questions of collaborative practice

The following questions emerged during the week and instigated debate during the daily feedback sessions.

How do groups find starting point?

How to begin?

What happens (blow by blow account)?

The process of collaboration: How Does it Work?

How do people commit? To an idea? How do they move forward?

What’s new for each of the artists participating in this project?

What tools do the participants use in order to shape and structure the work?

What is the story of beginnings, middles, ends?

(Starting points – sustaining an idea – what emerges)

What contradictions get flagged up in the group vision or in the space of making?

How does ‘non-consensus’ work as a strategy?

How do people offer up their personal fascinations, preoccupations, desires to the group?
How do these desires present themselves in the material even when individuals ‘let go’ of them as a driver for the work?

How are ideas owned? (individual, group)

How is collaborative process a vulnerable one?

What do the artists bring with them into a project like this? (various safety nets, armor, expectations, habits of working, etc.)

Questions after 1st day:

What roles did you take?

What did you choose to take with you, or leave behind, as you moved from one working process to another?

Did the focus on a showing get in the way of the collaborative process and in depth research – or does the ‘deadline’ free up the process, allowing for an objective direction through the collaboration?

How did you make decisions on form and structure for the many and varied elements that emerge?
how do you retain each collaborator’s specific differences of creativity and skills yet develop a coherent whole?

Can collaborative performance emerge from a sharing of compositional and choreographic structures and forms – rather than through an interpretation of each other’s sound and movement?

Are collaborations between artists formed solely out of a respect for each other’s work, or because of an attraction of personalities? Is this a question of giving preference to process or product?

Is collaboration always about being nice to each other - or this just the nervousness of the 1st day?

Did anybody take the role of director?