Free Dance Performance: SWITCH: Post-Failure Potentials

SWITCH: Post-Failure Potentials reclaims failure through the moving body, interrogating what it reveals about our values, identities, and collective loyalties. The work critically examines how we both win and lose — physically, emotionally, politically, and socially — in a high-stakes performance process that is in direct conversation with the urgency and precarity of the current world. Inspired by martial arts tournaments, the context pushes limits and builds thresholds for audiences and performers. We are interested in making a work that gradually reveals its own rules, queering the binary relationships between failure and success, competition and collaboration, and performer and audience, through constantly shifting and reimagining its parameters.

This piece is deeply visceral and experimental as it dares to reimagine failure as a beginning, revealing bold new possibilities for queer futures, radical resilience, and collective transformation. The politics of values, identities, and collective bonds are central. Performers engage in high-stakes and high-risk contexts as the audience is invited into active spectatorship reminiscent of an Olympic event or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu match. Informed by Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, martial arts, improvisation, and contemporary dance, the work subverts binaries as it spokes into the power, politics, and intimacy of post-failure potential.


Presented by Velocity Dance Center through the Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation in partnership with ARTS at King Street Station, and featuring the SFD+I Professional Cohort.

Learn more: https://www.seattle.gov/arts/experience/arts-events?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D180347423