Choreographers under pressure: dealing with failure

Robin Lamothe

What are the consequences of an unsuccessful piece on a choreographer’s career? As funding opportunities shrink across Europe, even minor failures become a major risk for dance companies and institutions. CN D Magazine investigates has asked artists and curators how they perceive and deal with failure – and how it reveals larger questions about longstanding inequities within the dance world. 

At the age of four, in a dance class, choreographer Soraya Thomas experienced what she now calls her “first failure.” The Franco-Mauritian artist remembers less the pas de bourrée steps than her ballet teacher’s insistent gaze, displaying a mixture of astonishment and condescension towards a brown body that didn’t fit in. “The dance world is not a welcoming place,” says Thomas. In that same studio, she discovered something else that would stay with her throughout her career: in dance, you only learn by failing. Technique is forged through fallen pirouettes, lost balance, and uncooperative muscles. Confronting one’s mistakes can become a method on the long road towards aesthetic excellence.

Professional schools and conservatories teach dancers to overcome their missteps, but they also sort out bodies based on what they consider to be deviations from the classical norm. Learning sometimes establishes an early relationship with failure as disqualification. For many future artists, failure begins with a shaky first relevé, a hurtful comment, a “you’re not cut out for this.” But once they leave school, failure ceases to be seen as a necessary part of artistic growth and becomes a professional liability. 

Thomas learned this the hard way in 2015 when she presented Barry n’est pas complètement blanc (Barry Is Not Completely White) in La Réunion, where she founded her company in 2011. The trio with whom she hoped to launch her career as a choreographer failed to take off, and she couldn’t really understand why. “Is timid applause, compared to a standing ovation, a failure?” she asks. A piece deemed a “failure” often manifests itself through a set of vague symptoms: sparse audiences, lukewarm reviews, rejected grant applications, or a sluggish performance schedule. And faced with the lack of feedback from theater programmers, choreographers do not always have a clear explanation.

For Jessica Fouché, cultural institutions that urge dance professionals to be ever more “daring” and “innovative” fail to appreciate the consequences of such risk-taking. “Artists are encouraged to be bold, but a half-empty theater can become an argument to question the artistic direction of a venue or the sustainability of funding,” explains the programmer and former co-director of Les Brigittines, an art center dedicated to contemporary choreography in Brussels. 

However, sometimes failure to appeal to the public is down to small details. “Sometimes when you program a piece you’ve seen on video you realize once you present it that the setting doesn’t suit it,” adds Fouché. A single missed opportunity can therefore have dire consequences for artists, especially those in the most precarious situations. In the current context of dwindling public funding for culture, choreographers who juggle multiple roles and low-paying activities (workshops, arts education, administration) are seeing the time they devote to artistic research cut short. This is pushing some dance makers to give up altogether.

Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic, Benjamin Coyle’s health collapsed. “This is it” was the line of dialogue that concluded La Séance, his latest piece, in 2021. “It was prophetic,” says the 35-year-old choreographer. “For me, failure was nervous exhaustion, a body that became a machine.” Facing financial difficulty and what he terms “institutional violence,” the German-English artist, now based in Berlin, embraced a new career path: occupational therapy, a practice that helps people suffering from physical, psychological, or social distress to become more independent through everyday activities. He now celebrates the “small daily successes” that dance no longer allowed him to achieve, although he says that he lives with a lingering sense of “an underlying fear that is always present” when he thinks about his long-term break from making art.

“Artists are encouraged to be bold, but a half-empty theater can become an argument to question the artistic direction of a venue or the sustainability of funding” Jessica Fouché

The Collectif ÈS, composed of Émilie Szikora, Jeremy Martinez and Sidonie Duret, who are now the co-directors of the National Center for Choreography in Orléans, describe failure as a subjective concept. For Szikora, the possibility arose in 2018 when a substantial funding request for their company was denied: “It put our entire economy under strain.” For Martinez, it began in the body: “The first calf injury is when you realize you’re getting older.” For Duret, it can appear in the collective’s relationship dynamics: “Working as a trio means you strive for symbiosis. But sometimes, no agreement can be reached. That’s when failure can occur.” Martinez talks about the difficulties of touring their performance Fiasco, created in 2023: “A programmer refused to present it simply because he didn’t like the title. It wasn’t marketable enough.”

It’s undeniable that failure does not carry the same weight depending on who you are and where you come from. As Thomas explains, “When I present my work in mainland France, I feel like a failure when it comes to promoting it – not because of its content, but because art from French overseas territories tends to be looked down upon, with a perception that is biased by their expectations.” Dance is no exception to the observation, made by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his 1989 book The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, that the permission to fail is a social privilege. Some artists can fail without losing their place, such as well-known cisgender white men who are part of legitimate networks, while those who do not fit this norm are required to be flawless. “My failure has never been technical,” adds Thomas. “It has always been linked to the way my body is perceived, as well as the political geography with which it is associated.”

American philosopher Judith Butler has written about the fact that vulnerability is never purely individual – it is produced, distributed and reinforced by social contexts and political policies that tacitly shape our individual ability to take risks and absorb their potential consequences. This shows up in the dance world, which tends to accept, and even embrace, symbolic or aesthetic experimentation, doubt, and hesitation, while more concrete hurdles – financial, physical, geographic – can become professionally disqualifying.

Failure is no longer part of the work, nor a tool for research; it has become a criterion for distinguishing those who are able to keep searching from those who cannot afford to fall. Dance could once again become what it knows how to be: an art of imbalance, of evasion, of the not-yet. A space in which fragility is not a flaw, but a mode of being. For what threatens dance today is not the fall itself, but the fear of falling.

Trained in the CNSMD de Lyon, Robin Lamothe is a dancer and choreographer whose career has evolved at the intersection of artistic creation, cultural leadership, and critical writing. He is currently Director, Pôle culturel de Chirongui (Nationally accredited venue for art, childhood and youth) in Mayotte island. His professional trajectory spans roles as head of development, curator, administrator, and consultant, through which he has collaborated with National Choreographic Centers (Centres Chorégraphiques Nationaux) and other publicly funded institutions across mainland France, Mayotte, and La Réunion, as well as within diplomatic frameworks and European cooperation networks. Alongside his institutional work, he is an author and dance critic, contributing to Springback Magazine, Dance Context Webzine, and Mouvement.

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