Drama 360 FALL & WINTER 2009/10/Thursday February 25: Performance Techniques ***

'Peculiar Detonation: The Incomplete History and Impermanent Manifesto of the Institution of Failure' By Matthew Goulish

Well, I guess I can start. The whole piece is basically about how failure is a blessing in disguise, and how it can be exploited for the sake of performance. The most important factor I took away form this article and from failure itself is unpredictability. For example, when they blew the whale to pieces, no one expected chunks to fly so far and crush a man's car, along with covering everyone in the area with pink mist. I laughed out load when I read this, because I could only imagine what the look on the pyrotechnics's faces. It would be somewhere between "What the fuck?!" and "We just fucked up a little..." But its beautiful in terms of performance, because that holds as much spectacle as any performance, probably more due to the unpredictability of the event.--Cody.thompson 07:48, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

What I found most important about this article was that artists must have an understanding of the fact that not everything can possibly go as planned all the time. In fact it can often be better if it doesn’t. Failures and mistakes can lead to whole new works with completely different meanings or at least something new to work from. True artists have the ability to adapt when things don’t go as planned, and beyond simply adapting they can embrace and completely transform the intention of the work. They just need to allow it to happen and not fight it, getting stuck on the fact that it’s not what they had originally intended. I enjoyed the idea of the “failure engine”. The use of incorrect lyrics is an everyday common occurrence. It can lead to humour and it can give a whole new twist or meaning to the songs.

I feel like we've really latched on to this idea in our piece. Each failure brings us closer to what we want to be. "I haven't failed 99 times, I've found 99 ideas that don't work here" ~Thomas Edison. Each idea that we have whether we use it or not is a sign of life, of freedom, and of humanity. Each time we "fail" we learn to fail better the next time. This is just such a fantastic theory which I think should be better known in our perfectionistic society.