Thinking about failure…. reading about failure…. feeling failure…..being failure…..breeding failure…..growing failure…. vomiting failure…..inhaling failure…. embracing failure? WHAT??? ………………….Failure sick.
Reading: Sarah Jane Bailes’ Performance theatre and The poetics of FAILURE (introduction) !!!!!! +++ My own thoughts questions and deviations….
As Artist is there obligation to express? Do we impose that obligation… what happens if we don’t express?…. Is Teching Hsieh no longer an artist when he says that he doesn’t have anything else to say?
FAILURE, what is it?
Looking at the online etymology dictionary: Fail comes from the old french “fallir” which means be lacking, miss, not succeed, run out, come to an end, err, make a mistake, be dying, let down, dissapoint…
From the vulgar latin “fallire”- from latin, fallere:” To trip, cause to fall” figuratively “to deceive, trick, dupe, cheat, elude; fail, be lacking or defective.”
Failure, is the contrary of success . It is something that in our society is seen as undesirable.
Bailes says that failure allows us to entry into a different place where subversion and resistance can be tried out and examined. That by examining that which has failed to be what initialy was expected the artist can ponder upon the ‘predicament of anticlimax’ and through that learn more about the human condition…..
ANd then I wonder…is this not a success in itself…failure turns into success…. so in order to succeed in failure where do we start?
Bailes suggests that by using experimanting with failure as a form of representation theatre companies like “Goat’s Island” Forced Entertainment” and “Elevator repair service” have found a way to test the boundaries and problematics and limitations of the conventional theatre event.
Failure through the Speech act= Unhappy incident which Austin calls ” Misfire“. A misfire can arise through misaplication or through misexecution.
Bailes is interested on what can failure teach about mechanisms of coping with misfires in the performing arts and how can the event continue. She thinks that finding coping mechanisms have direct social implications and she is excited about its social and political posibilities.
Failure in theatrical/ performative terms does not have to be an accident, it can be planned (scripted) as rehearsed as any other subject. Soooooo…. I ask myself… can representing failure become a success and as such is that not a contradiction in terms?
Does setting up to represent failure as a scripted event make it lose some of the possibilities that it offer us?
Bailes points out that Kim Noble’s use of the term Failure seems to be a failure to conform to prescribed good taste
http://mrkimnoble.com/watch-stuff/
John Cage explores the boundaries of sound. His silence piece mkes me wonder… is silence the failure of noise or viceversa? Do they have to be opposites…. We think of music as a collections of sounds maybe with particular characteristics….in that context then Silence is failure?
Bailes says…Rebecca Scheider talks about meaning as a matter of social exchange but also a matter of social change…”The negotiation of meaning can change the world…. and the stage… or beyond… where the performers chose to do or not do their actions can be a space where this happens? does the meaning of failure change?
Beckett says: To be an artist is to fail as no other dare fail! To restrain from failing would be to pracrice something other than art…. With Beckett, boredom, inertia, waiting, stasis become vital motifs of the Theatre event.