One of our most fundamental images of failure is the fall. We could trace this to the Old Testament, but we have no intention of doing that here. Falling evokes the precarity, uncertainty, and danger of the world we inhabit, circumscribed by post colonialism, late capitalism, and so many structures that disrupt our balance.

Falling feels inevitable. The question, then, becomes, what happens after the fall? We work with this inquiry through a series of circumstances and hypotheses, simultaneously interrelated and distinct. We might fall into reverie. Or we might fall through the cracks of colonial oppression. If we have the tricks and the tools, we might bounce back from the fall. And of course, the fall might be fatal.

Failure ultimately emerges as a resistance strategy, an aesthetic manifesto, and a technique for living. Multiplying the afterlives of falling, we trouble singular narratives, opening new ways of understanding where a fall might land us, or not.

Table of Contents

Equipment for Living
Waiting for Good-Dough
Surviving the Fall
Fatal Falls
Media Index


This is a course project of DRA3904 Performing Failure - Theories on Perfection and the Sublime.
Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto.
Instructor: Antje Budde. TA: Monty Martin. Fall 2015.