An Evening on the Poetry of Failure

One step too soon.
One movement too late.
A gesture reaching into the void.

We live as though falling were not an option. As though everything had to work. As though control were something we could promise ourselves. Yet every body knows stumbling, missing the mark, and losing its balance. What if failure is more than simply not succeeding? What if it holds a poetry of its own—fragile, contradictory, and deeply human?

Joyful Failure moves within this liminal space.

Six dancers and a musician encounter one another in a place where everything is constantly shifting, where the familiar slips out of balance, and where a too-late, a too-early, a never-quite-right shapes the moment that follows. Bodies reach out to each other and miss one another. They rely on one another, drift apart, begin again. Gestures falter; movements break off and return transformed. What had just offered support begins to topple. What had been light and playful suddenly shifts into something melancholic. What seems lost leaves a trace.

A space unfolds between certainty and doubt, between the freedom of the attempt and the vulnerability of failure—a space where what has not succeeded is not suppressed but remains visible: quiet, humorous, unruly, and alive.

Liam Byrne’s live viola da gamba performance, expanded by electronic soundscapes, brings early music and the present together in a richly contrasting sonic space—raw, poetic, and contemporary. Movement and sound permeate one another without seeking to explain themselves, creating an atmosphere suspended between irony and tenderness.

Again and again, we try. Again and again, we fail. We fail differently.

As a quiet echo of Samuel Beckett’s “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” JOYFUL FAILURE understands failure not as an ending but as a continuous movement.

The evening invites us to linger where our gaze would otherwise rush past, and to attune ourselves to those fleeting moments when something slips away, revealing what might otherwise remain hidden: our vulnerability, our ambivalence, and the contradictory demands of connection.

Concept / Artistic Direction: laborgras (Renate Graziadei & Arthur Stäldi)
Choreography: laborgras in collaboration with the dancers
Dance: Abraham Iglesias Rodriguez, Tian Gao, Miguel González Padilla, Rosalind Masson, Djamila Polo, Renate Graziadei
Dramaturgy: Arthur Stäldi
Music: Liam Byrne
Costume Design: Claudia Janitschek
Lighting Design: Kevin Sock
Press and Public Relations: Marcelo Vilela da Silva
Distribution: Micaela Trigo
Graphic Design: Mia Sedding
Photo: Phil Dera
Hair and Make-up Pictures: Adriana Metzlaff
Artistic Production Management: Urszula Heuwinkel