Personal Statement

Over the past decade, I have engaged in numerous theatrical pursuits. Even before I knew what a musical was, I rehearsed choral piece from musicals. However, my intensive involvement in musical theatre truly began during my undergraduate studies. I joined the university musical theatre society BWusical, where I began rehearsing various musical theatre excerpts as an actor, primarily singing but also incorporating some dancing. Later, I joined an external amateur theatre company ManiacMuse, where we staged two full-length musicals for commercial performances. For the second production, I worked as assistant director. As my collaborative experience grew, I also took on roles such as designing and crafting props and costumes, alongside managing the commercial operations for small-scale theatre productions. I also joined the university’s Shakespeare society, Wittenberg, where we undertook numerous creative adaptations of Shakespeare’s works and staged an open-air immersive production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now that I’ve come to Leeds, I’m working as a in training director, attempting to collaborate with more unfamiliar colleagues while also seeking opportunities to perform. Throughout these collaborations, I continually challenged myself with new responsibilities while seeking my place within the team dynamic.

Me played Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Line of Enquiry

An aspect of collaboration that continually intrigues me is how creative roles and relationships are negotiated — sometimes consciously, sometimes instinctively — within different cultural contexts. Having experienced both Chinese and British rehearsal environments, I have become deeply aware of how artistic collaboration is shaped by invisible cultural assumptions: how people communicate, when they choose to speak or stay silent, and how authority is expressed or shared.

In China, I was accustomed to a rehearsal atmosphere grounded in mutual understanding and less spoken trust, where collective intuition guided the process. In the UK, I encountered a more structured and dialogic model, where every voice is encouraged to articulate its perspective openly. These contrasts have made me reflect on my own position as a director in training: How can I balance guidance with openness? How do I create a space where different collaborative languages can coexist?

As Candy (2019) writes:

For many practitioners, the attraction of collaboration is in having a genuine dialogue based upon difference and drawing on that difference. They benefit from exchanges between people with differences in outlook or “world view”, differences in ideas and beliefs and differences in working practices. This is where the interdisciplinary element, a key aspect of collaboration, plays a crucial role. (Candy 2019: 103)

Drawing on Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, I see each project as part of a reflective continuum—moving from concrete experience to observation, conceptualisation, and experimentation. This framework allows me to not only evaluate what works or fails in cross-cultural teamwork, but also to reimagine collaboration itself as a dynamic learning process.

Ultimately, my enquiry is both artistic and personal: I aim to understand how a director can act as a cultural mediator — translating between differing expectations, rhythms, and creative vocabularies — while sustaining a shared sense of purpose. Through this exploration, I hope to transform cultural difference from a source of tension into a catalyst for creative growth and collective understanding.

Documentation

Through observation and practice, I have accumulated considerable experience in collaborative working. I shall now present and compare my specific practical experiences in both China and the United Kingdom.

Collaborative Experience with China’s Family Collaboration Company

During my time with the amateur theatre company ManiacMuse, I observed an interesting phenomenon that closely aligns with what Candy (2019) describes as the family collaboration pattern:

Family Collaboration is a pattern of collaboration in which roles are flexible and may change over time. Goals, interests and projects may change but the core family entity remains fairly constant. (Candy 2019: 116)

Most of us came from non-theatrical professions or were still students, gathering out of a shared passion for musical theatre. We rehearsed once a week, usually on weekends. There was no clear management hierarchy—only the most basic division of labour: those who could perform and those who could not. Non-performing members handled backstage and promotional work, while performers simultaneously took on responsibilities such as directing, costume and prop making, venue coordination, and even merchandising.

Interestingly, the role of “director” did not exist at the beginning. As rehearsals progressed, inefficiencies soon became apparent: discussions often became overly divergent or turned into casual conversation. Gradually, one or two members with stronger initiative and influence stepped up to assume directing duties, though the creative process itself remained highly collective. Everyone contributed ideas freely, and this openness—enabled by our egalitarian structure—encouraged genuine creativity. The directors mainly functioned as facilitators, guiding the process and maintaining an overall vision rather than dictating specific performances.

In terms of communication, our style tended to be subtle and indirect. Open disagreement was rare, and most feedback was implied rather than stated explicitly. The atmosphere within the group was close and harmonious, though this intimacy occasionally led to interpersonal tensions or emotional entanglements that disrupted the rehearsal dynamic.

By the time we mounted our second production, we had learned from earlier challenges and appointed both a director and an assistant director early in the process. However, in my role as assistant director, I found myself simultaneously responsible for numerous other tasks—purchasing costumes, creating props, organising refreshments for the audience, managing budgets, and performing in two roles. The workload was overwhelming and difficult to balance, and although the production was ultimately successful, I felt the final outcome did not fully meet my expectations.

ManiacMuse rehearsal behind-the-scenes footage for EPIC: The Musical

“Tomorrow” Project – Negotiating Roles in an Intercultural Collaboration

During the Tomorrow project in the ICP course, our team began with a series of open brainstorming sessions. Everyone proposed different story ideas, and through repeated discussion and creative friction, we eventually agreed on one that resonated with the whole group: a group of strangers anxiously waiting at an airport for their delayed flights, each revealing what they were going to do “tomorrow.”

This concept gradually took shape. During the following day’s discussions, we finalised details such as character identities and distribution. The most memorable moment came when a member listed typical airport characters, from which I selected the role of a passenger travelling to a funeral. I expressed a desire to inject more levity into the concept. My peers encouraged me to explore contrasting emotions—such as attending a funeral in a jubilant state. This sparked an epiphany: “What if I were attending my enemy’s funeral?” The team was instantly captivated by this idea, which later proved to infuse the entire narrative with dark humour and playful irony.

Although I acted as the director, our group had no clearly defined hierarchy. My main role became that of a facilitator — guiding discussions and helping to keep the process moving — yet the group was highly self-directed and every member contributed equally to shaping the narrative. This reflected a very different understanding of collaboration from what I was used to in China. Instead of waiting for clear leadership or delegation, everyone naturally took initiative, voicing their opinions and proposing creative ideas.

The score we composed for Tomorrow

Working in a UK classroom presented certain challenges. Language barriers frequently slowed discussions, and I noticed a greater emphasis on individual contributions rather than collective intuition. Moreover, the British collaborative approach seemed to prioritise direct communication and constructive disagreement. The model initially left me somewhat at a loss, though I later recognised it as an effective means of establishing clear understanding and shared accountability. Despite these challenges, the entire process remained fluid and successful: everyone respected each other’s perspectives, and the final performance authentically reflected our diverse viewpoints.

Sharing a Reflective Model with Domestic Peers – An Attempt at Active Experimentation

After learning about various reflective frameworks during the ICP course, I became particularly inspired by their potential to deepen collaborative understanding. Believing that these models could also benefit directors working in China, I decided to organise an online discussion session with several of my amateur director friends from my former university. I prepared a simplified version of the reflection models we had studied in class — mainly Gibbs’ Cycle and Kolb’s experiential learning loop—and hoped to introduce these as practical tools for analysing their own directing processes.

However, the outcome was not as productive as I had anticipated. Only one or two close friends actively participated, while others remained silent or responded briefly. My initial goal was to generate a genuine exchange about their rehearsal methods and to encourage them to apply structured reflection, but the conversation failed to gain momentum. Ironically, the “limited success” of this experiment itself became a valuable object of reflection. Why did it not work as expected? Was it due to their resistance towards an academic, structured form of reflection? Or was the communication format — an online discussion without shared contex — simply too detached to foster meaningful engagement?

In analysing this experience, I realised that the challenge was not only technical but cultural. Translating Western reflective frameworks into a Chinese creative environment required more than direct transplantation — it demanded sensitivity to communication styles, social dynamics, and differing notions of authority and self-expression. As Candy (2019) reminds us：

The family pattern depends upon a high degree of trust that underpins the co-reflection so necessary to achieving their shared goals (Candy 2019: 120)

Such trust and openness, however, cannot be instantly recreated in a new format or with participants unfamiliar with reflective dialogue. This active experiment therefore served both as a validation of my learning and as a reminder of its limits.

Reflections/Analysis

Looking across my three experiences, I can now see a developmental pattern that mirrors Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. My early work with ManiacMuse represented the stage of Concrete Experience — a lived engagement with collaboration that felt organic, intuitive, and culturally familiar. The “Tomorrow” project marked a shift to Reflective Observation and Abstract Conceptualisation, when encountering a new intercultural context forced me to step outside my habitual methods and question what “collaboration” actually meant. The final experiment — sharing reflective models with my peers in China — was an act of Active Experimentation, in which I attempted to apply and adapt these insights within a different environment.

This is a diagram taken from By et al. (2025) Kolb’s Learning Styles & Experiential Learning Cycle, Simply Psychology.

Through this process, I came to understand that collaboration is not a universal formula but a culturally situated practice. Each setting carries its own implicit “rules of engagement,” and as a director, my role is to learn to read and respond to these codes. In China, creative collaboration often relies on subtle communication and an unspoken sense of harmony; in the UK, it privileges open dialogue and critical exchange. Both modes have strengths and limitations. The challenge lies in bridging them — finding ways for implicit trust and explicit articulation to coexist productively.

Candy (2019) provides a useful lens for this reflection:

The value of each individual’s contribution is based upon how well the level of skill, specialised knowledge and differing perspectives supports the shared endeavour (Candy 2019: 111).

This resonates deeply with my own encounters: in both the Chinese and British contexts, the success of collaboration ultimately depended not on hierarchy or homogeneity, but on how difference was negotiated and integrated. Similarly, her description of “constructive criticism taken to the conceptual (and creative) level” (Candy 2019: 118) helped me reframe the direct communication I observed in UK settings as a form of co-reflection rather than confrontation.

In retrospect, my attempt to introduce reflective models to Chinese peers revealed the cultural limits of simply transferring methods across contexts. Yet, as Kolb suggests, even unsuccessful experiments can generate new learning. I now recognise that reflection itself is a collaborative and intercultural act — one that must adapt to local ways of thinking, speaking, and relating. As a developing director, I see my ongoing task not as mastering one mode of collaboration, but as cultivating the sensitivity and adaptability to mediate among many.

Conclusion

Over the course of this portfolio, I have come to recognise collaboration not as a fixed structure but as a fluid, culturally embedded practice. Through my experiences in both Chinese and British contexts, I have learned that effective teamwork depends less on hierarchy or efficiency and more on trust, dialogue, and adaptability. Engaging with Kolb’s experiential learning cycle has helped me transform challenges into reflective opportunities, allowing me to understand how my creative identity evolves through interaction with others. Key takeaways include learning when to lead and when to listen, how to foster clarity without imposing control, and how to embrace cultural difference as a source of creative energy rather than tension.

Moving forward from here

As I continue to grow as a director, I hope to take what I have learned about reflection and collaboration into both my current and future practice. One of my long-term ambitions is to help improve the working models of Chinese student theatre groups by introducing more open, flexible and reflective approaches to collaboration. I also want to explore how cultural bridges can be built. At the same time, I wish to keep finding my own place within the collaborative culture of the UK. For me, directing has become not only an artistic act, but also a journey of cultural translation and mutual understanding.

Bibliography

Candy, L. (2019) The Creative Reflective Practitioner: Research Through Making and Practice. 1st edition. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.