DIY Performance Series #4: 'Stop, Collaborate and Listen'
I not only use all the brain I have, but all that I can borrow.
-Woodrow Wilson
When I was a child, there was a My Little Pony animated movie that I’d watch. I vividly remember the scene in which Baby Lickety Split (a ballerina pony) attempts a spontaneous dance solo during an organized recital. Her seemingly free-spirited move was, in actuality, incredibly damaging--she ended up bumping into everything, sending props flying and scattering her other dancers as they dove for cover from falling scenery. Ultimately, several of her fellow dancers were injured, and Lickety Split left in tears while belting out her signature song, “I’ll Go It Alone”.
I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve thought of this scene when the word ‘collaboration’ comes up among my fellow artists. Let’s just say that Lickety Split isn’t the only free-spirit among us....
Fortunately for Lickety Split, she had a loving and devoted mentor/friend/guide in Spike, the Baby Dragon. Most of us aren’t that lucky in life to have a magical mentor.
SO--what exactly IS collaborating? Why would you do it?? What exactly do you as an individual artist get out of sharing your thoughts and efforts with another artist?
‘Collaboration’ is, at its essence, two or more forces coming together to create something in tandem. It can be as complicated as two large companies working on launching a product rollout, or it can be as simple as the relationship between you and your accompanist.
It’s also so, so much more than that--collaboration is a powerful tool in your ‘artistic toolbox’ that allows you to utilize your network to achieve incredible results.
SO….WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE A GREAT COLLABORATOR?
I don’t have a hard and fast list to give you, but some thoughts are:
-the ability to clearly communicate with others
-a genuine understanding of who you are and what you have to offer
-a genuine understanding of what skills you lack that are vital to the success of the project
-a sense of genuine appreciation for everyone who you meet and work with
-a sense of curiosity
-a sense of thoughtfulness and empathy
-a clear sense of what your partner(s) needs out of a collaboration
-a clear sense of what is it that YOU need out of a collaboration
-a clear vision of what you would like the final project to look like
-a sense of open-mindedness as to what the final project may look like
In general, to be a really great collaborator you’re going to need a little personal courage, a lot of faith in yourself and your abilities, and complete and utter honesty about your failings. Remember when we talked about DIY art demanding that you be completely honest with yourself and your skills?? At the most basic level, collaboration allows you to take what you’re excellent at and barter/trade it for a set of skills that you might not be so great at--which means you first have to start naming and claiming your skills and your weaknesses.
When it’s done ‘correctly’, collaborating feels natural--sometimes, the path of least resistance can be a sign that you’re on the right path. When you’re an effective collaborator, you will try to work in a way that benefits everyone and makes everybody’s life a little easier. Collaboration also requires you to give up a lot of personal control over the outcome of your production/project...a LOT of control! This can sometimes be a really scary experience for some of us. With so much risk involved, why would anyone collaborate?
COLLABORATING PROMOTES AUTHENTICITY
Sometimes you can be personally 100% invested into a project but still not quite seem to get the end result you’re looking for ---at least, not without a little outside assistance.
There is a marvelous story about Brene Brown, the award winning research author, and her own struggles with collaboration. Brene is a frequent guest on a podcast that I listen to, and in her latest interview, she discussed how her own creative process had changed due to collaboration. Brown was a self-proclaimed ‘control freak’, particularly with her writing---as a well-respected researcher, she liked to make sure everything was ‘just so’. Brown had already published several best-seller books up to the time she started writing Rising Strong...and that’s when she hit a creative wall. Up until this point, Brown describes her writing process as ‘a medieval road of trials’--she would anguish over every single sentence, making the entire process one long, torturously-slow grind. Brown, as many other writers, had assumed that this process was ‘normal’ for writers, and continued her own self-flagellating process...until one day, when a friend mentioned what a gifted storyteller Brown was.
It was a breakthrough.
Brown was a terrible writer, but an excellent storyteller. She could captivate a room easily, she loved public speaking, and she craved the social aspect of being around people. When she spoke her ideas aloud, they flowed forth--but when she attempted to shut herself away in a room alone, she felt creatively stunted and could not write the way she wished she could.
For her latest book, Brown decided to enlist the help of two trusted colleagues. She asked them to join her at her beach house in Texas and help her finish her book, which was under a fast-approaching deadline. Brown asked them to be her guests in exchange for their services: everyday, she would have these two sit down on her couch and take detailed notes while she told them stories about the subject of her book. After she finished each story, Brown would take their notes, go into the other room, and write down exactly what she had just told them. Then Brown would go back into the living room and read outloud what she had just written. The three of them would work on the text, asking for more details in certain areas and tweaking certain things. In this way, she was able to effectively capture her own natural speaking tone in her writing; she had never before been able to accomplish this.
Brene Brown claims that this collaborative process helped her write her newest book faster, better, with a more authentic voice and in a much more enjoyable manner than ever before. Because she trusted her colleagues’ opinions, skill sets, ethics and creativity the same way she trusted her own, she was able to create something extraordinary.
COLLABORATING CAN BRING FORTH NEW SKILLS
There is an amazing tactic called ‘combinatory play’. It’s the act of using one mental channel to open up another. Einstein used to talk about using combinatory play when he was stuck on a mathematical problem--he would often play the violin when he was having difficulty thinking of the solution. After a few hours of playing sonatas, the answer would ‘magically’ present itself. I use this trick all the time when I am stuck on a particular set of lyrics that REFUSE to drill themselves into my brain. Whenever I get frustrated, I will go into my kitchen and bake. I am a dreadful baker-- I mean AWFUL, truly truly terrible. I have to invest all of my mental energy into the act in front of me, which allows for other mental synapses to do their thing without any strain on my end. Most of the time, after an hour or two of kneading dough, I can rattle off the previously-offending lyrics with surprising ease. It’s a maddening exercise, but it works! Think of it like a computer (your brain IS the world’s most powerful computer)--if you have one program that is running slowly, it can drive you insane. Better to power down that program for a bit and upload something else, so that your computer can reboot and run smoother overall.
Part of the trick of combinatory play is that it requires your ego to get out of the way. It also doesn’t allow any room for fear---there’s absolutely nothing frightening about baking a pie, but there IS something scary about forgetting your words in front of an audience. Collaboration can work in the same way--it gets you out of your own head and puts you into someone else’s, distracting you from dwelling in the same frustrating place by offering you another point of view. By working with someone else (your collaborator) in the same general arena (on your project, albeit maybe not the exact focus you were working on previously) it helps your brain to hum along more efficiently.
COLLABORATING CAN PROMOTE FINANCIAL SUPPORT
The #1 enemy of DIY art isn’t time or energy--it’s funding and resources. Sometimes, collaborating on a larger project is the only way to ensure that your art can get made without draining your bank account. A great example of this was the recent collaboration between Chicago Opera Theater and the Opera Pittsburgh on the production of Elizabeth Cree.
Chicago Opera Theater is known locally for producing exciting, innovative new works. The company is praised for taking artistic risks; however, the staff is fully aware that their productions won’t be everyone’s cup of tea--including donors and opera-goers. Opera Pittsburgh has been expanding its contemporary opera roster since 2008, while still incorporating the ‘golden oldies’ of opera programming into their seasons. They have a lot of funding and financial support, but are just starting to experiment with programming more cutting-edge contemporary works. Both of these companies decided to collaborate on their newest world premiere, Elizabeth Cree. By pooling their resources, the companies were able to jointly take artistic chances without individually taking too much of a financial risk. Board members were pleased, the artists were well-paid, and audiences were delighted. The opera was a resounding success, selling out both in Chicago and Pittsburgh. I’m hoping to see many more collaborations such as this between companies in the future!
SO...WHY DON’T WE SEE MORE COLLABORATION?
Ooof.
This is where the honesty bombs start.
Chicago is a veritable artistic hub, constantly churning out new works and new collaborative efforts. As Utopic as this all seems on the surface, many artists --not just in our region, but all over the globe--are somewhat uneasy about the entire collaborative process; many avoid collaboration altogether. The reasoning behind this varies, but a lot of artists I’ve spoken to about the issue dwell on the idea of creative control and intellectual property.
This is a fancy way of saying that a lot of artists will refuse to collaborate with others because they are afraid of someone ‘stealing their idea’, losing personal control over a project, or of they themselves somehow ‘losing their artistic identity’ through collaborating with others.
Firstly, the idea of ‘losing your identity’ is laughable at best and seriously troubling at worst. The idea that someone could somehow suffer an identity crisis by working with a fellow artist draws that individual’s overall mental health status into question. An identity is not a physical item, such as a car key; you cannot lose it in the same manner. You certainly don’t lose your identity when you collaborate--you lose your ego. Please do not confuse your ego with your identity. Identity is who you are; ego is who you wish the world to see you as. Collaboration forces you to stand very strongly upon your own identity, firm in the knowledge that who you are can work with someone else to create something.
Secondly, losing control over a project is going to happen, regardless of whether or not you collaborate. Part of the creative process always involves chaos; either something falls away, falls apart, or falls through. Creation is the Chaos Theory in action. Collaborating requires us to step outside of our own ego and surrender some of the control we all so desperately cling to--either you’re going to surrender it to the universe in general, or to a colleague you trust enough to work with...between the two, I’m always going to choose my colleague.
Keep in mind that losing some control of a project isn’t always a painful process. Recently, the Chicago Opera on Tap chapter teamed up with a series of individuals to present a staged production of Der Freischütz. It was a massive undertaking, as the cast of Freischütz is huge and offers some unique challenges in terms of technique and staging. The production required the many, many collaborators involved to get behind each other’s ideas, and fast. Because the cast and crew were so devoted to the project, they were able to abandon their individual ambitions and pull together to create the best production they possibly could. Everyone I’ve spoken to who was involved with the project has described it as a fun, exciting process, rather than the usual rehearsal/tech week grind that many of us are used to. The end result was a beautiful production overall, full of glorious music that had not been seen nor heard in the Chicagoland area since the turn of the century. It’s almost always far more impressive for a team of dedicated, passionate individuals to pull together and present a giant project than a single individual.
Lastly, let’s talk about intellectual property---mainly, let’s talk about the threat of ‘someone stealing your idea’. Technically (and legally) speaking, an idea is not exclusively your intellectual property until you have documented your concepts, original content, and process in detail and applied for a trademark. Even then, it is incredibly difficult to get intellectual property trademarked, as a team of researchers must prove the content to be completely original. There’s a saying that ‘everything under the sun has been done before’---the same is true about ideas. If you have an idea for a production or a project, chances are high that it has been thought or done before, just not by you...and therein lies your power.
You are a unique artist. You’re a beautiful, impressive human being, with a unique voice and a unique point of view. Nobody else in the world can do what you do; there has never been another you, and when you are gone, no one else will ever be able to take your place. Trust that your voice and your abilities are unique, even if your ideas may not be. Even if someone else would attempt the same project or production or role or aria or whatever you choose to do, they will never be able to do it like you can. Nobody can steal your ideas, because they are your own. And if someone around you produces something that you were working on before you, or better than your own efforts, or on a scale that you yourself aren’t capable of---does this in some way negate your own efforts? Of course not. How could it? In a world where the arts funding and audiences are shrinking at an alarming rate, more is literally more. I would personally prefer my colleagues to produce something rather than nothing, so that, at the end of the day, something about this beautiful art form that we have all devoted our lives to remains.
Besides, when you obsess about being unique, you miss the entire point of the exercise. Uniqueness is exclusive to an individual--and collaboration is not about the individual parts but the combination of them (I know I’m beating a dead horse with this, but it bears continual repeating). Collaboration is not about uniqueness, it’s about efficiency. It’s about being economical and practical. Collaborating means you’re more invested in your art than yourself, that you respect the work/goal/process more than your ego. It means truly realizing that the end product is more than the sum of its parts, including yourself. It means you’re comfortable enough with who you are and what you have to offer that you’re willing to experiment and try new things. It means you’re willing to make mistakes and sounds that may or may not be beautiful, and to shrug both off and try again. Please do not get me wrong. Your ego is important; it’s the sum of your self-worth and your experiences rolled up into one. But just because it is important does not mean that it should direct all of your personal and professional decisions, particularly when it comes to collaboration. You do not need to feel that everyone you collaborate with admires you or holds you to a certain esteem. You do not have to even particularly like everyone you work or collaborate with; it makes the process easier, but it is not a requirement.
Collaborating doesn’t always have to be a squishy, happy, warm thing--sometimes it’s is extremely straightforward and brisk, if that’s what you prefer. That’s the beauty of collaborating, it can literally be anything you want it to be. It’s a mold-able tool, so take the time to shape the relationship you’re interested in.
If collaborating really is such a fabulous tool, then where does this fear, this hesitation, this deep distrust of our fellow artists stem from??
I honestly have no quick, solid answer.
But I have an idea.
I personally think a lot of the hesitation surrounding artistic collaboration is 100% fear based.
The artistic world is fast-moving and highly-competitive. There is a lot of healthy benefits to living in such a competitive world, but there are also some destructive behaviours that can stem from too much competition in one area. These days in particular, there is a deep-seated fear that sits inside each singer out there---the fear of NOT ENOUGH.
This fear pops up from time to time. You’ll see it in forums, you’ll hear it in tales of auditions and the dreaded PFO’s. There is seemingly never enough for all of us--not enough gigs, not enough roles, not enough productions per season, not enough money...I could go on and on with this.
From this belief of NOT ENOUGH comes the idea that SOMEONE IS TAKING FROM YOU. This isn’t a new mindset. It’s a tried and true way of controlling outcomes, and it’s utilized by almost everyone you know---from the teacher telling you that you’ll never be taken seriously unless you get a Masters degree to the politicians claiming that someone somewhere is taking your job/your money/whatever away. It’s a physical manifestation of our fear, this idea that art is somehow limited like a pie: if someone is getting a certain slice of a certain size, there must be less pie leftover for yourself, right?
...which is ridiculous. Art is not pie--otherwise the world would be full of happy artists, because nobody can be sad with pie around, no matter how small the amount. Art is not limited to some external well that will run dry if pumped too deeply. Art is more like a never-ending spring or a hidden waterfall cascading down within yourself. As soon as you as you realize that you have the ability to cast yourself, to produce your own work, to sing despite the fact that nobody is seemingly hiring you but yourself, the concept of NOT ENOUGH disappears entirely. It’s exquisite and liberating as hell, and I highly recommend everyone trying it.
WHEN TO COLLABORATE
Knowing when to collaborate is almost as important as knowing who to collaborate with. The need to collaborate depends on the size of the project at hand. Take some time to examine the project from every angle. Make a list of the various components and requirements of your project, then really take a look at it. Can you truly, without a doubt, fulfill each and every component and requirement on your own? If you can, bully for you---go forth and create freely on your own, Lickety Split. If not, consider collaborating with a few talented individuals who are as interested in the project as you.
Who should you woo into collaborating with you?? The answer is--not your usual outlet. If you have a few friends who are tried and true collaborators, that’s great. But inspiration can sometimes fluctuate, so it’s always a good idea to continue expanding your artistic network. Try to find someone who serves as your creative opposite. If you choose to collaborate with someone who shares your same strengths, you might also share the same weaknesses, which means you will run the risk of things falling apart rather quickly. You need to choose a coupling that boosts you where you are at your weakest. Try to always be on the lookout for people whose work you truly enjoy, but who might do things in a different way than you yourself would. A word of caution to this tale: NEVER collaborate with anyone who doesn’t align with your core values. It will be a disastrous exercise; compromise is one thing, but aligning yourself with someone who, at their very base, does not agree with your most important beliefs will only frustrate and upset you.
On the other hand, be careful of your beliefs being overrun by your dignity and ego. They are not always your friends
For example, when I first moved to the Chicagoland area, I started searching for a staff singer job at a local church. I have a very firm belief that singers need to be paid for their time and efforts as the professionals they are. I was hoping to find some place that would pay me for my time and efforts...and I completely came up short. There simply weren’t any churches hiring sopranos at that time. What was I to do? I needed a way to keep singing in public and to also network within the area. I swallowed my ego and decided to audition for a local amateur choir, and was accepted. The next few months were an interesting experimental phase for me. I learned how to blend my voice with untrained older voices, and I learned how to interpret my conductor’s wishes when they were not always expressed in the manner I was used to. More than once, I felt frustrated to the point where I considered quitting--after all, I was a professional singer, why would I want to waste my valuable (and rather limited) spare time singing with an amateur group?? (Please note the incredibly nauseating amount of ego that is dripping off that sentence. I too am not immune to the seduction of the self-inflated ego…)
However, I decided to stay until the end of the concert season, reminding myself of the various positive aspects of the group. I stuck with them, and we ended up producing some beautiful recordings from our final concerts together. At the close of the season, a fellow choir member mentioned an opening to me, which lead to an introduction, which lead to my first staff singer job. I ended up receiving an email from a former section member, detailing another opportunity with another choir. I auditioned and again was accepted; our first concert that season featured the soloist who would become my current voice teacher. Even better--this past month, I auditioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chorus. I walked into the audition room, smiled, and turned to discover my first conductor from that amateur group was my adjudicator. He recognized me immediately; my work ethic was well known to him, and because he was familiar with my voice, he was duly impressed with how far I had grown in a short amount of time. Because of our work together, I was comfortable with his presence, which lead to a comfortable, positive audition experience all around.
None of this would have been possible should I have quit when my ‘belief’ told me to. By allowing myself to collaborate in a way I previously had not considered, I formed some true friendships, learned a LOT about myself and my own abilities, and made some beneficial career-related relationships.
This is not to say that you should not enforce personal standards when collaborating--by all means, please do. Your standards, morals and ethics are incredibly vital to your overall happiness. But please remember that opportunity is not a lengthy visitor, and good things can come in packages of all shapes and sizes. Should you find yourself presented with an usual opportunity to collaborate, I would advise you to go with your gut and follow your curiosity.
A really great podcast addressing collaborating can be found here: https://scapimag.com/2017/10/10/scapi-radio-10-09-17-elizabeth-newkirk-kit-satoh/