Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service by Sara Jane Bailes (review)

Failure has become a key word of our time, and when I say that it is a key word, I mean it in the now old-fashioned sense that Raymond Williams articulated in the 1950s—a word in dynamic tension with its cultural context. In art and performance scholarship for instance, it has moved register. Failure as an art topic no longer indicates an interest in the failure of modernism. It is more likely to suggest an interest in the use of failure within art making, a strategy at whose feet of sand all kinds of claims are laid, including the idea that what we once saw as failure is not failure at all. Beckett’s “fail again, fail better” is not about the existential condition under which we struggle, but a powerful address to the system of representation itself, a tool that, in its capacity to disrupt unpredictably, loosens our hold on the taken-for-granted reality that we inhabit. However, in everyday life—that is, in the lives of our financial, educational, and political institutions—the heat of failure, with its capacity to burn up the lives of those touched by it, seems hotter than ever. The work it has to do here is to scare us into behaving well, behaving better. Its teeth may have been drawn, but failure still has a toxic sting in its tail.

How the deliberate production of failure works as a performance-making tactic, to unhinge the social construction of reality, is the subject of this intriguing and richly detailed book. Sara Jane Bailes places her discussion within the context of performance theatre, that strand of ensemble, collectively made, devised performance in which she herself worked before becoming an academic. Her subject therefore emerges from the intersection of practice and critical reflection, and her fine writing on the work of three companies—Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, and Elevator Repair Service—patiently investigates a set of questions relating to the typology, place, and purpose of failure in their work. She gives further context to her participant observation—she spent several years in rehearsal with each company as they developed new work—by drawing cultural analogies with social movements and artistic moments in which social norms have been actively challenged by what she sees as the productive work of failure. Failure operates, she suggests, by putting paid to acceptable outcomes and proposing alternative ways of making or doing. It doesn’t so much skew our vision as bring it into focus. There is, we might say, something at stake here, a sense that what she is writing about matters in the world. The labor of theatre does not so much reflect the world as help construct it. In undoing the seams of representation failure skirts catastrophe, the better to make use of its inevitable effects.

This is an elegant book but not a light book. Bailes is cognizant of the power of failure in the modernist imagination, and she wants us to reimagine it for a contemporary context. If the performance world she excavates and illuminates is determinedly post (post) modern, the critical tools she brings to it—tools developed by, among others, Adorno, Bloch, and, especially, Walter Benjamin—hark back to modernism. It works, this pairing, and it works because the fine-tuning, the detailed argument, and the scholarly texture of the book are matched by a deep understanding of what it means to make performance. Bailes brings modernist perceptions of failure into conversation with the work of the present, drawing failure away from the shameful and the catastrophic in order to release its transformative power as a machine for making a new kind of artistic sense.

To know how to make a performance of failure is not in the end to quite remove the sting in its tail. To fail, as psychoanalysis knows, is...