On Collaboration….or not
Article by Anaïs Bouts.
Anaïs lives in London and works internationally as a performer and choreographer.
After completing a degree in Philosophy (2000), she graduated in Dance Theatre from the Laban Centre London (2005), where she was awarded the Simone Michelle Award for outstanding achievements in choreography.
She is a founder member of MIKS (www.miks.org.uk ), a dance theatre collective interested in collaborative processes and alternative states of performance.
Anaïs was recently awarded the Bonnie Bird New Choreographers Award, to pursue her artistic career as a choreographer.
Recent works include: n+1 (2007) with MIKS; Burlesque (2007), a collaboration with filmmaker Tim Shore for Capture5 Awards ;Inventário (2007) with Joclecio Azevedo, Portugal; Only On Mondays (2007) with MIKS; Things Behind The Sun (2006), a Leche Commission for EDge.
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On Collaboration…or not
Tonight I went to a talk at the ICA with my friend and MIKS colleague Sara Lindström. The talk was entitled ‘The way we work… Collaboration’, and its outline on the ICA website was as follows:
From collaborations to collectives, strategic partnerships encourage the solitary creator to engage with a potentially stronger proposition. Are we diluting our individual expression or are we simply expanding our resources and knowledge transfer? In the current artistic climate, patchworks of people are ever-increasing. Consequently, how long before the common objective is crowded and the patchwork unravels? Is individuality lost in the process, or are there ways to ensure successful collaborations? Join us to discuss the past, the present and the future of collaborations.
Five artists (Tamiko O’Brien, Mark Dunhill, Moritz Waldemeyer, Oonagh O’Hagan, Matthew Stone and Robert Bidder) had been invited to talk about their individual works involving collaboration, and discuss this peculiar form of artistic practice.
Both Sara and myself came out of the talk very disappointed, as none of the people involved in the talk (which looked more like a showcase for individualities to present their work than a panel discussion on collaboration) managed to address the questions and issues we were eager to talk about: the notions of authorship and ownership; the practicalities of working together with a group of people, from the beginning to the end of a project; how people divide and share responsibilities; how artists manage (or not) to make compromises on their artistic views and own aesthetics…
Tamiko O’Brien and Mark Dunhill, who work together, introduced the talk by briefly presenting their link with collaboration (which unfortunately on that evening was nothing more than a webpage link www.collabarts.org) and by giving a short historical background to collaboration within the arts and more generally within a socio-political context. Then most of the artists invited exposed their own work within a timeframe of 10 minutes each…and that was it! No collaboration amongst the artists themselves during the talk, as it was announced at the beginning by Mark Dunhill, and no sign of collaboration as such within their speech. Matthew Stone, maybe, started to raise questions more closely related to the core of our talk, about how we actually collaborate and what it means practically. He was the first and only one to talk about the processes artists go through rather than only focusing on their final product. Robert Bidder also, in his own way, was closer to what I was expecting to hear about, as he described what collaborating meant for the group of people who formed the Mentalists, although he remained quite vague and in the end still focused on what was done rather than HOW.
After the talk (which didn’t allow any time for discussion or questions from the audience), we were invited to share a glass of wine with the artists and the rest of the attendees. Sara and I talked to Mark Dunhill and Tamiko O’Brien about our frustrations regarding the talk, and we finally started the debate, delving deeper into what should have been at the heart of the discussion from the very beginning. Mark and Tamiko talked about the 3rd person or entity that occurs when two people start making work together. I mentioned how the work I do collectively with the other members of MIKS is somehow both very familiar and alien: I share the responsibility for it, but it’s not resulting from my own creative mind only, therefore it has an extra layer of meaning which will never be completely mine, and which I accept as such.
Collaboration needs as a base the sharing of a common ground. We start from a common concept that we build together, then we define a methodology, on which all the various aesthetics and artistic visions of the collaborators start aggregating, often randomly and anarchically. This aggregation becomes a mixture that is neither an individual vision nor the simple sum of each artist’s mind. There is a constant reassessment and re-questioning that occurs in the process of collaborating with each other, and the intellectual stimulation that we bring within the group is of infinite value compared to the process of a solitary work.
I suppose the appetite for learning from/with the others is also a very strong reason for getting involved into collaborative work.
During our vivid discussion last night, Sara and I ended up by defining various degrees of collaboration, drawing directly on our personal experience within MIKS:
- the first degree is between the three active founder members of the collective (Sara Lindström, Ida Uvaas and myself). We share the ownership and the realisation of the artistic project from beginning to end, while still having different roles within it (more or less tacit, depending on the phase of the creative process).
- the second degree of collaboration is between MIKS and the invited artists, who often come in at a later stage of the conception of the artistic concept; they are given this initial concept to work with, and they bring in their skills and ways of seeing to enrich the project and give the depth that we can’t find within the restricted circle of MIKS (i.e costume designer Corinne Felgate for Only On Mondays, 2005; visual artist/dramaturge Rodrigo Valero Puertas for n+1, 2007…).
- the third degree is then one that we have to go through within the context of performing arts: it is any kind of collaboration with people who help us producing our work (theatre directors, technicians, marketing, web designers…)
I felt yesterday that some of the artists (especially Moritz Waldemeyer and Oonagh O’Hagan) talked about collaboration without actually really collaborating - in the sense I understand that concept, which could be as defined by Michael P. Farrell on www.collabarts.org:
A collaborative circle is a primary group consisting of peers who share similar occupational goals and who, through long periods of dialogue and collaboration, negotiate a common vision that guides their work.
Collaborating is not, to me, just a matter of working with people (as for instance O’Hagan was explaining in her so-called collaboration with her publisher or lawyers, when she published her book I Lick My Cheese ) – we all work with people: when I ask a plumber to make a new bathroom, I am maybe collaborating with him (giving him specific tasks, choosing the tiles, the colour of paint…), but it is on a very superficial level. Nevertheless some of the artists tonight talked about their collaborations in a similar way as I talked about the plumber. However, collaboration is not, in my opinion, about that kind of subordination for the sake of egoistic purposes.
My aim within collaboration is not to get rid of my ego, but to merge my artistic vision with people of similar views and sensibilities, in order to learn, expand and create a work that is richer and multilayered.
When I work in rehearsals with MIKS, I can propose a situation, a choreographic system or an image, and then get stuck about how to carry on with it. One of the collaborators will probably come up with a solution, because it will come from a different angle (i.e. a different brain!) and will thus propose a new way of approaching my initial idea. This problem solving is a constant in the collaborative aspect of our work, and it allows everything to go faster and grow bigger within the frame of our group.
If we have a look at the second part of the following definition of ‘collaboration’, from www.wikipedia.org, we raise again the question of methodology and means of collaboration, which is a topic I am very keen on discussing with other collectives, as I feel I would learn and gain extraordinary benefit from sharing how other people work:
Collaboration is a structured, recursive process where two or more people work together toward a common goal—typically an intellectual endeavour that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Collaboration does not require leadership and can even bring better results through decentralization and egalitarianism.
Structured methods of collaboration encourage introspection of behaviour and communication. These methods specifically aim to increase the success of teams as they engage in collaborative problem solving.
This is what stimulates my interest into collaborating with other artists: a constant discussion, questioning our work and our ways of doing, and a way of pushing each other’s limits and going beyond our comfort zone within the safety of a group of peers, who are both critical and understanding. Within that context, the notion of disagreement takes another dimension, which becomes more about our way of communicating amongst each other: how do we manage to convince/get convinced by others? How every idea and proposition is submitted, discussed, explained, evaluated, agreed or not, re-worked, abandoned, elected…?
The debate is still open.
London, 19 November 2007 - Anaïs Bouts