As children we have learnt from our mistakes through the footsteps of our elders… to learn… to grow… and most importantly to become the people we are today. Now we are older we are expected to become more independent of our actions and our choices. We are a new generation of young adults with the ability to change the world, fuelled with creativity and imagination. But we forget one thing, we are still learning.
From such a young age I have always been a perfectionist. I have always had the urge to produce work without fail first time around and failure with one idea has always led me to believe that I will fail at every other idea I would have after that… after todays lesson I have produced a new perspective on this situation.
Earlier this week we thought of a piece whereby we would simply stair each other at different points within the library, focusing on the lifts and the stairway, considering the concept of personal space by placing a rope around the performing area. Transient spaces in the library that is taken for granted by many library users. We took inspiration from Marina Abramovic’s “The artist is present” piece, in which she simply invites audience members to sit in a chair opposite her in that space and stare into her eyes. We participated in some areas within the library as a trial run for reactions and outcomes. The results produced some interesting conclusions about the library. Many members of the public noticed the performances more in the refuge area (another area of the library some users take for granted) so we decided we would use one of the refuge areas in our final performance. We also decided that a lift was an excellent area to perform in as audience members are in a way forced to either witness or take part in.
During todays site lesson however we took part in an unexpected site specific performance, whereby I thoroughly enjoyed to both witness and participate in. We were encouraged to write on walls with chalk and express ourselves in a more unconventional way than I could have imagined. After this performance and a Q and A session with the performers I personally felt inspired to produce a welcoming factor into our performance therefore an hour or so before the pitches my group met up to discuss possible changes.
We then went on to showcase our pitches in the final hours of the workshop, whereby we had the final idea of using the theme of a tea party to create a welcoming atmosphere for our performance within the library’s refuge area and lift. We would use grain instead of tea within the teapots to represent the goods and grains warehouses included within the history of the library partnered with visual and audio technology. When presenting this to Conan and Téo they asked us questions as to why we used the tea party idea, in which we then realised seemed irrelevant to the site generally speaking. We accepted this failure and we can now move on to become braver and bolder in our ideas to produce a brilliant piece of site work!!
I guess that when I experienced failure it classified me as a failure but now I realise that’s not the case at all, it means I’m developing into a better person. As a wise man once told me we should not feel judged for our failures by others around us… and I see that now.
Failure is a part of life, there is no doubt about that, to grow as people we need to fail in order to succeed!
“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt, Looking Forward.