Failure and Improvisation

I have been thinking about improvisation and failure, how they go hand-in-hand.

When I was at the masters, I took a Digital Performance class at Brown. I knew I was out of my element right away but I kept at it for the same reason. The day of the final performance came, live audience, real people I have never seen in my entire life filled the room. My performance was an extremely complicated combination of Facebook/real-time performance where 5 guys were supposed to sequester me with the uttermost verbal and physical violence from within the audience. The performance was an inquiry of the Mexican reality and ways social media were supposed to aid someone in distress.

Needless to say, my snatchers were outside the room and missed the cue. At the end of one performance they just rescheduled me on the spot and I was in the middle of the stage improvising something completely stupid, that in hindsight I just can’t believe I was able to do. Suddenly, five guys came in the middle of the stage, black masks on, blurting out “Nobody move, you fuckers”, trying to intimidate the audience while they were trying to hold me down. One guy held on to me but when I wanted to break free from his grip, he let me a little bit loose but yanked me back to his side. In the end, the effect was one of a slingshot gone bad and I ended up ricocheting back towards his torso, smashing my face unto his shoulder and falling to the ground with an unbelievable pain on my nose. He helped me stand up and we all left the stage. People were baffled and quite frankly, some offended, it was neither performance nor comedy. It was a loud, chaotic failure.

I cried and cried for days. My friends helped me out the first night with some whiskeys but they knew deep down, there was no remedy for that kind of experiences. I believe some people from the class were angry more than concerned about me and I know exactly why. I shot myself on the foot, I set myself for it because I didn’t rehearse, not even once. I thought that improvisation was a good thing in these kinds of things and to artists that was their major mean of expression, my performance (if you could even call it that way) was an announced and embarrassing death.

What I do know is what failure taught me. Once and again, I have embarked on personal or artistic journeys that have either been good or bad for me. It’s like Tarzan jumping to the next rope. Plenty of times my intuition tells me there might be a rope and I feel an incredible sense of freedom when I grab that thing on my hands and I swing unto the next one. Sometimes when it’s no so clear-cut, I have jumped anyways sometimes falling with a terrible thump, breaking a leg or wounding my heart. Socially is hard to withstand, people can be very mean and judgment can be incredibly hurtful at some points in your life.

But although it’s a cliché, failure teaches you so much. I am more and more inclined to do it, not because it’s fun or I’m keen to embrace stupidity, but because I believe in what I’m doing and for that reason, I will burn in Hell if needed. What I learnt so far is that you can create a thicker skin through it. It’s hard to do, you have to be very strong when you’re having a bad day because it can be a vulnerable spot you don’t want to be in but if you own it, every piece of it, it becomes like a scar of war or something. You wear it without people having to understand what happened, it actually protects you from believing what other people might think of you, so it saves you in a way. Finally, failure liberates you, it’s like the Universe saying: “You fucked up… So what?” It will not be the last time and I’m certain I will not spend my life trying avoiding it. You hurt yourself, you own your part, you acknowledge and respect your original desire and the mess that it might have become but inevitably you move on.

“I’d like to conclude by recalling philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch's psychoanalytically oriented framing: ‘In improvisation, the too far-sighted man wants to reclaim the innocence of day-to-day life, and to resolve on the wing the small problems born of the indeterminate moment: he thus disturbs his own adaptation to accident and deprives himself of the temporality that ensured his safety.’ On this view, improvisation becomes not so much a practice, but an aspiration toward freedom that, even as it is doomed to failure, nonetheless produces a consciousness that continually transgresses limits and resists their imposition.”

The Condition of Improvisation, George E. Lewis, Columbia University