Pig Iron Workshop

I did a workshop this weekend with Dido and Quinn of Pig Iron theater. If you don't know Pig Iron, they're a pretty amazing group out of Philly that generates work as an ensemble...including "Chekhov Lizardbrain," one of the best pieces I saw last year.

The workshop was, for the most part, a review of a lot of the generative techniques that I'm familiar with from having studied with Tina Landau...lanework, composition, things that people who have studied Viewpoints would recognize.

But there were a couple of things they said that will stick with me.

The main one:

That theater is a "failure-based art form."

In context, I think that Quinn meant that "usually, plays fail." The vast majority of new work doesn't turn out the way we want it to...which is, of course, what spurs most of us to try again.

But the comment strikes me as pretty damn profound, in part because I think one of the reasons we go to the theater is because there's always the possibility of failure. Live theater necessitates the possibility, at any given moment, of an accident. And while you don't (usually) want to see harm come to the actors onstage, it's the danger -- emotional danger, physical danger -- that lurks around any given corner that assures us we are, in fact, watching something real.

We all have stories of the actor who completely forgot his lines in the middle of the third scene, of the missed entrance, of the actor or piece of scenery that collapsed. Audiences love these stories, tell them over and over. Things don't go wrong on film -- those mistakes end up on the blooper reel, or the cutting room floor. Likewise, any "accident" you hear in recorded music was kept there for a reason. Visual art has "mistakes," but the artist made the choice to allow you to see that mistake and has, in a sense, sanctioned that mistake. Only live performances offers the possibility, every night, of a real "oh shit" moment -- only live performance asks us to live on the high-wire.

What does that mean? On some level, I would say that it's our job to invite failure in. I would say that failure, or danger, is as much of a tool in our craft as anything else. If we can create danger -- emotional danger, physical danger, the REAL sense that things are just on the edge of going out of control -- then that failure will bring us closer to success than playing it safe.

Go Big or Go Home, I guess, is the message here.