[This text was originally published in French translation in the book Curieux manuel de dramaturgie pour le théâtre, la danse et autres matières à changement.]
“But part of it is that if you are really committed to working collectively you have to give up some of your preciousness around style.”
– Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
“I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen. A labor movement that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people.”
– David Graeber
Over the past thirty years I have written a great deal about artistic collaboration but I worry that, despite my attempts to be completely honest on the topic, I have often ended up being less than completely honest. When I started making collaborative group performances I was a teenager, that was over thirty years ago, and I desperately wanted to believe that working together we could make something so much better than any of us could make on our own. I still have a strong desire to believe this. And perhaps belief gets me a little bit closer to the heart of the matter. The desire for a belief. To believe in something. I’m remembering a line from the Czech poet Vladimír Holan: “But we who do not believe are always expecting something…“ I find that I’m still expecting something and sometimes the name I give to this sense of expectation is collaboration.
In the Jewish education of my youth, most of which I’ve almost completely disowned, the name given to people who helped the Nazis was “collaborators.” When I think of the word “politics” my first immediate associations are leftist politics and activism. When I think of the word “collaboration” my first immediate associations are intriguing artistic collectives. But fascism is also politics. “Collaborators” are also engaged in collaboration. (Every word is a double-edged sword.) I often think of artistic collaboration as a difficult friend, a friend I’m happy to have but who at any moment might do something that would make me extremely unhappy. Sometimes even friendship can be like this, and you need to put in the hard work to find the best way to remain friends.
In these matters, as with so many things, it is less about method and more about something else. But what exactly? A sense of ethical reflection? Letting an artistic reality of “not knowing” be one’s guide? A realization that we’ve all had different life experiences and within the space created by such differences we might might find something closer to truth? Letting experiences evolve into wisdom, though it is extremely unfashionable today to speak in these terms. And, whatever terms one might use, such ethical reflections, experiences and wisdom must somehow be embodied within the method. Also, open to change over time. Also, it will always be less than perfect and imperfection should be its guide. I am still searching for all of these things.
Then there is practical matter of what I’ve actually experienced during such collaborations. The chasm between theory and practice is noticeable. Sometimes I think: if I want to move my practice closer to my ideals, I need to change the goals. Perhaps the goal is to make something I don’t like. Because then I’ll truly know I wasn’t the one who made it. That it’s not overly based on my own idiosyncratic tastes. That it was something made by all of us. By the same logic the goal could be to make something equally loved by all of us. However, this seems rather difficult to do. Perhaps the heart of the matter is not belief but compromise. What is an artistically productive compromise? What does it look and feel like? Such thoughts might be alalogous to discourses that value process over product, but I fear I’m too much of an artist (for my own good) not to be overly focused on the end result. On the other hand, perhaps many of the works I’ve been involved in do in fact look more like process than they do like product, with aspects of collaboration foregrounded and embodied. The differences between the collaborating artists become the visible cornerstone of the work, which is one way of understanding what process is.
With every collaboration I’ve ever been a part of, the overarching goal was to make something that would be performed in front of an audience. Collaboration was never an end in and of itself. For me, the idea of art has always been connected to the idea of an audience. I’m attracted to the possibility of making something and keeping it secret, but I’m attracted to it mainly because it undermines most of my key conceptions regarding art. For me, art is when you make something and attempt to show it to a large number of people over time. When you do so, you put your name on the line. You invite judgement. People can say you’re a good or a bad artist. (Or a good or bad collaborator? But since they weren’t present during the process how could they actually know.) As the prospect of an audience grows closer, this sense of an impending judgement always creeps into the process of the collaboration and often begins to dominate.
As we know, this business of the “artists name” is deeply connected to capitalism. An artist puts their name on a work so that they are able to profit from it. It is significantly more difficult to profit from a highly collaborative work. And the more artists involved in the work, the more difficult it is for each individual artist to profit from it. However, what I have found most depressing over the years is how difficult it is for a collaborative group to collectively profit from their collaborative work. Art institutions almost always gravitate toward presenting art as something made by a single name, no matter how many people worked on it. And despite all my longing for collaboration, I cannot deny the incredible charge I get from seeing my own singular name printed on a giant poster or on the cover of a book. For me, every time this happens, I feel a little bit like my ego is on cocaine (followed by the slight hangover of guilt for having such a big ego in the first place.) I worry this feeling is a large part of what has undermined my ability to make collaboration a more satisfying and effective part of my artistic life. Even though so much of my life has been dedicated to artistic collaboration, the cocaine-ego feeling of pushing my singular name too often wins out. I realize that many (or most) artists don’t even question this aspect of the state of things. Never question their name on the poster. Never question why their name is a priori the most important one when others worked on the project alongside them. I have questioned all of this a great deal but with what results? Nonetheless, I simply can’t live with the fact that so often the underlying meaning of art is that people accomplish things alone, that the artist makes the work and has a final say in its authorship. Since no one does anything alone. Everything is part of an interrelated web.
So I return to collaboration over and over again. Trying to learn from my mistakes and making every new kind of mistake in the process. Sometimes I feel mentally trapped in the previous century: the battle between communism and capitalism, between collectivity and individualism. (Though, for me, the Soviet Union was often little more than a form of state capitalism, and technological breakthroughs in the West were made possible through state funded research and the collectivity of taxation.) But if I try to move my thinking a little bit more into our current century, I feel all sorts of new energies continuously forming. A new emphasis on care as the most politically radical position. Activists working on Transformative Justice, which has to do with addressing harm within community without ever calling the police. When I read about Transformative Justice I find it incredibly inspiring and also clearly see how difficult the work can be. The logic of Eurocentric-derived cultures are completely tied up in notions of punishment. Searching for different ways of dealing with harm, for methods of accountability and healing that sidestep the logic of punishment, is counterintuitive for so many people, and therefore has to be learned (or learned again) almost as if from scratch. Often there is frustration around situations where a Transformative Justice process was attempted and it simply doesn’t work. These activists are pushing forward toward a time in the future when hopefully more people will have found ways to reduce harm within community, or where experiments in that direction have led to other kinds of transformative discoveries, and therefore cannot allow themselves to be overly discouraged.
Reading about Transformative Justice, I very much recognize the description of a certain very specific kind of frustration, of a process where sometimes it “simply doesn’t work,” from my long history of making collaborative performances. In Transformative Justice movements they are working toward a world without police and without prisons. A great deal of the time I don’t entirely know what I’m working toward. Just to be a different kind of artist, to collaboratively make one really good show, not to worry so much about pushing my name. My name is at the top of the first page of this text. I could have tried to write it collaboratively with someone, but I don’t actually have anyone in my life I’m able to do that with. (Once again, the chasm between theory and practice.) Perhaps it’s about belief. And perhaps it’s about compromise. And perhaps it’s about loneliness.
What is an artistically productive compromise? What does it look and feel like? I still don’t really know. But I do know that I absolutely don’t want it to be about sanding down your personality or your desires to suit the needs of the group. I am hoping for strong individual personalities that together search for, and hopefully often discover, a multitude of different ways to effectively work together. And find equally useful ways to manage the many conflicts that arise along the way. I don’t need to be less of myself in order to connect with your point of view. A compromise is not that I have to completely give something up, but rather that I come to see the value, in the moment, of doing something differently.
When I put my name on the cover of a book, I also think of it as being in dialog with all the other books that have been written, one node in the interrelated web of books. As Italo Calvino writes: “Literature – even though people usually study it author by author – is always a dialog amongst many voices which intersect and reply to each other within literature and outside it.” I have often written about how I live a double life, one half spent writing novels, the other half spent making collaborative performances. Books are the activity I do (mostly) alone and performances are the activity I do with other people. I find writing books much, much easier than making collaborative performances. So often I find myself wondering if, for this reason, I should give up making performances and only write books. There is much about me that fits the cliché of the melancholy writer, the dandy, the flâneur, wandering alone amongst the city within my melancholy thoughts which I will later write down in an attempt to communicate something that goes far beyond my own narrow experience.
I’m not sure what kinds of personalities are most and least suited for working collaboratively but, if I were to make a list, the melancholy flâneur probably would rank rather high in the least suited column. And this must be yet another reason I do it, somehow going against my nature, trying to open up a world, the world of my own thoughts, that always suggests the best thing to do would be to shut everything down. The desire for artistic collaboration, at least for me, is a desire to find a third way between solitude and community, and it is less important that this third way actually exist then that I manage to keep alive the search for it. In this sense it truly is an impossible dramaturgy.
But it is not just a struggle within my thoughts. It is something I actually do with other people. Each time we start again we cannot fully rely on the maps we’ve made in the past. We have to concretely deal with the task at hand, in the moment, deciding from moment to moment when to fight and when to compromise, what aspects of the work are most important to us, what we think we are making and why, and how might it be possible for us to make it better together than any of us might be able to make it alone.
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[As well, as some of you might already know, Individualism Was a Mistake is also the title of a performance PME-ART made in 2008.]
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