ABSTRACT
Performance ethnography is well-established, focusing as it does on a live performance of some kind. This chapter begins by highlighting key concepts drawn from performance literature on misperformance and failure. It considers how they might apply in the context of performance ethnography by "staging" a dialogue with each other based on these ideas. It presents performance studies' theories of failure. Silence in performance, which is never entirely silent and stillness, which is never actually still performance ethnography. Intelligence, effective knowledge production and transmission, scholarliness, and mastery are all desirable traits to be demonstrated in order to "succeed" within research contexts. An honoring that communication is really hard work and that the most challenging dialogues demand passages of silence, for those engaged to process, reenergize, and recommit themselves to the ongoing process, the attempt to truly understand one another, oneself.
