Failure

A cruel and necessary part of the creative process is failure, complete, horrible, and humiliating failure.

And not just little failures like the day I misunderstood my teacher's instructions for an exercise and ran wildly onstage only to freeze and blurt out the first word that came to mind- quesadilla. I was really hungry. Little did I know we were supposed to be expressing our feelings about some larger, deeper concept like love, faith or hatred. I would have been safe if I would have screamed "Hungry!", but no. I had to shout out my lunch cravings instead.

As embarrassing as that was, it is still not the type of failure to which I am referring.

When you find yourself capable of estimating the value of another's work it then becomes obvious that others will be evaluating the value of yours. This is a double edged sword that I would be glad to be without. Unfortunately, my passion for the form does urge me to evaluate and learn from the work of others. But this obsession frequently gets in my way as I attempt to produce my own work.

In school, teachers will tell you that you should make at least 5 mistakes (or some other, arbitrary number) or you have no place in class. They try to make you comfortable with messing up so that you will be a brave actor, one who takes chances and learns from the constant stumbling. As a teacher, I completely agree. I love watching my pupils discover! What a wonderful thing to witness! As an artist, as a human being, I abhor imperfection in myself. I should KNOW better! I've been doing this for 15 years! How can I make such mistakes? I am quite patient with others, but not so much with myself.

This morning, as I dabbed my nose with tissues and sat in my self-pitying posture on the couch watching the clock tick closer and closer to the moment I should have been in my technique class, it occured to me that I shouldn't be in this particular class at all. Not because I don't need the instruction or the practice, but because there is little for me to fail at. I understand these concepts very well. I've been teaching these concepts. I need to be working on something more complex. I need to put myself in a position to practice failure.

It strikes me as a bit funny because I took this particular class as a way to pump up my confidence level and ease my way back in front of an audience. It turns out that what I really need to do is choose something really difficult and throw myself at it repeatedly until I get it right as opposed to the path of least resistance. Stupid path. That path has been talked about ad nauseum by every teacher I've ever encountered. I never believed that it was a good path to take and yet I've found myself travelling down it more times that I can count. It's a deceptive path and sometimes it looks a lot harder than it is. At least, that is what I tell myself.

So, today I will raise my tablespoon of Robitussin to those who recognize that it takes 20 "failures" to make that big success possible. As soon as I stop coughing up my lung- I'll give that a try myself.