The value of failing

Festival invites artists, audience to bravely face the fear of failure

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Early this year, Laura Ann Samuelson, founder of the experimental dance company Hoarded Stuff, began asking fellow artists — who find themselves caught in an endless wheel of marketing and self-promotion — about the opposite end of their resumes. Not how they’d succeeded and what they’d accomplished, but how they’d failed.

“Art can be about more than a certain kind of mastery. I think mastery is incredibly important as well, but I think missing the mark actually opens up so much for us to see,” Samuelson says. “I think we’re failing as much as we’re succeeding in every moment. … That’s how life works, and I think that when we start to focus on one element of it, we start to lose the learning that comes from everything else.”

She’d been wrestling with the idea of failure in her own work — what artist hasn’t? — and finding that exciting work came only with a generous dose of failure, or at the very least, a willingness to risk failing. Being rejected, she found, forced an artist to work in new and different directions. Failure could stimulate creativity and make room for growth.

Meanwhile, artists she knew who had seen early and enduring success seemed stalled out creatively. Having attained success, growing as an artist became a frightening prospect because, being the unwieldy thing that it is, growth might not produce work that was equally successful. So they were still creating similar artwork to what initially led them to acclaim. They weren’t growing.

Samuelson saw an opportunity to undertake a new project that would venture into unknown territory, that might possibly be rejected, denied funding, and garner any of the other trappings we connect with failure: She created a festival dedicated to failure.

She’s recruited artists to perform at the Failure Festival who have backgrounds in dance, theatre, video art and writing. Samuelson’s first foray into risking public rejection with this festival was applying for a grant from the Boulder Arts Commission to hold the festival. She didn’t fail.

As an experiment in disengaging from that constant need to self-promote (and part of the grant application), Samuelson asked artists to submit biographies of themselves that focus on their failures.

Published author and Naropa University professor Bhanu Kapil wrote about being a failed British novelist: “… she has had several husbands and failed to make an acceptable lasagna for even one of them, which sounds cute but is actually the basis for the last four years, which have been spent writing a fifth book, BAN, in increments so puny a snail could have emigrated to France, not been eaten and figured out how to make cappuccino from scratch in the time it has taken to pull the absence of a plot together.”

Dancer Lauren Beale wrote about her artistic hang-ups: “Making choreography is a painful process filled with self-deprecating back talk and self-sabotaging procrastination… and so she improvises… on stage and in life, because being spontaneously present is a coping mechanism and a strategy for getting out of her own way.”

If those didn’t make you flinch, Ethan Cowan’s will. He recounts failures including not breaking the brick in his black belt Tae Kwon Do test, not getting into colleges, quitting snowboarding, quitting playing the trombone, even quitting the dance collective he helped to start, “and that’s right when the collective started taking off and doing really cool shows.” He’s now working as an administrative assistant.

The three-night festival will include dance performances improvised based on cues given from the audience — some of which will be thrown on stage — and videos that show artists attempting impossible tasks. A pair of improvisers will perform a duet they’ve rehearsed only by exchanging drawings and prose back and forth from their respective homes in Iowa and Colorado. It’s not about attempting to fail — “You can’t actually set out to fail, because once you try to set out to fail, if you do it, you’re succeeding,” Samuelson says — but about being willing to undertake something that’s likely to fail or probably impossible to achieve. 

What audiences experience will be left, at least in part, in their own hands.

“I think it’s incredibly valuable as an artist to perform something that may fail because I think you find so much more information, and I think it’s valuable for an audience because they’re receiving something that’s incredibly fresh and real because it’s happening in real time,” Samuelson says. “The goal of this is to create a situation where people are getting to engage in failure in their own way, and also if that’s not happening, that’s also fine.”

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