Permission to Fail Granted

“Failure is not an option,” as the famous tagline from Apollo 13 goes. For the group of close-knit Westville friends who put on Permission to Fail, a series of monthly open-mic performance events, failure is not even recognized.

According to Travis Carbonella, a Westville-based videographer and co-founder and emcee of Permission to Fail, the series was hatched around a kitchen table at 2:30 a.m. with friends performing for one another, amid much hilarity. Carbonella said he challenged friend Hannah Hudson to perform away from the comfort of the kitchen table and even promised to find a venue for her and other friends to share their art with a broader audience. The very next day, Carbonella approached Manjares Cafe, who welcomed the idea, and Permission to Fail began.

Billed as ​“a night of stage performances featuring you and others,” Carbonella was clear about the event’s rationale from the beginning: ​“As artists we don’t start projects because we’re always waiting for the most opportune time or we don’t finish a project because we always revisit it. This creates a deadline. It creates an event where, it doesn’t matter — you cannot screw up if you can’t fail! That’s what this is all about.”

Since September it has been presented in Manjares Cafe and Lyric Hall.

PTF features a ​“pot luck & wine,” helping create a social, even familial atmosphere before anyone takes the stage. A modest event fee helps pay for the space rental and limited advertising. Adding another layer of interest during last Saturday’s event were several vendors located in an anteroom, offering samples that included chair massages and handcrafted organic deserts and foods.

Part coffeehouse and part hootenanny, each Permission to Fail is subtitled with phrases like Permission to Play and Permission to Dream. Last Saturday’s installment, Permission to be Amazing, showcased some regulars, but there were also new performers from as far away as Brooklyn and Queens, a testament to the event’s growth.

Carbonella and event co-organizer Thema Graves have been refining the Permission to Fail description.

“It has a new tagline,” Carbonella told Saturday’s audience. ​“Permission to Fail is a community at-play exercise,” a characterization that met with approval.

New Haven Review publisher and Westville resident Bennett Lovett-Graff said he played a previous PTF event as a way to transition from playing guitar privately to playing publicly. ​“PTF,” he said, ​“is not for the jaded. All the acts are from the heart — and so, too, is the audience’s response.” Graf also noted that ​“PTF is one of the few community-run (rather than college-run) open mics that is open in format: not just songs, not just poems, not just stories told on stage, not just theater of the absurd — it’s anything that a like-minded community might appreciate in a shared space for one night.”

One of the onstage presentations included an informational video by Hannah Proch, owner of Maitri Massage LMT, and Graves, who is a reiki master. They were seeking support for their humanitarian and educational venture, Maitri Body Without Borders Peru 15, through an online Gofundme campaign. The pair hope to attend the Healing House, a place for growing a global community of healers in Cusco, Peru, and replicate the Healing House infrastructure upon their return to New Haven.

Among the many moments of lighthearted play during PTF performances are ways to learn about people we sometimes know only through the prisms of their jobs or roles in society. Stephanie, a single mother, student, and popular local barista, bared her soul with poems she had written about the drug-challenged father of her daughter, and the untenable situation that gave rise to her painful decision to leave the relationship. There was also a poem about child abuse and lost innocence. On this given night, there were no children in the room except the one whose voice echoed from the past.

Your dirty skin on my juvenile body
Your nasty fingers on my virgin skin —
Your old breath
wanting to steal mine; filled with youth and beauty —
Your body pressed upon mine as I lay there like a corpse,
for 40 seconds I can’t breathe
but that’s not enough time to end it all.

A somber hush rolled over the audience. It was not entertainment, but it was as real as it gets. Through her words, many of us glimpsed the reality of the person who took our breakfast orders and poured our coffee — always with a broad smile. She descended from the stage to hugs of support, tears, and the warm embrace that is Permission to Fail.

The next Permission to Fail event will take place on May 16. For more information, visit the PTF Facebook page.