Fail hard

FAILURE:LAB makes friends with discomfort

Three weeks ago, during a solo modern dance performance at the PAC, I fell. With a splat. In front of paying viewers. Like an 8-year-old kid on a Slip’N Slide. 

Now, I’m a grown woman, a professional. I know how to measure the ratio of energy input to gravitational force. But in that moment, calculated perfection was apparently less compelling than calculated risk. In other words, I just went for it.

My landing was a failure. Not my first onstage, and presumably not my last. Not to mention the countless disasters in rehearsal, the wrong turns in concept development and the flubs in working with colleagues and collaborators. 

Being a performing artist? It’s magical. It’s a mess. And sometimes, it’s both.

“I have a long history of painfully bombing vocal auditions,” theater artist Anna Bennett says. “Like, they wouldn’t let me in the 5th grade talent show.” 

Sara Cruncleton of the Nightingale Theatre recounts a particularly painful burlesque performance:

“How about dislocating my knee while naked except for a bird beak, feet and tail feathers? The whole audience came outside and cheered me on as I got carted off to the hospital.”

For Tulsa Ballet Artistic Director Marcello Angelini, failure is “not achieving 110 percent in each and every task I tackle every day.” 

“The knowledge that what I do can be done better is the engine that makes me want to be better,” Angelini says. 

Performing artists work and sweat and strive for perfection. We’re supposed to be more than human—athletes of God, as Albert Einstein reportedly said of dancers.

But can failure be okay? Does it have to have “fear of” tacked to the front of it? What if we see it as a natural byproduct of healthy, courageous boundary-pushing? 

Grand Rapids-based FAILURE:LAB, a storytelling and performance group, believes that talking about failure is a cathartic way to “explore the space between resilient people and people who give up,” says program co-founder Jonathan Williams. This world-traveling TED-inspired project, which visits Tulsa on July 24, shares stories about failure interspersed with periods of reflection so listeners can process what they’ve heard.

Williams says that FAILURE:LAB, which also has a curriculum for businesses, aims to  tell the backstory behind success. 

“The storytellers have to stop before they tell you what they did to overcome,” he says. “The idea is, if I can trust you with a huge struggle in my life, it opens you up. Instead of judging me, you’re going to be thinking about your own life.”

“Vulnerable narrative is a timeless thing, but we’ve gotten away from it,” he says. “The exponential changes of the last 30 years have driven a lot of fear and led to a lot of digital isolation. If we’re going to be trying so many things in the face of so much change, we’re going to have to be way more comfortable with trial and error.”

The subject of failure touches a tender spot in the reality of theater-making, and that reality is what I want to cover in this column. What is performance but an experience of humanity that’s richer, more colorful, more intimate? Creating that experience doesn’t happen without risk. And there’s no risk without a willingness to fail. According to Williams, the more we talk about what goes wrong, the more encouraged we’ll be to try again. 

Failure keeps us honest. Being honest about our failures keeps us laughing, and humble, and open to trying hard things. And we need—and need to celebrate—laughing, humble, honest, bold artists more than we know.  

Performance artist Marianne Evans-Lombe puts it this way: 

“I believe it requires extraordinary courage to create bad work—to let that work see the light. So it follows that, if I have the courage to make the bad work, to fail, then I will have the courage, when I need it, to make the great.”

FAILURE:LAB comes to the PAC’s John H. Williams Theatre Friday, July 24 at 7 p.m.

Alicia Chesser is the artistic director of Tulsa Modern Movement and the founder of the blog Tulsa Dances.