelle Tolbert and Alex D'Agostino. EMP Collective | Baltimore, MD
  2016. Superwomen, featuring Marcelline for GRL PWR. The Crown | Baltimore, MD 
  2015. Midsummer Night's Dream, featuring Michael Wasteney Stephens for Tidal Swell. EMP Collective | Baltimore, MD
  2015. Tidal Swell, for Tidal Swell. EMP Collective | Baltimore, MD

In Taking Space
A collaboration with dancers Noelle Tolbert and Alex D'Agostino. This durational, movement-driven performance piece was commissioned for ROOM, an exhibition of oversized inflatable sculptures, at MICA.

The piece explored the body taking physical space as an inherently political act -- both oppressive and emancipatory -- in response to the pure geometry forms in ROOM. The piece invited itself to evolution or deterioration over the night. Audiences asked to come and go, touch and not touch, witness or ignore. The performers at times slammed their bodies together, climbed atop each other, or became ensconced within the same oppressive structures within the space. The interactions became struggles between independence and dependence, power and weakness, failure and success, the individual and the group.  The living sculptures they created rose and fell, supported and antagonized, ebbed and flowed.

• Performances
  2016. ROOM exhibition. MICA | Baltimore, MD

soft. pricking. painful.
A seduction. A danger. A trick. A soft, smothering obliteration. With Emilia
Pennanen and Karen Carpenter of The Carpenters.

• Performances
  2015. The Sun is Softly Setting / the world it simply turns, curated by Michael Wasteneys Stephens. Penthouse | Baltimore, MD

We hope you enjoy our performance.
An absurdist cabaret of beauty, gender, and violence. With Jacob Budenz.

• Performances
  2014. Femininity and the Feminine Image. Pulse Performance Series | Baltimore, MD
  2015. The Praxis Series. Little Berlin | Philadelphia, PA

hopelessly devoted 2 U
A site-specific work including bathtubs, beautiful ladies, ritual gone grotesque, and
the song stylings of Olivia Newton John.

• Performances
  2013. LADYPARTS, curated by Alexandra “Rex” Delafkaran and Eames Armstrong. Aether Art Projects | Washington, DC