The Tragic and the Ridiculous mixed together in Forced entertainment’s work. Bailes says that Like Beckett, Forced Entertainment are fuelled by the same existential paradox… ” The failure to be able to express, rekindles the very desire to express”. They are both drawing on Phelan’s premise that ” Failure id the condition from which everything began and to what everything returns (2004).

Walter Benjamin’s Archive
Elizabeth Crossley | Spring 2008 – Number 209
Translated by Esther Leslie, Edited by Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin’s Archive (Verso, 2007, £16.99)

In his essays on Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin examines the poet’s portrait of a Parisian ragpicker:

Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects.

Benjamin reads this passage as a metaphor for the poetic method: ‘Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.’ The figure is also apt to the activity of the archivist. The modernist impulse to recover scraps of the past in order to aticulate the fleeting experience of the present is realised, in Benjamin’s Archive, as a physical practice. His stated aim as a collector was not to retain the new but to renew the old ‘in such a way that I myself, the newcomer, would make what was old my own’. To this end, the philosopher, literary and cultural critic amassed a vast and intricately systematised collection of artefacts, texts, images and fragments of everyday life.

Bailes talks about Forced Entertainment as Ragpicker performers that make use of what is thrown away and discarded as rubbish. They investigate it and give it a new sense of meaning… they renovate?

And then She poses this question:

What makes a performance/performer come up to scratch? And if the performers don’t agree/ BEHAVE well or act according to what might be expected… what becomes of the event?… What happens to the experience of a performance that keeps failing to materialise

This question is , I think important to keep in mind in all aspects of life and to think of failure within…. Sooo I ask myself… What makes a student come up to scratch? and if the students don’t agree / BEHAVE or act according to what might be expected … what becomes of the… event=course?… What happens to the experience of learning/teaching that keeps failing to materialise?…..

I will pray to Saint Failure to give me the answer!!

She just spoke to me while I was praying and said… Well it will just be a bloody mess…..

Bailes talks about Adorno’s thought in relation to Forced Entertainment’s work. Adorno’s sees the strenght of theatre in the potential to ‘ Organize the world according to a diversified notions of norms, logic and structural limitations, that enables society to be conceived differently and in difference’…. She also then makes the point that Forced Entertainment  invite the spectator to rethink societie’s norms.

And then she talks some more about Adorno and Kafka and Deluze and Guattary… talking in a sense about something like … going beyond Hermeneutics…. I get a sense of what she means .. a feeling a mood… is it something like .. saying that these art works  ( like the work of Forced Entertainment  go beynd hermeneutics… beyond trying to explain to theorise… they make us feel, embody… what the are talking about…)…Something like this???

And then she talks about Club of No Regretsss…and Spivak and Bricollage… And ends pointing out to the fact that Force Entertainment’s work threatens to make us Hostage until we leard to see Differently!!!!

 

How can this represent failure?… The thought for this piece came from my recent diagnosis of  fibroids in my womb…thinking about them and coming to the conclusion that my value as a reproductive female had dropped drastically I felt I could  probably fit in the category of reproductive failure…

I feel that the image is …. repulsive and ugly…both adjectives go had in hand with failure while beauty would be associated with success.

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….

Beckett:   The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express!

 

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.