On Failure
The foyer of FLING Physical Theatre is warm and bright against the winter cold. A halo of light, a bubble of voices, and the scent of warm food greet me as I walk across the grass. The audience is gathering of the eighth performance of Failure by Beth Lane and Patrick Meessmann - FLING’s first ever professional work.
As usual under Executive Director Gabby Rose, FLING has employed no half measures. In partnership with aerial experts Legs on the Wall - a fellow NSW physical theatre company - FLING has made a work that sees its dancers fastened via a rope to the ceiling, or colliding with an airborne dancer from below. As with previous works My Black Dog and After, movement is accompanied by monologue and dialogue scenes. But it is their 2024 show The Tent that springs most readily to mind - half a dozen performers in a FLING Studio transformed by rigging, where the movement is given meaning by thoughtful scripting.
The paradox of Failure, as a show, is that it is a stunning success. It is the introduction of locally created and produced professional dance work to the Bega Valley. It highlights local talent and has attracted interstate artists, with Jacqui Maida and Honey Stoové debuting with the company. It bridges youth and professional collaboration with three emerging artists, formerly of FLING company, on their first industry contract. It even sold out a two-week season in a regional setting.
Lane and Meessmann’s show is crystal clear on what Failure represents but less clear on what failure represents.
A failure establishes its stakes through three core elements. The first is the clarity of the task or game. For instance, one might vow to stand on one leg for three minutes, where placing another part of the body down represents a fail. The next is the consequence of failure. In live performance this is usually provided by the social pressure of an audience, but in other contexts might be a punishment, having to do the task again, or the withholding of a reward. Finally, there is the visibility or acknowledgement of failure, without which the game does not work. Think about umpires in sport or children admitting they were tagged in a game. Failure at times lacks this clarity, the sense of calling oneself out when unsuccessful, instead asking each audience to define their own boundaries.
The show essays a range of perspectives. Early on, in perhaps my favourite scene, four performers sheepishly shuffle about on stage, perennially on the cusp of speech but unable to form a word. It’s a state universally recognisable, most obviously from public speaking but also the confrontation of a blank page or the aftermath of an inappropriate comment. The transmission of this feeling is purely physical. So too are the more spectacular scenes of the show, for example the first time we see a cast member elevated on a harness. Christopher Wade spirals into the air above us, trailing a black shroud behind him like an ethereal cloak. Then there are the spoken portions, often utilised in calmer moments, either describing the movement or - at their best - sharing a personal narrative of failure in everyday life.
The show never quite articulates what physical failure is. Some of the verbal material is strong, directly injecting to the audience that specific feeling of shame infused with self-loathing and a trace of wry humour. But the physical material is executed very well. It raises the question: what is failure, really? Because a slapstick phrase of pitfalls and collapses, rehearsed to perfection, reads as success.
At the risk of falling prey to self-serving semantics, to fail is to set out to achieve something and fall short. The cast of failure do not fall short, rising to meet a series of challenging sequences and scores.
In the parlance of the gym, to ‘go until failure’ is to undertake a series of repetitions of the same movement until the body cannot execute another. Over time, this strengthens muscles so that more reps can be completed. Undoubtedly, the cast of Failure undertook this process, developing new skills individually and as an ensemble. But something has happened, perhaps at the very end, one or a combination of the following:
The choreographers culling the parts that didn’t work, or
The team paring back the reps until it was just within achievability, or
The cast stepping into that final mile only once the performances had begun.
What’s tricky as an audience is that we don’t see behind these scenes. We see the theatrical scenes, finished. Certainly still alive and challenging and engaging, but complete and doable. Of course, this criticism is impossible to please because on some level we want to be wowed, we want that feeling at the ringside or stadium when bodies like ours reach beyond what we can imagine our own body doing. We don’t want the show to be a failure. So how can it explore failure?
When we see the group pausing on one leg, one cast member hopping twice to regain his balance, is this failure (to remain still) or success (in adapting to remain upright)? During a complex ‘mirror trio’ - two dancers in harnesses, oriented to opposite corners, each supported and interweaving with two others - as the trios fall out of unison with each other, is this failure? When a dancer swings wildly in the harness, bracing hands on the ground to come to a shuddering stop across the floor, is this a failure to break cleanly or just the efficient execution of that difficult action?
We don’t know because these things, unlike speaking to a crowd or revealing our feeling to a crush, are outside of our bodies’ knowledge. At times, amongst the glorious carnival of it all, I craved moments of simplicity in action. Where we could recognise a balance, push, or acceleration, and notice if it became a fall, collapse, or stall. I’m sure these are happening all the time, but because the cast can adapt so well - displaying a facility of both technical skills and deep listening at a professional standard - we miss them.
It contrasts with a work in progress showing I saw recently, Mothership by Pat Toh Ling. The work, exploring climate resilience with sections built around the display and limits of physical strength, built on earlier developments by Ling and Jenni Large. Large is one of the masters of stakes on stage, establishing unspoken rules with clarity and making the difficult immediately comprehensible - think of Wet Hard Long with its six-inch heels on a flooded tarkett. In Mothership, two dancers wield stacks of 1-kilogram weights, performing repetitive motions and gradually adding each dumbbell. There are six lying at each dancer’s feet, and every person in the room is crystal clear on the dramatic question: can they continue this repetition without faltering? It matters less whether or not they do fail on any particular performance, what’s important is that the setup leaves no room for doubt.
In its defence however, Failure is a show that grows upon rewatching. Indeed, this was encouraged by the traverse seating arrangement, and directly recommended by FLING staff. Many audience members did return, and thanks to a complementary ticket I was able to see the show a third time. Reading the program, it becomes apparent that Lane and Meessmann are interested in “the performance of failure”¹ rather than its actual existence on stage. More so than the explicit failure which I have set out above, the choreographers tasked themselves with exploring ambivalence and “mess”². As one rewatches Failure, the layers peel back. The slapstick combat phrase grew to be one of my favourites, realising that “the playful rebellion of embracing a failure is the art of the gag”³. In the subtle discrepancies that played out each night, rendered very close to us due to the setting of the studio, we could determine which adjustments were intended and which were small failures that the dancers would subsequently work to eliminate. In fact, perhaps the show is designed to subvert critiques like this one, a system of thinking which descends from a kind of formalist perfectionism.
If this all sounds harsh or nit-picky, it is only because the production value and performance skill of the show is so high that I find myself searching for the failures. For as long as I have seen their shows, FLING has been making youth art of such a high calibre, one of the big fish the sector looks up to. This jump into the professional realm - a bigger pond - is emblematic of the company’s vision and ambition. As a supporter and frankly a huge fan of FLING, one way I can help is by interrogating this work as I would any other professional company. Perhaps at the end of the day Failure is just an imperfect title for a work which, in every way that matters, is a success.
¹ Lane, B & Meessmann, P, 2026, FAILURE program, printed pamphlet, FLING Physical Theatre page 3
² Lane, B & Meessmann, P, 2026, FAILURE program, printed pamphlet, FLING Physical Theatre page 3
³ Lane, B & Meessmann, P, 2026, FAILURE program, printed pamphlet, FLING Physical Theatre page 3
