Embracing the Chance to Fail - 24 HR Theatre Festival Part IV

Best-selling author of "Tribes" and many other books, Seth Godin, entitled his blog post today, "How to Fail" (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/04). He discusses the pitfalls of working too hard to avoid "failure" and offers some tips on setting yourself up to fail - which of course also allows you the opportunity to succeed at doing something big and worthwhile.
Improvisers, too, understand the concept of embracing, or "celebrating" failure as a path to succeeding at risky ventures, and our 24-Hr Theatre Festival reminded me anew how we can seize the adventure or play it safe.

At first glance, one could assume that simply producing or participating in the project constituted an embracing of the chance to fail. And I suppose that's fair enough. But it is also true that moment to moment, each individual had the opportunity to choose risk or safety - to raise the challenge bar or lower it. Here are some examples:

• The producers of the event could have cast only actors they knew. Or had auditions and included only the most experienced and "qualified." Instead they invited folks from schools and community theatres as well as well-known talent, mostly focusing on who expressed enthusiasm.
• They could have matched directors and playwrights based on what they knew of their styles and work histories. Instead they pulled names from a hat.
• The playwrights could, frankly, have drafted work before arriving that night - or taken an earlier project and tweaked it.
  
• The actors, when asked what they wanted to do, had choices to suggest something outside their normal comfort zone or within it.
• The designers could have set strict limits with us on what they would try. They instead embraced impossible challenges.

Some of the choices to risk failure rather than play it safe were visible and obvious. Others were subtle and private and may have never been detected one way or the other. And this is not to say that the riskier choices are always the better ones. I will tell you, though, that personally having done my best not to plan, not to have a safety net, to set the bar wildly high, the resulting experience was especially gratifying. Improvisers talk of going "into the cave". By this they mean, if there is danger present in a scene, move toward it, rather than away from it. That's where the drama (and hence the comedy) is, and of course, it is the dramatic that the audience yearns for. That is what makes the actor special - he goes toward those places that we mostly try to avoid in real life - the pain, the embarrassment, the choice to be vulnerable. As Tom Stoppard has the Player King say in "Rosencranz and Guildenstern" "Don't you see? We're Actors; we're the opposite of people." Although the life of an actor has plenty of failure inherent in it, it also has tremendous amounts of life!

So the next time you embark on an adventure ask yourself:How fully am I embracing this chance to risk?

• How much am I hedging my bet?
• What is a way I can stretch that may be invisible to others?
• What is a secret goal I can fulfill?
• What am I afraid of?
  
• How can I go there?