I come to this moment in the fifth decade of life, as an artist who has moved from place to place creatively, beginning as a musician in a punk band during the 90’s/00’s; writing a releasing music independent of corporate labels. Then moving into theatre briefly before and podcasting, before embarking on the comedy circuit in my 30’s, and back into acting where I stayed for a while, enjoying the process of acting but left feeling empty with the grind. It was that lack of enthusiasm of working to another person’s timetable that led me to filmmaking, a term I use to cover four disciplines, that of writer, director, cinematographer and editor, each one a necessary core component for making film. As a result of both financial need, being as there was and still is no real money available at this stage of a burgeoning film career, and an inability to recognise collaborative practise (over doggedly continuing as a “Single Shooter”) as a source of fruitful production. Rather I depended on my own sense of it will be faster and more like the thing I want to make if I do it myself.
The idea that solo endeavours within a multidiscipline creative practise is one I can, in hindsight, spot patterns of success within my own body of work, mainly pointing at the hard drives full of half completed projects taking space and time away from projects that had better odds of completion but required a portion of collaborating and designation I am not used to. But marching on solo, although creatively singular and in the spirit of auteur theory was I fooling myself in to believing this is the only way to succeed on my terms? As Adam Savage (a former special effects model maker for Industrial Light and Magic) puts it in his book, “Every Tool is a Hammer- Life is what you make it”
“Even if I had all the necessary skills and experience to execute a job perfectly, going it alone without any help would have been foolish. Not only is it less efficient, but how do you expect to learn new things or get better if you do everything in isolation?” A Savage (2019) (p94)
As Savage states it is within those moments of submitting to the collaborative practice, that as an individual you grow and learn as your own discipline takes on the skills learned in those moments, and should you venture into a world of attempting to fulfil a project by your own means then there is potential to fall short, as Savage states
“Let me tell you something: when you are working in a team, making something for somebody else, trying to be the hero is a terrific way to end up becoming the villain.” A Savage (2019) (p95)
In my own experience I have become villain to my own practice more often than not, leading to those moments of fractured professional relationships and the unfulfilled potential felt from a day one ensemble. What I endeavour to pursue in this piece is cataloguing and reflecting the work carried out in the masters programme so far. How my shift in collaborative practice takes shape during these initial first steps. I aim to take account of practises and product that I encounter to broaden my knowledge and push my long enshrined beliefs in how art is devised
There is a parallel viewpoint shared by Robert Rodriguez in his book Rebel without a crew, he states
“If you want to be a filmmaker […], know that you don’t really learn anything in film school anyway. They can never teach you how to tell a story. You don’t want to learn that from them anyway, or all you’ll do is tell stories like everyone else. You learn to tell stories by telling stories. And you want to discover your own way of doing things.” R Rodriguez 1995 (p9)
Rodriguez speaks about how being a multi-discipline creative and embarking on a learning curve of doing you can find success, being the “Hero” in Savages vernacular, of your own workload. He argues that only when you break away from formal collaboration in education can you truly rely on the education you receive in doing the thing and learning from your errors, should you follow convention and the well-trodden path then there is a long line of people waiting their turn patiently “pull cables” only to tell stories like everyone else does, and only in self-reliance away from formal collaboration and that well trodden path can you be an original artist far from the interference and expectant nature of traditional pathways.
Breaking away from these pathways is a privilege and speaking as someone with a Eurocentric lineage in the arts that can be traced back to Aristotle I must counter with Daly form his book “Being Black and British: Before, During and After Drama School” where he states,
“Knowing that you are not the first and that there are other lineages into which your work fits, pushes against and/or furthers, can be empowering because consistently having to be ‘the first’ can be exhausting.” D, Daly Being Black and British: Before, During and After Drama School 2025 (p240)
It’s important that while framing my enquiry into expanded work practices through new ways of collaboration I acknowledge the system I am in and its failings as a truly global collective and reflect on the centricity of the arts and my part in countering it.
New ways of working: so reflecting on my time spent in this masters programme so far we have addressed and experienced a number of collaborative practice in devising of the arts, some I recognised but hadn’t had the formal introduction of, as these were times out in the world working I encountered them in anger, others felt very new, what follows is an account of the practices that I found useful and those I recognise there use but perhaps right now aren’t what work for me.
One such creative device I encountered without knowing was Lehrman’s Critical Response Theory, an experience I only really recognised as familiar once applied to a piece of work I’d prepared for one workshop entitled “Together” I felt quite at home with the neutral questions, and they aided my ability to separate my personal feelings about the piece and just be a vehicle of creation.
During a workshop we as a cohort were tasked with a series of devising tools gathered through the work of Robinson in the book, “A practical guide to ensemble devising” being each placed in groups of 4/5 each team were given a methodology in creating work, these ranged from “Tossed in the pool together” a system of seemingly randomising a group perhaps unknown to each other and seeing what work comes from this form. As Robinson talks about this method is often used in education workshops as it eliminates hierarchy and each group member enters on a mostly equal level, or as he puts “leadership overlaps” he states
“This generates excitement and sometimes frustration, but the time pressure helps resolve differences and is a great motivator for getting things done.” Robinson D. R., A practical guide to ensemble devising. 2015 (P98)
Robinson continues to draw positives and negatives in this method; I sway more towards it negatives. “Tossed in the pool together” harks back to those awaydays in vanilla office jobs, where our team leader wants us all to “get out of our work shadows” and be friends. Fortunately, in more creative setting there tends to be a mostly positive outcome, natural leaders step up and the idea of social norms kicks in, and we each take our defacto roles of director, writer, performer, enabler/producer to get through the task. I raise this particular method as in the early stages of a master’s degree we are mostly all one giant “Tossed in the pool together” cohort, and it will be interesting as we venture on how those defacto roles emerge and with how much rigidity they remain.
My group were given “Yes and..” another of Robinsons action methods, a system built on improvisation and rotated leadership, giving each person a moment to suggest a pieces next steps, for example:
Person a “we are all on a family trip to the US”
Person b “ we are driving to the airport to come home, but we forgot one passport”
Person c “when we stop to search for it, one of our group finds £10k in used notes”
And so on.
Reflecting on this specific task, I found this mostly useful to eliminate barriers to creation, given the time constraint and a need to engage with a suitable level of enthusiasm tends to allow those of us “tossed in” and with responsibility of the product laying with a flat hierarchy of more than just myself, to give in and let the process happen. What resulted wasn’t ever going to develop into a piece of theatre, but as a group made up of directors, dramaturgs and musical directors I think we formed a useful collaboration that culminated in a positive end.
Similarly in our New Work Lab in week one we again were tossed into groups with an aim to create the starts of something. This time rather than randomised each group had prescribed members from each MA programme, a director, a musical director, a composer, dramaturg and several company members. Our starting point was the word “Mountain”
In our group we began to tentative task by throwing around ideas, no one seemed to grasp the group very much initially, until I threw in am idea of a “want song” taken from a not yet existing musical about living with ADHD. The “mountain” being a literal pile of things on a desk the person has to sort in order to, strangely for the second task running, find a passport.
We ran through ideas of obstacles and each person building on the legend and lore of the protagonist until Jason our composer returned the next session with a full song, and as an ensemble we rehearsed.
What I found most interesting with “The Mountain” was that as a collaborative piece, that exists currently as a single song and a pitch deck, as a cohort we all had a sense of pride, in eagerness to share, a collective ownership that fuelled rehearsals and bonded us as a group. What I personally struggled with was once my concept left my hands and landed amongst the ensemble I felt like I’d lost ownership initially, which harks back to the idea of a multi disciplinary single creative and the ownership of a project throughout its life, but here that total ownership ended when as composer Jason took it and added their perspective, which again changed when Dan out Musical Director played it, and our company sung. What was a nice an idea when I was in sole ownership had become a realised piece of art when allowed to follow its path along a creative chain. As Butterworth puts it in her Book “Too Many Cooks”
“..the intentional relation of artists who have chosen group creation, there is some risk in the outcome; some compromise of personal artistic ideas and aesthetic.” J Butterworth Too Many Cooks – A framework for dance making and devising 2012 P108
Butterworth here speaks of the lost ownership and compromise I felt in the early stages of devising “the Mountain” a process I was unsteady about but fully engaged with following the process. My resistance I thought was a hangover that needed a cohort Alka seltzer to sure, which it did. I found that The Mountain’s truth resonated more than I could explain when I first heard the song, with each person having their own part in this “want song” their induvial ownership come together as a singular piece gave it substance, as Greg Doran the former artistic director of the royal Shakespeare company puts it,
“You could always tell a production where it isn’t an ensemble because the actors who aren’t speaking don’t look as though they’re listening, or that they don’t really know what it’s about. I think [theatre is], at its best, one of the most democratic of the arts because it is about what we produce in the room.” G, Doran Interviewed October 2024 for Cherwell.
I am at a point within this process of tipping over the Dunning-Kruger graphs high point, where I initially feel confidence in my new found abilities and knowledge, past experiences confirming a foundation on which I sit. But now looking back there is a sense that I am not where I felt I was, there is much to learn, this is a real positive, it’s a line in the sand of what I was and what I am becoming as an artist, a benchmark to measure my next steps against.
Bibleography
Robinson D. R., . (2015). A practical guide to ensemble devising. London: Palgrave. A practical guide to ensemble devising
Savage, A.(2019) “Every tool’s a hammer” Simon & Schuster
Rodriguez, R. (1995) “Rebel without a crew. Or how a 23 year old filmmaker with $7000 became a Hollywood player” Plume
Norton, N. (2025) “interview with Gregory Doran” Cherwell Student Newspaper https://cherwell.org/2024/05/08/interview-with-gregory-doran-former-director-of-rsc-two-gentlemen-of-verona/
Daly, D. (2025) “Being Black and British : Before, During and After Drama School” Routledge.
Butterworth,J. (2012) “Too Many Cooks – A framework for dance making and devising” Routledge.
