Last Saturday night, I had the pleasure of watching an adult woman dance foolishly across the stage at Artists Repertory Theatre, while a particularly terrible Miley Cyrus cover of "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid launched a full-throttle attack on my ears.

It was beautiful.

As part of this year's Risk/Reward Festival, Faith Helma's "I HATE POSITIVE THINKING" combined all the best elements of performance art, stand-up, and improv into one completely absurd, disarmingly poignant meditation on everything that's wrong with the load of bunk propagated by books like The Secret. Helma's piece culminated in a call to replace the cult of positive thinking with a newfound affection for failure, and what better way to fail spectacularly—and publicly—than to dance like an asshole to Hannah Montana in front of strangers? Helma prefaced this performance with a sad-cut-with-funny monologue that imbued her eventual freak-flag-waving with a layer of very real catharsis. It was a surprising performance in every way possible, and at Risk/Reward, that's the point.

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