If All Else Fails is a production by the well-known British theatre collective Forced Entertainment and explores the theme of failure and the role it plays in our lives. It’s performed by Cathy Naden, one of the founding members of Forced Entertainment, and dancer and performer Seke Chimutengwende, who’s a close collaborator of a.o. DV8 Physical Theatre. The piece is a dialogue of speech and movement, questions and answers, absurdism and irony.
The audience is presented with a series of characters and scenarios struggling with some form of failure. The show aims to challenge our perception of failure and explore how we can learn and grow from our mistakes. It encourages us to embrace failure as an inevitable part of life and see it as an opportunity for personal growth.
Using their unique technique on the cross section between storytelling and verbal improvisation, this new production – as many others in the long history of the group – is as much a tribute to the complexity of human existence as much as an ironic comment to its evanescence.
“[If All Else Fails] has a tight format: based on a few sentences, Chimutengwende and Naden keep changing infinitely, always neatly one by one, in which they keep questioning and stretching the meaning of their thoughts a bit further. This way, each statement gets looked at from all sides, gets questioned, turned around, and restored again.”- Marijn Lems, NRC
“Naden and Chimutengwende keep changing their sentences just a tiny bit: in words, intonation, and rhythm. It is interesting to hear how a sentence with such little change can get a completely new meaning.”- Juliette Georges, Theaterkrant