Failure, by Internet
Channel: Diego Chamy
Date: 2011-05-20

Failure is one of Internet's first ever performances. The play was written for an evening based on the idea of failure, which is ironic since Diego didn't show up.

Written by Diego Chamy and Siân Robinson Davies.
Performed at Testing Grounds series at South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell, UK.
February 26, 2011

sites.google.com/site/internetthewebsite/
www.sianrobinsondavies.com
sites.google.com/site/diegochamy/

Review by Corinne Felgate:

With its myriad of multi--function, pseudo spaces, South Hill Park, was the location for the first event in Testing Ground's 2011 programme, conceived around the concept of Failure. [...] Sian Robinson Davies took the mic and rabbit-in-the-head lights style, declared that her collaborator Diego had not arrived and she didn't know what to do. Appealing to the audience, she began to muse on the possibility that he had done so deliberately as he was prone to be "a bit dramatic sometimes". Two minutes in and bam, half the audience are eating out of her hand, whilst the air was simultaneously tainted with latent hatred from the other half.  

Luckily, (so the audience is led to believe) the performance had been previously scripted and an audience member duly volunteers to play the part of Diego, who turns out to be something of a comic genius, delivering the lines devoid of emotion of any kind.  

At one point, Robinson Davies displays a knowing awareness of mounting audience tension, taking the mic to them to ask if they are finding the performance boring. This direct addressing of the audience along with her exaggerated passivity is a moment straight out of Michael Haneke's Funny Games. The audience's responses skirt the question of boredom, testifying to feelings of support and cynicism in equal measure. 
Robinson Davies then proceeds with an Oscar worthy depiction of a kind of Zen damsel in distress, neatly framed as one of those good people that bad things happen to. And in an almost criminal helping of cuteness, the resulting saccharine sheen pulls the wool over even the most hardened cynic's eyes.

The audience duped, Robison and Chamy's tightly sewn up, heavily scripted piece runs wild. The script is a performative essay, a true manifestation of Searle's 1969 Speech Acts. Boredom is discussed to evoke Boredom. The words need to be performed, in order to have meaning. The head-spinning number of permutations of these meanings are played out and looped with a push and pull between the collaborators to make Becket proud.  As Mac-clad twenty-something after Mac-clad twenty-something enters, proclaiming to be Diego, the penny drops that it's all a lie. There is no delayed flight, no kind audience members who stepped in, and no being thrown in at the deep end; the failure is an utter fabrication from start to finish.

The product of their work together is in many ways a re-contextualisation of one of Andy Warhol's deconstructions of 50's Hollywood.  Ultimately Chamy and Robinson Davies have created a deconstruction of contemporary live art, and just like Warhol, it induces anger, embarrassment and respect in equal measure, and mass-man does not thank them for it. They do things badly, very well indeed.

Chamy and Robinson Davies' approach to failure evokes that of Soho's late Dandy, Sebastian Horsley. A man who contrived to be a living personification of failure -- the ultimate fuck up, who even failed at the stunt he is most remembered for -- his own crucifixion.  Just as Chamy and Robinson Davies eloquently demonstrate, playing the loser makes you a winner. To proclaim yourself a failure prevents others from doing so, and this is the essence of their performance.

With more doppelgangers than the poster for Being John Malkovich, a script that makes Waiting for Godot look like a chat in a lift, Failure is an essay that can only have been a performance. Robinson Davies' Machiavellian delivery ensures that there are no failures here, only perfection. The audience inevitably ponders,  "Isn't this total shit? " and like Warhol, quizzed about the pornographic nature of his films, is told, "Yeah . . . . isn't it great?"