Recently, Redmoon Artistic Director Jim Lasko was invited to participate in Pecha Kucha, in which artists are asked to speak on a single topic using 20 slides for 20 seconds apiece. While ruminating on the topic of “failure,” Jim reflected on many Redmoon experiences….

1. This is a shot from a show called Galway’s Shadow. You probably won’t recognize the windows of the facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art. In this show, we deployed over 60 puppeteers and performers to manipulate thousands of tiny illustrated images on 36 overhead projectors to bring that facade to life with shadow.

2. The goal at Redmoon, the mission of this project, is to activate public space. I believe that this form of theater can revitalize democracy. No less than that. Revitalize democracy. I was…disappointed in this plaza space and its relationship to the facade. It seemed to defy congregation and intimacy. I created Galway’s Shadow to counteract it.

3. On the evenings of these performances, thousands came, sat in their lawn chairs or on blankets, laid their heads on backpacks. They watched this complicated choreography, people in separate rooms (unable to see or hear one another) manipulating minuscule pieces of plastic to create a seamless screen.

4. Like most everything we do, this failed. Our effort flattened out. It disappeared behind an all too familiar two dimensional surface. And the audience took the same passive relationship toward the show that they learned from the screens it seemed to emulate.

5. This become clear at the show’s conclusion when the performers walked between the projectors and the screens to cast their silhouettes on the screens for a curtain call. Suddenly the plaza was alive. People recognized the massive endeavor they had just witnessed for all it was. A live event. They looked to one another; they were suddenly aware of the space they occupied, aware of their commonality. The failure made the piece. The failure pointed to its success.

6. Increasingly our lives are lived in a privacy assured and reinforced by commercial interests. Even activities that seem ideally suited to social interaction have become sources of communal isolation. Public spaces are re-shaped and defied by the private experiences of phones and pods. It could be different.

7. This, for example, is a public square during a harvest festival in Spain By activating public space, these shows call people together, outside of the apparently endless reach of commerce, to witness one another, to register their shared context, shared fate, and shared responsibility. Fear is reduced and care is increased.

8. In Graduate School I began to make theater pieces based on two things: the Greek ideal of a civic theater and photographs of productions I never saw. It was a problematic hermeneutic, and the results were some wonderful failures. The elephant was created by a French Spectacle troupe Royal De Luxe. The elephant is surprisingly unaffecting. It’s mechanized.

9. His friend is far more compelling. She is operated by a team of coordinated manipulators pulling ropes attached to her knees and arms. Their intense physical effort brings her impossibly to life. They are indentured to her and she is, therefore, endlessly compelling. I tried this once, but with some very different results.

10. Sometimes failure is just that, failure. This was a performance, back in the early days, on Navy Pier. In the next scene the creature’s head will flop backward to expel his ‘soul’, a thin gauze wrapped version of him that, at the last minute, we decided to treat with red paint. It has thus been dubbed “The Tampon on the Stick.”

11. Sometimes, though, failure can show the Promise of Effort. Sometimes Failure is a finger pointing to something else, some Beautiful Ideal. In failure you see the Beautiful Ideal alongside the unapologetic human effort to achieve it. In a failure, the Ideal doesn’t gloss the effort, it punctuates it.

12. In the Spring of 2006 we devised a show set in the Columbia Basin, the majestic site of the 1893 World Fair, now more likely to be recognized as the generic lagoon behind the Museum of Science and Industry. The show was conceived as a clown show on water. It was to open the first weekend of September. Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29th.

13. Our show had to change entirely. I saw no choice but to throw out months of work in order to try to create something that spoke to the tragedy of that event. It became somber and brutal and, honest to god, there was a blustery rain almost every performance. In one scene a blanket vendor made his way across the lagoon.

14. As this was inevitably against the wind, no matter how early we sent him, it seemed he had to battle to make his cue. The band, also on a raft, would extend their song, watching him labor, waiting to start the next tune. This was not staged. It was a man against the elements, an actor trying desperately to make his cue. Rather than fall flat, that scene came to be the heart of the show. Effort toward an ideal.

15. Every time we go out we fail. We are at a moment in our collective history when change has become a necessity. New methods of living and learning and being can no longer be the province of the avant garde or a select group of Utopians. Creative solutions have become an imperative. To each of us.

16. In 2005 we mounted Sink. Sank. Sunk…, a show that worked in most every way. The show started with action in each corner of the park, convened in the center for its body, and ended along the river bank, where a funeral for one of the characters floated by. Ping Tom Park sits between the river, the 18th street bridge, a commuter train, a freight train and the ‘el.’

17. Woven into the performance, then, was acknowledging the interruption of traffic on each of those thoroughfares. The response to the ‘el’ was to stop whatever they were doing and raise their hands in a longing gesture of ‘hello.’ It was the hopeful wave a child at a passing train, full of the fruitless desire to connect.

18. We did this for weeks as we rehearsed. It became instinctive. Even in production meetings we’d all stop whatever we were doing to stand and wave. On the final evening of the final performance the performers stood for the fruitless, but hopeful wave and saw in the train windows, pasted cardboard hands waving back. It was a beautiful moment. My favorite ever. The connection was made.

19. Creative solutions are only possible if failure is embraced. Nothing new will be found without first evoking the distinct possibility of failure. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

20. This is my son. He, like most of us, is encouraged at every turn to avoid failure. On his all important standardized tests it is quantifiably better to not know than to venture a guess. A wrong answer is minus points, whereas a blank space, no effort, is accounting neutral. Look at him, he’s scared out of his mind and fervently patriotic. I fear he’s a perfect Republican stooge.

So this is a cry to fail. To try and to fail. And to endorse failure, to applaud effort. Fear of failure keeps us locked in to the current way. Right now, better to see one another pointing somewhere with promise, even if the directions are unclear, than to disappear into our bubbles. We must reduce fear and increase care. Embrace failure. Relish it. Applaud it. Someone’s trying.

Thank you.