The Bad Performance

by Orion Maxted and Diego Chamy

Performed on March 9, 2013 during the fundraiser event for the Month of Performance Art Berlin at Platoon Kunsthalle Berlin.

Our basic idea was to try to make a bad performance, though it was difficult to know how to go about this. In a lot of ways, the very idea of making a bad performance seemed a bad place to begin. No sooner have you started with the idea than you encounter an obvious paradox: a bad performance cannot set out to fail because, if successful, it somehow becomes a “good” performance. Beyond this, there was also the inherent questionability of the terms “good” and “bad”, not to mention the fact that such judgments usually reveal more about the conditions of judgment than about the thing being judged.

Nonetheless, the immediate badness of the bad idea only drew us closer to its charms. What intrigued us about the idea of The Bad Performance was that it exhibited many of the qualities typically associated with good performance practice:

· It's surprising.
· It's alchemical, turning something commonplace into something of special interest.
· It takes the mind on a strange conceptual journey.
· It embodies risk.
· It does not necessarily understand itself from the beginning.
· It violates taboos.
· It provides an extremely broad performance framework.

We also found that there is a genuine fascination with “bad” performance, not only in the popular imagination (as shown by the way performance art is portrayed in cinema), but also among performance artists. This was made clear when we posted a request for bad performance ideas on Facebook (itself a bad idea) and received nearly 300 responses in just a few days. It seems that artists themselves are all too aware of common performance pitfalls — not just to avoid them, but also because failed performances often reveal new possibilities and can provoke audiences in a way that successful performances sometimes cannot.

As we developed the piece, we realized that the paradox of bad performance was far from theoretical. On a practical level, we found things that at first seemed “bad” easily became “not too bad” or even “pretty good, actually” if one simply adhered to certain performance conventions, such as maintaining strong contact with the audience or a certain stage presence. We concluded that we must not only perform bad ideas, but perform them badly.

The performance opened with Orion undercutting the organizer’s formal introduction by entering the stage to say he was not ready. He returned to the stage a few minutes later to apologize (insincerely), before proceeding to dance badly – in a way that had no redeeming qualities – so much so that he got booed. It was strangely reaffirming to receive this feedback, but also a bit confusing. The performance was going badly, so was it going well?

We also wanted the audience to understand, at a certain point, that we were in fact trying to make a bad performance. So it was not just about making a bad performance, but about indicating this intention to the audience. Thus, in the second scene, Orion invited Diego, a badly planted “volunteer,” onto the stage. After enacting various clichéd performance actions (e.g., tying string to the audience), the following dialogue ensued:

ORION
...I know what you’re trying to do... you’re trying to make a bad performance.

DIEGO
Wait, that was my line...

We acted confused (bad idea) and took out scripts (bad idea) from our pockets and reread everything that had been done and said since the start of the piece until we got Diego’s line right.

DIEGO
(overacting)
...I know what you’re trying to do... you’re trying to make a bad performance.

ORION
Well, is it working?

This move, we hoped, would present the audience with a number of perceptual challenges and insist on a reconfiguration of its aesthetic criteria. By challenging the evaluation process in this way, we hoped to create conditions under which all judgment must necessarily be suspended, thus allowing a “beyond judgment” experience to flourish.

We continued by reading out various ideas for bad performances and realized some of them for the audience. For example, we presented a Skype performance that failed to engage the audience; we showed a few too many Facebook replies about our request for bad performance ideas; we made a performance about the Holocaust that turned on a bad pun; and we called the curator to the stage and, while playing “We Are The World,” we announced that we wanted to give back our artists’ fees as part of the fundraising effort. We also used a whistle to interrupt whatever we were doing in case it suddenly became good.

At the end of the performance, we left the stage and came back to bow more times than the audience was willing to clap. When everything was over, we came back yet one more time and read a text that, using complex philosophical jargon, tried to explain the performance.

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Photos by Arielle Bier (camera) and Johnny Chang (mobile phone).
Video by Vered Nethe.