Here at the Accademia dell’Arte, the students are challenged inside AND outside of the studio / classroom to work collaboratively. Whether they’re working on a project for one of their studio class or creating a performance piece for the student-run CABLAB, the students are regularly exploring and experimenting with how to communicate productively in a creative space.

Below, Physical Theatre students Ariana Starkman (University of Pittsburgh) and Lucy Purnine(Vassar College), and Dance students Kayla Cardenas (Gustavus Adolphus College) and Elise Miwa(Muhlenberg College) tell us about their experience collaborating to create work this semester.

In what ways are you responding to Nhandan’s or Sabine’s collaborative approach to leading classes? How has this changed for you since the beginning of the semester?

ARIANA: I’ve always loved collaborating with other artists because it gives me an opportunity to see how other people work. Here at the ADA I’ve been reminded that collaboration is really hard and comes with a lot of questions. In the beginning of the semester we started with mainly collaborating with one other person to create a piece. I got along well with my partner but our pieces weren’t collaborating well, so it was a process trying to fit our work together, but once we figured it out by trying a bunch of different techniques it opened up doors later on, once we were collaborating as a larger ensemble. Now that I’m almost at the end I think collaborating has gotten a lot easier in some aspects, but harder in others. It’s good now because everyone knows how each other works and what each other’s creative outlets are. So now rather than figuring out how to collaborate with fifteen or twenty-nine people the question is how to collaborate with and acknowledge the hundreds of ideas that everyone has. It’s exhilarating and exhausting but I think that’s how it’s supposed to be.

LUCY: I think that I’ve definitely become more aware of it [collaborative atmosphere] later in the semester because earlier on Nhandan was a guiding force, but there were pretty clear instructions and we were improvising within a much stronger frame, whereas now that we’re creating individual actions I’ve become much more aware of both the space we have to create and responsibility we have to create. Right after spring break was a pretty strong switch for that for me, so it’s taken me a little bit to get adjusted and find my footing again, but I’m interested in going back to the individual actions and the collaborative approach after the experimental lab intensive we’re having right now. These couple days of experimenting have been kind of a crash course in what we’re capable of, so I’m excited to go back to Nhandan’s class and create in a space that I’m familiar with, with a little bit of a new lens. And less pressure after a little break.

I think the term collaborative is interesting in that question because we’ve been having our collaborative classes with Dory and Giangiacomo and Nhandan and so when you say “collaborative” that’s where my mind goes. Also even in Nhandan’s movement class we’ve been encouraged to use voice more and do some Commedia, and it makes you realize how easy it is to sit in the separate categories of movement, voice, and commedia and not question it. I’m really not comfortable with my voice particularly with words, but I’m very comfortable with movement, so I’m trying to use strengths to get into other lenses. We did an exercise with Nhandan where we just had to be “evil”, and one person was movement evil while the other person was vocally evil and we influenced each other, and that was great because it was someone else’s movement influencing my voice. There’s just so many different ways to structure things and it’s just funny what works for you or not.

ELISE: A lot of our stuff that we’re creating both for the butoh show and the final performance is made up of a lot of our own movement. It’s similar to stuff I’ve done before, even one of my dance teachers in high school was very much like a college dance person who somehow ended up in a competition studio, who knows, and that was the way that she built dances, and  that’s the way that we do a lot of stuff at muhlenberg as well so it’s a familiar process. Here it’s more like a lot of different things that we’re working on within the space of one semester than usual. Usually, back at home or at Muhlenberg, it would be that one of the pieces that I’m in this semester is doing that or one dance in high school. But this semester we’ve made movement for two different things that are going in our final, and the butoh show, and then also in Laban class as part of an exercise a couple different times. There’s a lot more just creating a short phrase in ten or fifteen minutes and then playing with it. I feel like in school usually you build one thing and then you work with it for a while but I feel like this is a bunch of different things, some of which we stay with and are part of the final, but some of it like for the butoh week or the LJubljana week  you make it, you play with it, you mess around with it, and then you let it go. It’s different and it takes some of the pressure of of building things.

KAYLA: For me one of my professors does this back at Gustavus, and so this is not something foreign to me in any sort of way. I think it’s really nice because she [Sabine] takes what we create and gives us parameters. For example, for “Lei”, which is a piece we’re working on, she said “what are five movements that you believe represent you as a woman?” Then we put our movements together in this piece along with her choreography and we learned each others’ choreography. I’ve become more aware of how I work and what I need and it’s nice to have Sabine’s direction as an outside view because it helps me think about what I have to do internally for myself. She directs really well, which is something that reminds me of my professor at home, and think it works well when she consults with us of what our intentions are with our movement that we’ve created, and she fine tunes it. I think it’s a nice mish mosh of collaboration. I think it’s a nice even amount of direction and self awareness/being your own director, not always needing an outside eye. I’ve become more aware of how I move and what directions I can go to and critiques I can give myself.

In what you’ve experienced so far this semester, can a performance – and the creation of it – be collaborative? If so, what examples do you have from the semester? How does this differ from your past performance experiences?

ARIANA: Yes. Collaboration is always possible I think collaboration can have a bunch of different definitions. It can be during our core rotations [chores around the villa] of figuring out and assigning jobs throughout the week, regular tasks. It can be collaboration with your roommate in terms of keeping up your space, collaboration in a  teacher student relationship in terms of mutual respect and understanding and a willingness to participate and help each other. Those are all creative collaboration in their own way. Within classes we’re asked to collaborate every day and it doesn’t happen every day; sometimes it’s more piling ideas on top of each other or a bunch of individuals all in the same space. I think it’s  a constant push and pull and stacking and asking each other to grow in ways that aren’t always comfortable or ways that we haven’t explored before. Here performances are mainly driven by who’s in it. There can be outside questions and guidance, but the creative responsibility is really that of the performers/creators, so sometimes I take notes and I’m not in the piece but I’m still collaborating with it. Whereas back home at my university my voice is much smaller. I can still give the same input and ideas, but they’re not always listened to, and they’re not necessarily always listened to here but here there’s an expectation of the performer to collaborate. Other productions I’ve been in it’s more of a surprise if the performer wants to collaborate. Sometimes coming into a space of collaboration makes the process a lot more difficult or time consuming, but it really depends on the goals of the creative space, and here it’s definitely encouraged for everything to be done collaboratively.  

LUCY: Yes. I think a performance can be collaborative, I think that’s a really general term. I think some people are always going to have more ideas than others and some are always going to play different roles in a collaborative process and I think finding that balance and not asking everyone to be in exactly the same place is important.  We’ve been doing a lot of collaboration the past couple weeks with our movement piece and CABLAB in particular. I’ve been part of a CABLAB piece that Georgie’s been heading, which I feel has been a collaborative process even though she’s the one who proposed it and she’s the one who’s giving us the improv scores. Within those improv scores we have the freedom to put our own ideas in our expression of them and I think that is also collaborative. In Dory’s class we’ve been doing three person voice orchestras, yeah I don’t know how many people you need to consider it collaborative, but I think that’s group work and it’s collaborative and just naturally has more space for us to try things that don’t work whereas once you get into larger groups direction becomes more important. This is different from my past performance experience in that I’ve done some collaborative work, but I don’t think I’ve ever been given enough time for it. One of the things I’m realizing is that collaboration just takes time. You need time to have so many ideas and so many opinions and then either address or consider all of them.  I’ve also done a lot of less collaborative work where it’s a show and it’s the director’s vision. I also think CABLAB in particular has been really interesting because we’re not being asked to collaborate for an assignment. Even in classes on collaboration sometimes we’re collaborating with the person in charge, while they’re not collaborating with us, is still having an input, whereas with CABLAB it’s just collaboration for the sake of collaboration. This can lead to freedom and new discoveries, and it’s been really great to have the space to make those discoveries and not feel like you’re going off track.

ELISE:  A lot of what we’re doing is comprised of our own movement and then organized by someone else, although the “Hide and Seek” piece that we’re working on in Modern class has gentle guidance in a certain direction, but it’s really all on us how we organize it within the rules that are set. So that piece is pretty much whatever we want to make it is what it will be, and Sabine has just put on us the rules and the impetus for it. Another example is that I created a piece for first the CABLAB where everyone made their own movement for it and I didn’t really do a whole lot, honestly. I assigned each person to an instrument in the song and said, “when that instrument is playing you’re dancing it and when it’s not you’re not.” So that was very much that everyone had their own part of it that they made and we worked collaboratively to create it. Oh also I was in a CABLAB piece last time, which was directed by Kayla and it was contact improv but with one person, that was the idea of it. So that was an interesting experience in terms of collaboration. We built the whole thing as two people but it wasn’t really set, we would improv together and then we tried to remember it. Then that became choreography that I had to do with by myself without having the impulses from the other body that I was responding to originally, and without having someone actually holding my weight, which was tricky. So that was really interesting to go from something that was created so organically and have to set it and reproduce without half of it.

KAYLA: When we were in Butoh that was a good example of collaboration. We were given prompts like “find your fish and remember that feeling” and then we collaborated and learned others’ movements. So yes you can collaborate with others. Listening to each other is a big thing, if you have two dancers or a group and you’re working together, it’s a collaboration between choreography and dancer. With my first piece for the first CABLAB I worked with Elise as a dancer and I was there as a body, it was based off of contact improv. What I like to do as a choreographer is I have the dancer improv, but I also direct and choreograph within the dancer’s movement. I placed myself as the prop, but then I took myself away and Elise had to find and remember the feeling of me being there. We used the idea of this structure. There was a nice even collaboration of us together making this piece and both of our energies were there in the piece.