Things to remember while making work
Number six: Developing collaborative relationships takes time.
I have, for many years, been a fierce advocate for collaboratively devised theatre. Today that belief was challenged more profoundly than I thought possible.
I have had the great pleasure of a collaborative partner with whom I shared a certain mysterious connection. I'm not sure I could ever explain why we were able to make work together. We certainly had our disagreements but we always had faith in the other's vision.
Today I was reminded, very harshly, that you cannot jump into a room with strangers and expect that connection, or any fraction thereof, to be present.
We are trying to work together, but we have no idea how. We have no model to base ourselves on and no time to talk through the process before jumping in. If we throw out the old hierarchical structures, what replaces them? I had a method in my company in San Francisco but I'm having a hard time adapting it to these short projects.
We worked with a variety of artists from different mediums and had them all respond to the same stimuli - space. Then we asked them all to develop scenes in response. That scene could be anything, action, object, or music, as long as it had a beginning, middle, and end.
That way, each collaborator was responsible for a certain portion of the show, then we, the co-directors, wove the scenes together with theatrical action and from that characters and narrative began to emerge.
In these shorter projects, however, we're essentially being asked to create a whole piece in one scene.
So how do seven people make one scene?
Should seven people make one scene?
Can seven different sets of politics and tastes be made to fit together?
Today, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm having a bad day, I don't think this is wise, productive, or advisable. here's why:
Ideas rarely get the time they should to grow into something fruitful.
Groups are often forced to use a majority-rules democracy, which votes out good ideas simply because one idea has to win and one idea has to lose.
People are incapable, including myself, of hearing someone out completely before jumping in with their own variations or substitutions.
Ideas are extensions of our person and so it is nearly impossible not to take it personally when an idea is shot down.
People often sit at the table with different levels of investment, but assume everyone has the same level of investment.
Questions of style and politics rarely get the time they deserve - everyone has different thoughts on what's important but we don't take the time to address our differences.
Making decisions collectively is extremely difficult. When an idea is proposed and discussed and one person says "ok, can we agree on that?" and they get some blank stares, a yes, a no, and someone else seems to be texting..... what can you do?
(by the way - if any of my classmates are reading this - this is not my exact description of what happened today. it is a collection of things I've been thinking about since we started 5 weeks ago.)
this list could go on and on but I'll try to summarize by saying that if we persevere and develop these relationships over time, things will get better.
But today I really just feel like having a glass of wine and turning on the television.
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