Failure in Performance: Failure, Feminism and A Third Thing
Beginning with the Letter F
Brogan Davison
Hugarflug annual conference on artistic research
11. - 12. September 2025
Iceland University of the Arts
My research explores failure as a subversive strategy within artistic practice, framed through a feminist lens and grounded in over a decade of work with my long-term collaborator, Pétur Ármannsson, as the duo Dance For Me. It examines failure not as an endpoint but as a generative force, asking: what are the redeeming qualities of failure in performance and beyond? Can failing reframe our political, artistic, or everyday realities?
Using my own trajectory as an artist transitioning into the world of academia, I write from a personal perspective of my own failing to sustain a career as a performance maker. I reflect on the external forces that shape internal conditions and impact both personal and professional lives. Combining personal narrative, pedagogy, and performance, the project blurs the lines between artistic practice and academic discourse—allowing each to inform and destabilise the other—while offering insight into the experiences of independent artists working in Iceland in the twenty-first century.
Brogan Davison
Choreographer Associate Professor at the Iceland University of the Arts, program director of MA in Performing Arts programme.
Brogan Davison is a British choreographer and performance maker with an MA from DAS Theatre (Amsterdam University of the Arts, 2019) and a BA in Dance Theatre from Trinity Laban (London, 2010). In 2013, she co-founded the award-winning collaboration Dance For Me with Pétur Ármannsson. Their debut project, Dance for me, gained international recognition, and they have since presented work at over sixty venues, including Mousonturm (DE), BIT Teatergarasjen (NO), and Dansehallerne (DK). Brogan is Co-Artistic Director of Reykjavík Dance Festival and Associate Professor at the Iceland University of the Arts, where she leads the MA in Performing Arts programme.