Embrace the failure inherent in chance success

If my unique experiences can be translated from my microcosm to a wider world view for you in order to draw some universal truths from them, so be it…

I spent 16 years as a professional touring performer with my own company. I’m still a performer, but I formed my first company when I was 22. We were a 3-man, modern dance-based, acrobatic, comedy group and remained as such for 16 years. Not only that but we also handled our business as a non-hierarchical collaboration. All humility aside, I built our business pretty much single-handedly for the first many years, finding agents, negotiating contracts, locating lost luggage, etcetera. Yes I had help from my colleagues and especially from one of my best friends, who accepted the self-appointed role of technical omnipresence for our group, explaining to me, “Paul, you don’t know how much you need a person to handle the group’s technical needs, so I will do this for you to prevent you from making the giant mistake of not having one ever again.” He saved me from myself.

Observation #1: With Hands-On Learning, the freedom to try and the possibility of failure are teammates, not opposites.

Everything I learned about the business of performing artists, I learned as the self-appointed manager of our group, and although I tried to find someone to mentor me and help me answer the hard questions, I couldn’t find one for one simple reason: the world of dance companies was all about being a 501(c)3 non-profit and we had chosen instead to be a for-profit venture. No dance companies operated the way we did, and no for-profit lawyers or accountants were familiar with our world of touring our art as a business. I just figured it out as I went along and, since only the easy choices are simple black and white ones, I often was unsure of which decision to take. While it was exasperating to not find someone to give me the advice I needed, in time I became the person I wish I’d found… I’d turned into the one who could be a mentor.

Observation #2: It is not completely up to you, so let people who are attracted to your work — your first allies — dictate (some of) the direction your work takes.

In spite of my on-the-job instinct development, sometimes one thing leads to another and you look back years later, recounting your tortuous path to success. For us it all started with our first application for a university award… a potential scholarship that came with a $5000 stipend, one winner in each category of theater, dance, film, music and visual art. All candidates had to submit one short video of their best work, which for us was the first dance we’d made together. We had a cinema major pal film us doing the dance and sent it in to the dance committee.

What followed was a bizarre series of coincidences that led us right to our niche in the business of the touring world: how should they categorize our work? You read my description above of the blend of styles in our work. Nowadays many groups fall through the cracks and can be labeled simply with one moniker or another, but this was 1987 and the dance committee said, “nice work, but it’s not quite dance” and sent it over to the theater committee, who said, “nice work, but it’s not quite theater.” Each category had a chosen winner and we were left flapping in the breeze, but they thought our work was quality so they sent our video to a performance art curator authority in NYC who said, “I don’t care what you call it, but give me their number and I’ll invite them to present it here.” Ultimately they invented the category of performance art in order to give us our recognition and a nice five grand award, PLUS we got our first gig in NYC!

Being part of a mixed-bag show turned into being one of three groups on another bill and then this helpful, supportive curator invited us for a weekend of our own. I learned how to contact agents and say, “we are currently seeking representation” and we got our first agent. We capitalized on one small success after another and spun our PR to fit our inevitable destiny among the lucky ones.

Our work won awards and we were invited to perform on stages and tv shows around the world: Letterman, Broadway, Seoul, Edinburgh, Tokyo, Paris, Jerusalem, Berlin, Santiago… the full time touring life of a performer in my own company.

Observation #3: The scale of your ideas will ultimately have to match what you want and what your audience can support.

Maybe we were in the right places at the right times, or maybe it could have gone in so many other directions had we accepted some of the gigs we turned down in favor of others. I wanted us to operate on the international circuit, and turning down local events for international ones meant making a bigger name in the larger pond. So our company created a strong show and traveled internationally, performing the best pieces we had as a “best of” style show. But I also know some former colleagues who have built a small empire in their town or county or state… folks whose celebrity status is cast in a narrower slice of the world, and earns a living generating local notoriety and paying for their homes and lifestyles.

A company that tours must travel a lot and make money by performing the show(s), and does not have to create a new show every time. A local organization trains students and offers a few different shows a year. The variety of the shows is about 2 things: a. new students doing the old material, or b. making up new material for the local audience.

That is why The Nutcracker Ballet can be done in one’s town every christmas, but the other shows throughout the season must be varied. Parents go to the nutcracker to see their kid grow into new roles, doing the same choreography others did before them. For the rest of the season, variety to the programs is a must if people are to buy seats.

Observation #4: Don’t rely on luck because it is not in your control. Instead, work on your talent, channel your drive and allow for the possibility that luck will show up.

An aspiring performer once asked the great male ballet dancer, Rudolf Nureyev how to become a successful artist, to which he answered as follows: (I paraphrase here)

“Successful artists need three things: luck, talent, and drive. If you have any two of those, you MIGHT become successful.”

I think this explains a lot. It answers a question we each have about why someone can be popular in spite of our thinking his/her/their work sucks. But this statement’s genius comes from another angle: We all know that if you’re gonna make it as an artist, you gotta be determined… and everyone could use a little luck thrown in from time to time, BUT the understanding that maybe you don’t even need talent at all?… that luck and drive might be all it takes to summon the success every artist thinks he/she wants?… that’s the ingredient that makes Nureyev’s words a universal truth.

The chance involved has everything to do with whether or not we even know ourselves and our situation well enough to suss things out, parse the factors and make the right choice. This is part of the beauty of the failure we all run from most of our lives… the stuff we’re not afraid of when we’re very small, and the stuff I want you to consider sloughing off at whatever age you are now.

Observation #5: The desire for success comes at a price and comes with conditions, which, like the fine print in an agreement, you don’t always quite understand.

My father often liked to remind me, “Paul, don’t wish for something too much, or you will surely get it.” I always knew it was talking to my misperceptions of the thing I’m aiming to get, the thing that in reality is rife with all the good and the bad of almost everything I life. But I can now also see that it pertains not only to things but to events and the choices I’m made that bring those events to bear. I have so often thought certain choices were one way and only much later can I see them differently.

Our company suffered a setback at one point resulting from opposing wishes for success. One of the members was in a committed relationship with a dancer who was not in our company and his lover’s wish for success brought their tumultuous situation to a point where our third member asked us to officially bring her in to our group.

What do you do in a situation like that? Walk away from the group you’ve been cultivating for years, whose touring business was finally bringing us enough cash flow, or cave to the pressure inflicted by of one of the co-directors? The 2 of us spoke a lot about the issues the 3rd was insisting on. We thought, “Perhaps the change in the company wouldn’t be too bad. Had we denied her inclusion, we’d be losing our friend along with the excellent chemistry we three had honed for years. And who would we find to replace him? In order to keep him, the other two agreed, albeit reservedly.

It was a disaster, resulting in his departure for some months, our cancelling shows, followed by his return, without her. And to top off the mess it made, we debuted a new routine at a prestigious NYC venue and got poor reviews, which our agent chastised me about, saying it required months on his part to undo.

We wanted our company to continue, the 3rd guy wanted his relationship to continue, and his lover wanted a shot at real touring to prestigious theaters in a professional dance company.

Had we gone the other way, and bailed on him when he made that unrealistic demand, would he have come back, or did it take his being in the middle of a bad circumstance he’d inflicted upon us for him to truly see it… and then return without her?

Observation #6: The research and the grind pave the way for the occasional moments of flow.

Over the years our formula for creating work changed. When we began we estimated that it took about 40 hours of rehearsal to create one minute of presentable dance. But later in our career we estimated that one minute of dance took us about 80 hours. We hadn’t gotten worse at creating, just more discriminating. We would make a bunch of new dances for a premiere in our hometown and maybe one or two of the routines (out of 10 or more new ones) would enter our repertoire. It got harder to accept new pieces into rep and took a longer time to make anything new.

But as anyone doing anything he/she cares about knows, it is not about length of time or how much crap in order to get an amount of quality product… it is about honing a worthwhile process, so where is the flow?

Here’s the final point of this missive I wish to impart… core things I know to be true: These tough choices are ahead of you when you begin your own venture. And the only thing I ask you is to ask yourself the following questions:

1. Who are you deep inside? Do you know yourself well enough to answer that?

2. What do you really want… and what do you want to say with your art?

3. Why do you want to say it?

If you can answer these, and if you can bear in mind the observations I’ve laid out above, you might truly have a shot at making something you’re proud of, regardless of how anyone else views your work.

It’s your work and the only opinion that ultimately matters is the only one you can never leave behind: your own.

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