Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do as artists, designers, and creatives. But collaboration as a subject unto itself is rarely taught, practiced, or critiqued in art schools, conservatories, and universities. Arts training inherently requires us to collaborate, but we rarely examine the collaborative process itself with the same level of reflection and discipline that we bring to our core artistic skills.
To address this gap at Rutgers, I created Interplay, a course on collaboration which enrolls 200 visual artists, designers, dancers, filmmakers, musicians, and theater artists each year. Students meet weekly to make connections outside their individual programs, engage in collaborative games and projects, hear guest lectures from multidisciplinary faculty, and develop collaborative project proposals in small groups.
Now in my third year teaching the course, I have developed the guiding principle that collaborations will not develop unless certain preconditions are met. Collectively, I call these preconditions the ecology of collaboration.
Plants and animals can’t thrive unless very specific conditions occur: the air, the light, the soil, and the other organisms all have to be just so in order for a given species to thrive. Similarly, my experiences as a professor and as a collaborative artist have taught me that there are four basic pillars which allow collaborations to emerge organically. Some of these conditions are internal or psychological; others are physical or institutional.
Familiarity + trust + curiosity + initiative =
The Ecology of Collaboration
These are necessary, but not sufficient, for collaboration to thrive. Ultimately, successful projects are a result of the specific interplay of ideas, people, places, resources, and either audiences or markets. But absent these environmental factors, collaborations will be thwarted before they begin.
Mainly as a mental exercise for myself, I’d like to take the next month to write about this framework. I hope that someone might find it useful, and this process will also help me refine and develop it for myself and my students.
I’ll devote a post to each of these four pillars:
Familiarity
We don’t collaborate with people we don’t know. Our habits, routines, and daily movements don’t always bring us into contact with the people we need to know in order to develop robust, effective, and inspiring collaborative projects. Sometimes, we have to override the natural rhythms provided by our schools, jobs, families, and regular gigs so that the group of people we know, and who know us, is continually expanding. I’ll talk about building networks, making meaningful connections, and the long-term benefits of serving a wider community. I will also address the power of physical proximity and the value of in-person interaction.
Trust
A collaborative proposal shouldn’t be our first interaction with someone. Collaboration involves risks. In a strong and healthy working relationship, everyone will feel comfortable presenting raw, unfiltered, unrefined, and potentially bad ideas. Unless everyone in the group feels comfortable sharing out their roughest prototypes, we hold back our most innovative ideas for the exact reason that they don’t conform to expectations. In this post, I’ll introduce the idea that a community of potential collaborators has to develop mechanisms to build trust and psychological safety before proceeding toward active collaborations.
Curiosity
This is the mentality that everything has the potential to be interesting. Many of the most memorable artworks bring together multiple elements that don’t have an intuitively obvious relationship. Consider Hamilton, the most successful musical theater work in a generation: in order for that project to happen, Lin Manuel Miranda had to be curious about subjects that had no ostensible connection to his core work as a music theater artist. I can’t speak for him, but my guess is that before he found the unexpected resonance between hip hop and early American democracy, he was already a voracious consumer of music across many genres and social, political, and historical thought from a wide variety of sources. We have to look out over the walls of our little gardens and connect what we do to the wider world of culture and ideas.
Initiative
In the immortal words of The Boss, you can’t start a fire without a spark. But if we focus on the individual who has the idea, the inspiration, or the lightbulb moment, we miss the point. Collaboration thrives in environments in which taking initiative and proposing things is common, frequent, and expected. We need to foster environments in which we lower the stakes on pitching ideas to each other (some of which will work, others of which won’t). In this way, we shift our thinking away from innovative individuals toward innovative communities and cultures.
In Conclusion
At a dinner party last weekend, a friend asked me about the creative process and whether I used free time in between commissions to work on projects for myself. My answer: I don’t. This isn’t because I don’t believe in treating myself (I do), but rather because my favorite part of the whole creative cycle, the part that inspires and motivates me, the part that makes all of the misery worth it, is the moment that I get to the first rehearsal.
I find that the process of composing is lonely and somewhat miserable. I find that going to premieres is stress-inducing and somewhat miserable. But I absolutely adore going to rehearsals. I adore working with other artists who just want to make something great, learning from their artistic and intellectual experiences, and solving the problems that are keeping us from the best possible outcome. I thrive when I’m in pitch meetings, or part of a creative team, or working in the studio or the rehearsal hall or the gallery, when I’m envisioning outcomes, refining the sound, hanging the photographs, testing the lights, and checking the balance.
But getting myself to this moment takes an extraordinary amount of work, energy, resilience, and tolerance for failure. I’m a good ways into an artistic career, but I am for sure still learning to dial in my own ecology.
So: familiarity, trust, curiosity, and initiative. I’m interested to share these ideas with a wider community and see if they resonate with others as well.
xoxo,
Scott