Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure by Bailes Sara Jane;

Author:Bailes, Sara Jane;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

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News From Nowhere

Goat Island Performance Group1

The stage is not just illusion; it can also be anticipation of what is to come, for in it the resistance of the empirical world is eliminated.

Ernst Bloch

There is no joy in leading people to a place where they already are.

Matthew Goulish, Goat Island

Introduction: delight in the difficulty of doing

It was during the making of The Sea & Poison (1998), a process that lasted some two years, that the Chicago-based performance group, Goat Island, came up with a way of characterizing its idiosyncratic movement vocabulary, calling its strange but graceful choreographies “impossible dance.” The notion of impossibility has since become synonymous with its practice, applied to a range of contexts and activities and adopted by many who watch and reflect upon their work, and by the company itself. For example, the group names one of the preliminary practical activities in its summer schools the Impossible Task. The exercise instructs each participant to write down an “impossible task” on a piece of paper, then pass it to a neighbor whose instruction is to interpret and transform the brief directive into a repeatable, performative action. Each individual therefore takes on the impossible task instruction of a fellow participant. Part of the challenge of this exercise is the invitation to work quickly and complete this objective in a matter of minutes. In this preliminary activity, usually the first of the school, participants learn several things quickly: how to challenge their own perceptions of the condition of impossibility and to reflect upon what that term might connote; how to begin to collaborate; and how to animate an idea through practical exploration within a brief, determined timeframe. Participants also learn to let go of what they might already have become attached to – in this case a written instruction – and instead accommodate an unknown directive. The Impossible Task describes an approach to creative practice that is intrinsically collective yet individually pursued (to begin with) whilst establishing a performative territory based on actions that seem un-doable.

I use this example to begin to suggest the broader significance of impossibility in the context of Goat Island’s work. But I also want to illustrate how for its group members, practice is understood as the transformation of idea from the imaginary to the concrete realm. It is the development of philosophical and social inquiry extended through the principles of collaboration. For example, in rehearsals, one might learn how to confront the predicament of aporia or impasse, and examine spatial and psychic geographies that seem hostile and unyielding through the coordination of different trajectories that are patterned together. Through the simple act of translating an instruction from a written to a performed event, the distinction between the critical and the creative (between theory and practice) begins to dissolve, and, in effect, “doing thinking” begins. One not only imagines the impossible; one begins to make it. In the context of a discussion concerned with failure and representation, impossibility identifies a category that sits well within a

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