Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, and Elevator Repair Service

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Notes

1 ‘Girl Friday’ was the name given to me for a position I held at the head office of a department store. Its meaning is a female employee who completes multiple lower-skilled office tasks. For me, that meant running errands, cleaning the lunchroom, making labels, photocopying and sorting mail.

2 Part of my dissertation, ‘Failing to Succeed: A Dramaturgy of Failure in Performance’ speculates as to why Canadian Performance Studies discourses have largely ignored a poetics (and aesthetics) of failure in comparison to UK performance and scholarship. Generally, Canadian university theatre programmes don't offer formalized practice-as-research initiatives in their graduate curriculum at the Masters and Ph.D. level, which leads to a lack of encouragement towards process-oriented methods, non-disciplined performers and embodied research.