Coordinating Collaboration

The theater company that I work with just had a HUGE weekend.

In the span of three days’ time, we had our annual fundraising Gala, our company birthday (hooray!), a load-in for our mainstage production, and a two-night concert series.

Needless to say, it was a very successful but VERY long weekend. Every day was filled with a LOT of details to remember, and a bunch of complicated moving parts that all needed to work in sync.

I happen to be very lucky---my staff and Board members are some of the most empathetic and generous collaborators I know, which makes coordinating the important stuff a breeze.

They truly understand the meaning of collaborating: everyone working tirelessly and relentlessly towards a single goal, without allowing their own ego or insecurities to get in the way.

This got me thinking about collaboration in general, and what truly takes place when artists collaborate with one another during the creative process. So often we take the entire process for granted without realizing what a marvelous effort it is.

In this day and age of autotuning and pre-recording, live performances remain one of the last raw, exposed experiences that still exist in the musical world. As performers, we too often become accustomed to working in extremely-controlled environments. We practice for hours to ensure that, when the time comes, we can deliver. This is a great system when you operate mostly as a soloist, because you have a lot of control over the finished product.

But when you step onstage with a collaborator, whether it’s a single accompanist or a 180-piece orchestra, you place yourself in an extremely vulnerable position. The performance could go well or not, but its outcome isn’t entirely dependent upon you anymore-- you’re just one of many cogs that has to work in sync. There’s an electric edge to the event itself, the thrill of possibility. Live performance is a game of chance built upon mutual trust: you know your part, you know what level of preparation you put into it, and you have to believe that everyone around you did the same. Should your accompanist stumble, or should the conductor decide to waive his baton a little faster, everything becomes affected. The entire performance shifts and changes accordingly like a living thing, and you have absolutely no power to prevent anything from happening. You simply have to trust that everyone will work together seamlessly to make something beautiful, right then in that moment.

Seth Godin, a New-York Times Bestselling Business Author, calls collaborating ‘a magical act of selflessness’. He describes it like this:

Imagine a circle of ten kids, passing a ball from one to another. What you do

when you don't have the ball doesn't have much impact on how fast the ball

moves around. But during the moments when the ball is yours, every second you

spend is a second added to the route. That route is called the critical path. It's the

irreducible schedule, the sum total of all the required steps. If you work on a team,

part of your job is to know where the critical path is, and to know when you're

on it. The rest of your day is devoted to helping those that are on the path or

getting ready for your turn.

Think of the ‘the ball’ as your musical entrances and exits, and this quote becomes suddenly applicable to live performances. ‘Passing the ball’ becomes the single most important act, and the ‘critical path’ is a successful performance of the piece in question. The outcome depends not only on the ensemble’s skill sets, but on their ability to collective focus their energies towards a single outcome. There is a certain energy that you can sense when an ensemble is particularly ‘tight’ in a performance, a heightened sensory awareness of each other, an anticipation of each other’s actions. The effort to seamlessly band together as a single unit is essential to the creative collaborative process. It requires time, effort and nurturing to build instinctive trust and support. When this isn’t a valued part of the process, the results are painfully obvious. Audiences are instinctively empathetic--they WILL notice when something is disjunct or ‘off’, and that can color their overall impression of the performance.

The next time you go to collaborate with another artist, take a moment to clearly map out your goals together--what you want, what they want, and what the ultimate goal is overall. Then spend some time getting to know your collaborators, how they play, how they breathe, and how they react to each other. The time and efforts you put into the little things can often affect the overall performance as a whole.