Writing

On Collaboration

OR Anti-Interdisciplinarity, Anti-Collaboration, Anti-Interdisciplinary Collaboration

27 November 2022

I can perhaps think of no more defining terms of the current generation’s artistic pursuits and preoccupation (outside of the concept of “immersive” work, but we’ll leave that one aside for the moment) than the concepts of interdisciplinarity and collaboration. These ideas are totally dominant over our current artistic milieu. When theatre directors, playwrights, composers, choreographers, or even visual and multimedia artists talk about their work, one would be hard-pressed to get through the discussion without hearing these terms dropped a handful of times. This interest rides along a continuum from younger, emerging (or, pre-emerging artists since the concept of the emerging artist is another essay altogether) to very established, commercially successful, and even mildly famous artists. With a background in sound design and composition as well as devised and Avant Garde theatre, I am often asked to join projects of this nature. Generally, they are sold to me using these very terms. The lead artist describes in detail their intention to work very collaboratively with me (and in many cases a handful of others) to create something that is not quite theatre, not quite dance, not quite sound, but something that exists at the merger between many of these disciplines. I also used this same kind of description to pitch projects of my own to friends when I was doing more devised theatre work in New York. And yet, almost every time I engaged in or led a project of this nature, the process was rarely as egalitarian, collaborative, or interwoven between forms as imagined. On one hand, this could easily be chalked up to me being a young artist who is predominantly working with young artists, all of us trying to find our own methodology and artistic voice. On the other, it speaks to a larger disconnect between words and actions in the arts industry which continues to be exploited as collaborative and interdisciplinary works gains more and more mainstream traction.

Over the past 20 or so years countless theatrical and artistic forms that revolve around artistic hybridity and/or intensive collaboration have gone from off-off Broadway and the experimental art circuit to mainstream productions appearing at major institutions. These include, but are certainly not limited to, devised theatre (and its many offshoots), concert theatre, gig theatre, music theatre, dance theatre, movement theatre, multimedia theatre, and so many more. The goal of this essay is not to critique or dive into the popularization of these forms but rather to dissect some of the issues and concerns with them as a practiced methodology. However, it is important to understand that these hybrid and collaborative forms are no longer a radical fringe movement or even really part of the Avant Garde of the art world. Rachel Chavkin, artistic director of the TEAM which is a Brooklyn-based devised theatre ensemble (a type of theatre in which the work is built collaboratively through the rehearsal process rather than following a playwrights preset script), is a two-time Tony award winning Broadway director. Beth Morrison Projects, a company who describes themselves as “one of the foremost creators and producers of new opera-theatre and music theatre…” has now produced and premiered two Pulitzer Prize winning operas. Though these collaborative and hybrid forms may have once only been a concern of fringe or experimental performance, they are now an important part of the contemporary mainstream.

Anti-Collaboration

Despite the interconnected nature of interdisciplinarity and collaboration, I would like to start by addressing them separately. Collaboration is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the act of working with another person or group of people to create or produce something.” The difficulty of this term lies in its ambiguity. The nature of the working with or the something produced is not defined and thus collaboration can mean almost anything. One could refer to a performer who is hired to stand in a preset light and say one pre-written sentence with predetermined stresses and inflections as a collaborator. You could also use the same term to describe two co-writers of a work who might have had totally equal roles in the generation of a text. Though the nature of these collaborations would be incredibly different, both examples do qualify as a collaboration.

When dealing with such an overreaching term, how we define it as individuals and as a culture is of paramount importance. In our contemporary artistic landscape, I would argue that collaboration has become somewhat synonymous with a non-hierarchical (or not-as-hierarchical) artistic practice. This stems from the fact that most forms of performance in a Western context are steeped in a very hierarchical tradition. For much of Western musical history, a singular composer dictated a series of notes on a page and performers were asked to fulfill the composer’s vision of the music based on that notation. Likewise, in the theatre a playwright would dictate words on a page that actors were expected to follow.

Now, collaboration often implies the antithesis of such dictatorial artistic hierarchies. Instead of an overreaching artist telling you exactly what to do, making work collaboratively implies a sharing and exchange of artistic ideas between independent creative artists. Holly Holsinger employs the term very eloquently in this way in the Howlround interview, Creating Authentic Stories Through Collaboration. “I teach ways of creating physical performance and collaboration…Mostly, I teach students to think of themselves as creative artists, no matter what they’re doing in theatre, that they’re a collaborator with the script, with the character, with the director. They need to bring themselves and their imaginations to everything they do.”

Holly’s use of the term collaboration in this context is much more concrete than the actual definition implies. Collaboration to her involves thinking of oneself as a creative artist no matter their role in a production. The collaboration she describes with the script, character, and director implies a more fluid and equal conversation between artistic entities as opposed to the dictatorial and hierarchical relationships of the past. The positioning of anti-collaboration at the start of the section is in no way an argument for returning to the old hierarchical and often exploitative models of the past. Ideally, this kind of fluid conversation between artistic entities in service not of one person’s vision but rather to create the strongest work possible should become a mainstream artistic norm. However, this idealistic understanding of collaboration often runs into direct conflicts with a world and culture that remains stuck in hierarchical models and returns the concept of collaboration to its ambiguous and unclear definition.

The examples of this range from incredibly obvious and even trite to deep seated a far reaching. For one, even the most collaborative devised theatre companies maintain and advertise a deeply hierarchical structure. SITI Company in New York is one of the premiere devised theatre companies in the country. Their mission statement on their website describes the company as “ensemble-based.” It goes on to say that “SITI Company was built on the bedrock of ensemble. They believe that through the practice of collaboration, a group of artists committed to working together over time can have a significant impact on both contemporary theater and the world at large.” Yet, for their new production, The Medium, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in Spring 2022, “created by SITI Company” received the top billing while “conceived and directed by Anne Bogart,” the artistic director, was second. Much further down on BAM’s website, the design team was listed with no mention of the names of ensemble members in the credits. Further, the pull quote to provide hype for the production begins with “Bogart and her company…” immediately cementing the work’s hierarchy with Anne as the director at the top.

The understanding of collaboration as a conversation between creatives and the importance of the ensemble in the creation of work is severely undermined in the billing by emphasizing Anne Bogart’s role above and beyond the contributions of the other unnamed ensemble members. The matter of crediting or billing might seem trite, but I believe it is a larger reflection of our deep indoctrination into hierarchical models which actively push against the contemporary understanding of collaboration. Nowhere is this more apparent and potentially damaging than in the rehearsal process. I would know because I led many of these processes myself.

In undergrad I caught the theatre directing bug, hard. I was especially excited about collaborative, devised, hybrid, movement-drive forms of theatrical storytelling. I studied the work of Anne Bogart and other likeminded artists voraciously. After directing a few devised works at school, I eventually moved to New York to continue this practice. In New York, I attempted to push my practice away from the traditional hierarchy of theatre directing. While in my first few years, I might have asked performers or designers to work with me as a performer or a designer, I began shedding that language and adopting other terms: co-creator, ensemble member, deviser, team member, and of course, collaborator. A few years in, I took a stab at a project, eventually titled Decline and Fall, which I pitched to my creative team as “democratic.” Yes, I would ultimately be the director and steer the ship, but I wanted my core creative team of 5 to essentially co-create the work with me. We each had our own roles (writer, scenic designer, composer, etc) but we, along with the performers, would be able to have our say over each part of the production.

Little did I realize my ship was sunk long before it set off. Despite my attempt at pulling together a design team of equals, it remained my show in my head. I had come up with the idea and it was produced under the guise of the company I had created. Further, I was primary producer. While others predominantly focused on their artistic role, I was out finding meager amounts of money to pay to them for their contribution to my project. Everything about the larger production structure was hierarchical. Most importantly, I retained the role of “director.” Thus, I was the one actively leading the rehearsals, deciding what would be worked on and how it would be worked in the moment. Despite the hours and hours of conversation about the process, the show, the text, the movement, etc. that I had with the creative team, I was the one making decisions on the ground in rehearsal, and I insisted that this needed to happen in order to present a united front to the performers. Without this hierarchy, I argued, rehearsal would be far too confusing and inefficient. We simply wouldn’t get anything done. As expected, this project nearly collapsed at multiple junctures. We were able to pull something off with the skin of our teeth, but we all fell out artistically afterwards and that project launched a long artistic reevaluation process for me personally which ultimately brought me to CalArts.

One of the key issues with this piece was the disconnect between what I asked of the creative team and what I ultimately wanted. I wanted to direct the piece. I wanted to create the work that I had in my head and while I of course wanted input and help from my team, I wanted it to look and sound and feel like the vision I had for the project. I would argue that this in itself is not a bad thing. There can be other kinds of collaboration, often effective, in which there is a lead artist who has a clear vision and goal for a work and inspires others to aid in that goal. However, this was not my approach for this project. Instead, I asked a group of people to come on as fellow leads and take part in an intensely collaborative process with me. Because of the disconnect between what I was asking and what I, ultimately, was looking for, the artistic process became chaos. I understand that I hurt other team members and friends along the way and, to be fair, some of them also hurt me. In the end, so many compromises were made to accommodate different artistic personalities that the work looked and sounded almost nothing like the initial vision. I’m sure many others felt similarly. It was my last time leading a devised theatre piece.

Unfortunately, that’s far from my only example. Since pivoting more to sound design and composition for performance, I’ve watched countless other artists walk headfirst into the same trap I set myself during Decline and Fall. Sometimes their pitch is nearly as egalitarian and democratic as mine was. In one instance, I was asked to be part of another multi-individual lead artist team. Like in Decline and Fall, we were all responsible for our own roles while also forming the piece as a unit. Also like my own experiment, one of these roles had significantly more control over the artistic process than the others. Though the work was ultimately more successful than my attempt at this kind of collaboration, the process made significantly less effort in reconciling the various artistic perspectives. At times, it felt that my and some of my fellow “lead” artists’ concerns were not even being heard. Although we may have created the show together, it became increasingly clear that this was one person’s project, not the egalitarian co-creation it was pitched to be. Finding myself on the receiving end of this spectrum provided me with a greater sense of empathy for what my team went through on Decline and Fall. Acting as a creative lead on a project requires an immense amount of time, energy, and care. To discover that, despite this commitment, the things I cared most about were not given the appropriate time or energy in rehearsal was frustrating and disappointing.

In both of these examples the disconnect between how collaboration was discussed and how it was executed created a rupture in the process which ultimately effected the quality of work. While I am of course sympathetic towards artists excited about more democratic power structures or collaborative art-making, this excitement at times overshadows the reality of the artistic process which can potentially set projects and working relationships up for unnecessary hardship. While anti-collaboration serves as a fun and provocative title, I am not ultimately advocating against collaborating. Nor am I advocating against finding exclusively non-hierarchical models of collaboration. Rather, I feel that we need to re-evaluate our own relationships to collaboration and try to be more honest with what we truly want out of an artistic process. If it turns out a non-hierarchical model is something of interest, then it is on the originating artist to really commit to that model with the knowledge that their singular vision will likely shift dramatically and ultimately not be realized in the way they expect.

Anti-Interdisciplinary

The other part of the trap that I continue to watch other artists and creators walk into involves interdisciplinarity. For the purposes of this essay, I am utilizing the term “interdisciplinary” to describe work which melds different artistic disciplines together. Although the critiques of interdisciplinary art practice in this paper can potentially be applied to multidisciplinary or hybrid artwork as well, there is a distinct difference between the terms that is important to highlight.

Once again, starting with the dictionary definition feels pertinent. Interdisciplinary is defined in the Oxford English dictionary as “an adjective relating to more than one branch of knowledge.” Unfortunately, this is also rather vague in nature – how do the branches of knowledge relate to each other exactly? What separates truly interdisciplinary work from traditional theatre in which sound, light, movement, and speech all do relate to each other and play a role in the production? There is a further clue we can glean by investigating the prefix inter, which means between. While the term multidisciplinary refers to the utilization of several elements (inherent in the “multi” prefix), interdisciplinarity goes a step further. The prefix “between” implies not only the use of various forms, but also an investigation into the function of these forms. Interdisciplinarity questions how certain forms relate to one another structurally and dramaturgically. It implies a more detailed process for integrating forms into one another and, in practice, an interdisciplinary project should carve out a unique place for itself at the crossroads and intersection of different artistic genres and disciplines.

Given my background in theatre and music, I have worked on a handful of projects which have attempted an interdisciplinary approach between stage action and sound. Unlike film scoring, which has a clearer history and is rather defined in its function, scoring for live theatre is much less intuitive. Not only is striking an aural balance with the live, spoken, text far more delicate, but the interaction between live performer and soundscape is much more tangible since actors and dancers hear the music during performance. Given music’s power to dictate emotion, this element often influences their performance. On one hand, this can allow for a real collaboration (in the sense of fluid conversation between elements) which, if properly executed, can create more interesting and nuanced work. However, it also contains some serious pitfalls especially in situations where directors or choreographers have a limited understanding of music as a form.

The first of example I have for this kind of misunderstanding happened in New York when I was designing and composing music for an MFA thesis project. The playwright had written a highly poetic work and the director and writer were both interested in a kind of ever-present score to heighten the surrealist elements that situated the world of the play and ground the emotional journey of the characters. At the time, I had never worked on a project that asked for a full layer of underscore and I jumped at the opportunity.

In hindsight, this musical concept was doomed from the start. The director, playwright, and I were all attempting to create an interdisciplinary project between sound and music by using a traditional theatrical rehearsal process. We were all too inexperienced with creating this kind of work to understand that a layer of underscore could not just be dumped on top of pre-rehearsed material in the same way that sound design is traditionally brought into a process at the very end. For 80-90% of the process, the play was being staged in a silent vacuum without music and I was composing a dense soundscape in my room without actors speaking any text. When we attempted to put these elements together as we headed into tech, it became painfully apparent that the music far overpowered the performers. Rather than enhancing or enriching the text, it demanded the audience’s attention and made it difficult to literally hear the poetic and often soft-spoken text and even harder to comprehend the density of the words. In the end, about 90% of the music was cut. Not only was this frustrating on a personal level because it undid hours and hours of compositional work, but the final performance reflected none of the interdisciplinarity or hybridity that the director, writer, and I had discussed at the project’s inception.

In our talks during tech, the director expressed her regrets regarding the process. She mentioned the way the musical elements clashed with the poetry, stating that we would have needed far more discussion between myself, her, and the writer to flesh out how music interweaved with the dialogue. Additionally, rehearsal time would have been needed to work with music as essentially an extra character in the piece. At the time, I agreed with this analysis. However, in hindsight, even if these concerns had been addressed the hierarchical nature of a theatre rehearsal process (in which the text is most important and all other elements of production are in service to it) would have remained at odds with the interdisciplinary concept and use of music.

It was not until recently that I fully understood this disconnect. During my time at CalArts I worked on a project which planned on integrating a musical presence into the rehearsal process from the very beginning, a major step forward from the Columbia playwriting thesis. For this, I would attend a handful of rehearsals every week where I would try different musical ideas and create a composition based on trial and error in the room rather than unrelated ideas thrown on top of the production at the 11th hour. In many ways this was a much more deeply considered approach and I remain thankful to the director for engaging in it with me. However, divergent ideas as to the function and role of music in the production between myself and the director emerged during the process.

Despite some back-and-forth discussion, the traditional power structures of the theatre were reinforced in this rehearsal process. The music became another subservient element to the directorial vision rather than an active collaborative force. Though the work did have a heightened musical and aural footprint compared to most theatrical work, the piece ultimately remained a straightforward play. The project was certainly multidisciplinary as it utilized various artistic disciplines in process and practice. However, it did not explore a deep dramaturgy of sound and was not interested in situating itself between disciplines. While this may have been the director’s vision, it did not feel in line with how the project was pitched or explained to me, which, is not unusual in a professional context.

Like my critique of collaboration, anti-interdisciplinarity serves as a provocative title but does not disavowing interdisciplinarity as a concept. Rather, it advocates for a realistic reevaluation of interdisciplinarity within an artistic process. In a milieu in where hybrid, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary forms of art have become extremely prominent and almost expected of non-commercial work, this can be quite difficult to do. While maintaining an artistic hierarchy might generate strong hybrid or multidisciplinary work, it often falls short of interdisciplinarity because certain elements or disciplines will remain lower on the hierarchical totem pole than others. In the provided examples, sound and music was asked to adhere to a director’s mise-en-scene, which in itself was ultimately in adherence to the playwright’s text. This hierarchy cuts the collaborative impulse at the heels through delegation. It forces artists to stay in their own lane and focus on their contribution while receiving structured feedback from a singular visionary. As mentioned, this is not necessarily a bad way of creating work. Without some kind of hierarchy or power structure it is very easy for a project to spiral into disarray. A variety of competing voices and ideas all fighting for their individualized vision could both prevent any real artistic cohesion and create a variety of unhelpful standstills in the artistic process. However, this approach is certainly not interdisciplinary (or collaborative in the contemporary sense) and should not be conflated as such.

Concluding Thoughts: why be “anti” in the first place?

If this paper is not actually arguing against interdisciplinary or collaborative artwork, why position it as such? What is the use in being anti interdisciplinary collaboration if the critique is less about interdisciplinary aesthetics and more of a semantic argument regarding how we discuss and define work? This paper positions itself in the negative because it seeks to do away with the terminologies which in practice have run very far away from their culturally understood implications. More simply: we need to find a better way to talk about our work in practice and, more importantly, in process. Rather than focusing on buzzwords and vague concepts, we need to hold ourselves and each other to a higher semantic standard. Lead artists who are interested in collaborating with others in any capacity need to engage more honestly in understanding their own process as it relates to a specific work and to their artistic practice overall. From there, more transparency and stronger communication regarding the artistic process is needed at the beginning as new collaborators are brought onto a piece.

Then why are we holding onto these terms in the first place? What are they actually doing for us as an industry? Artists who are truly interested in these processes often have more specific methods of discussing their practice. Whereas artists who create in a hierarchical capacity should accept this and stop pretending to engage in something greater. This is why I propose doing away with these terms all together and finding more effective and transparent ways of communicating with each other and our audiences.

Unfortunately, the greater machinations of the arts industry cements the importance of these ultimately unhelpful terminologies. CalArts as an institution provides an excellent example of the institutional entrenchment of such discourse. In school, one of the primary funding opportunities for students is the interdisciplinary project grant. While it is understandable that the institute wants to foster interschool collaboration, the grant forces students to prove a project’s interdisciplinary credentials rather than placing value on the concepts and questions of a work. Rather than asking anyone to honestly investigate or dismantle the very entrenched hierarchical power structures that ultimately prevent interdisciplinary collaboration from occurring, the interdisciplinary grant asks artists to situate their often-hierarchical works into an inappropriate category. This leads to further confusion and generates an environment where everyone scrambles to situate their work this way because it is rewarded both financially and in social capital. Ultimately, it leads to a rupture of words and deeds, discussion of process and actual processes. To be against interdisciplinarity and against collaboration is not about avoiding each other as artists and staying in our lanes. Rather, it asks for a total reevaluation of how we discuss and value work.

CalArts and the interdisciplinary grant provide one small-scale example to a much larger trend within the arts industry. The popularity of collaborative and hybrid forms of work have created a general rupture of discourse which often leads to artists abusing each other’s time, energies, and work under the guise of collaboration. This is not to say it is the fault of these lead artists. Rather, it is a system which values the discussion and perceived value of an entity more than that entity itself. Anyone with a background in political or economic philosophy might recognize that this is precisely how capitalism works. It strips things of their actual value (i.e. the labor put into creating said thing) by assigning them to arbitrary dollar values based, in theory, on laws of supply and demand (which in practice are easily manipulated by marketing, advertising, promotion, and propaganda). A select few individuals seize the things, convert them into these dollar amounts, and dole out miniscule payments to the actual laborers in order to maximize their own profits at the expense of literally everyone else.

This paper provides one small example of how this larger system has infiltrated the arts. The arts have always provided people with a framework with how to perceive the world around them. We take our perceptions and infuse them into artistic works in order to create connections between each other and interweave ourselves into the greater fabric of human activity or what John Holloway describes as “the social flow of doing.” If the arts become more concerned with perceived value than actual doing, even if that value is not directly financial, then our own ability to relate to one another and perceive the world as an entity will be filtered through a capitalist lens. In turn, this entrenches capitalisms power structures and reinforcing the false and damaging myth that these structures are part of human nature. As young artists, we have the power to shift this perception, reallocate where we place social (and even financial) value, and undo the systems that have been forced upon us (in a very unnatural way). However, it starts with reevaluating our own relationships to ideas and concepts that we might hold dear. To find more effective ways of communicating and, yes, collaborating, with ourselves and each other.