Failure – Feeling It, Knowing It and Working With It

with Emma Jayne Park

Talking about failure is fashionable – but what does we mean? Rejection? Bad reviews? No audience? Losing friends? Doing harm?

This workshop aims to dig deeper than failure tropes, reject the language people learn to write in evaluations and move beyond patching things over with a ‘growth mindset’ to really explore what failure feels like, how that differs for everyone and how to hold those feelings. We will aim to use our feelings of failure as information that can inform our career choices, practice, and evolving view of the world.

The research that underpins this has been evolved between Emma and Eoin McKenzie, who initially met as part of the PUSH PLUS Failure Lab in 2019 and worked together as Failspace Champions as part of the AHRC Funded project Cultural Participation: Stories of Success, Histories of Failure.

ABOUT EMMA JAYNE PARK
Emma has been called a dancer, theatre-maker, collaborator, facilitator, movement director, dramaturg, intimacy co-ordinator, advocate, activist and occasional drag king. They’re not fussed about titles, instead they focus on interrupting conventional/ inherited expectations and using physicality as a tool for closing the gap between ideologies and everyday actions. Their work is a series of overlapping explorations of failure, belonging, intimacy and euphoria. It always begins in the body but manifests in various forms; including site-responsive, intimate and durational performance, curated conversation spaces, strategic consultation and cultural policy, international cultural relations, and creating chaotic community dance parties.

Working under the moniker Some Kind of Chaos, Emma has worked locally, nationally and internationally from a base in rural Scotland for the past fifteen years. They are a recent recipient of the Magnetic North Seed Fund and the Working Class Artists Commission, through a process designed and awarded by artists for artists.