Personal Statement
My previous experience in creation and collaboration came mostly in the form of what Candy would define as Familial and Distributive, with some Complementary. Working as a performer in bands the majority of the work was Familial collaboration, while the solo music work was typically more Distributive, characterised by attending music events gathering a selection of performers together. At the same time my work in theatre contained elements of Complementary collaboration, but had always leaned towards a more Family style as well. These experiences almost all centred around performing a piece of work that had already been written. When it came to creating new work my experiences had been almost universally individual, and had involved little to no collaboration.
Line of Enquiry
I began my course curious as to the ways in which collaboration could aid or hinder the development of a creative project, and wanted to try and arrive at a definition of what ‘success’ meant when it came to describing a creative process. My previous experience had been that in order to arrive at a single cohesive piece typically required a sole creator or smaller creative team working with a clear leader. This piece could then be performed by a larger creative team under direction, similar to processes 1 through 3 of Butterworth’s Didactic-Democratic model. However the success of a creative product is not necessarily defined by its production of a commercially viable piece of completed media. The collaborative process can have more outcomes than simply the generation of a work, and the outcomes of these more process-led works can be just as useful in achieving a further understanding of creativity and collaboration than a project-led piece.
Adam Hayes lays out seven criteria for defining a product’s success, which provided a useful starting point for analysing a creative piece’s apparent success. His metrics are Schedule, Cost and Profitability, Customer Satisfaction, Team Satisfaction, Output Quality, Cycle Time, and Continual Improvement. When analysing the following projects I will use these as a starting point to discuss whether they might be considered ‘successful’ or not from a more commercially focused viewpoint.
The criteria for assessing the collaborative nature of the pieces will be through the joint framework of Butterworth’s Didactic-Democratic Model and Robinson’s ensemble devising structures. This is to assess each piece for how it combined leadership driven creativity or showed a more collective collaboration. The success of a piece will thus be judged simultaneously by whether it was more collaborative or more singly driven, and by the success it then achieved according to Hayes.
Comparative Piece 1: Tomorrow the Musical
Assigned to a random group that was dictated to include a dramaturge, a musical director, a director and a minimum of three performers, the prompt of the word ‘tomorrow’ was given. The intention of this was to create a piece of work within one week, for presentation to a group. There were no more instructions given. The group I had been assigned to began work on a new musical with this as the theme.
Our initial brainstorming session quickly refined the idea with heavy use of a ‘tossed in the pool’ collaborative style. Every member of the group suggested ideas or directions that the musical could take, quickly finding a setting of an airport, a group of characters waiting for a flight, and an overarching theme of characters waiting for something that would happen tomorrow. From this initial brainstorming session a final pitch idea was arrived at. The final presentation would take the form of a five minute pitch of this new musical, including a performance of a proposed opening song. Our Musical Director wrote a short piece of music and I provided the lyrics and what would become a short opening scene, acted out by every member of the group. The initial brainstorming session would be approximately a 4 on the Butterworth scale, involving input from everyone in creation. This then changed to having group leaders as Robinson might define then, but they were confined to one specific field ie. Composition, lyric generation.
The presentation of this piece was very successful, and it was clear that we had been able to generate in the week an idea that could be further fleshed out to become a full musical. However, it was also apparent from the early stages that some people’s contributions at the creative level were more substantial than others. Although every member did help in shaping the setting and characters, the bulk of the work of creating the piece of music that formed the central lynchpin of the presentation fell to two members of the group. Once the piece had been created though the rehearsals were conducted on very equal footing and the final performance relied entirely on every person contributing. In this way as with my previous experiences the creative process tended far more towards a 1 or 2 on Butterworth’s scale, while the performance was more a 4.
By the previously mentioned metrics Tomorrow the Musical was a complete success. It delivered on time a zero cost presentation that met its brief with a piece of work that matched the quality of the other works. Although customer satisfaction is a little harder to define in this sense it was well received in the room, and the group seemed to enjoy working on it. The experience allowed everyone involved to trial new ways of working that could lead to their improvement in other areas. With this as a stating point I will now compare it with another project.
Comparative Piece 2: In Class Short Assignments
There were two pieces completed during a class which had a similar intention to the first case. Both of these pieces were generated by a new group working together with a single word prompt and the addition of a Robinson structure in which to create the creative piece. The structures chosen by the group I worked in were Groups With a Leader and Collective. The word prompt was ‘Holiday.’ Through this method we created two pieces, one of which was on the surface more successful, while the other was less so when judged by Hayes’ metrics.
The first piece was a short story of a train journey across the country during a snowstorm. This was written by myself, with physical actions carried out by two other members. The last two members of the group served as the leader assigning roles and deciding on the theme and style and an outside eye evaluating the piece. Via this method we created a one minute monologue with actions that was performed to the group. This was the Group Leader task.
The second piece was a short story written using the method of passing the story to the next person in the group after each word. This also created a short story that could have been performed by monologue, however the narrative structure of the piece was far less cohesive, and there was no accompanying movement or staging, as well as no specific performer chosen to recite the monologue. This was the Collective task.
On the surface of the two pieces the first was the more successful, however both of the pieces would be considered unsuccessful in relationship to Tomorrow the Musical. From this standpoint Robinson’s ‘tossed in the pool’ collaboration would seem to be a near complete failure. In further reflecting on these two works I decided to evaluate them not by the end result, but by the original stated goal and intention. The task was not to create a piece of performable work with a cohesive structure but to create a collaborative piece using a prompt. From this perspective the second piece was the far more successful, as it represented total equality of input from all the participants, and led to the creation of a piece that took an unexpected direction that would likely not have been chosen deliberately by any of the individual participants. The lack of a group leader created a less directed effort but allowed for more interpretation and freedom.
Comparative Piece 3: 10 Minute Musical Pitch
The final piece for comparison is a pitch I made for an original project I had already completed before entering a collaborative space with it. I took the original idea that I had worked on and brought in a musical director and two other performers for the piece. This gave me an example of collaboration much closer to Complementary from Candy’s perspective, approximately a 2 on the Butterworth scale, and very much Robinson’s Group Leader pattern. The Musical Director could interpret the music as presented to them, and I was more than willing to incorporate suggestions for improvement, but the piece was already written and would not fundamentally change. Similarly the other performers were learning a completed melody and words presented to them.
The final pitch was again by Hayes standard a success, meeting every metric. However as a piece of collaborative creative work it could be described as a failure, since every piece of it was created by a sole creative, with minimal input in the final stages from others. However taking the other examples previously mentioned there are smaller ways in which the piece succeeded as a collaborative work. The musical director brought in aspects of orchestration that I would not have been able to given my musical background, and the performers brought aspects to the characters which I had not previously considered.
Reflections
Leadership in collaborative efforts emerged as an unexpected discovery of the various projects undertaken. Even when trying to work on an entirely equitable level it seems as though certain personalities are more likely to take control. As the second example shows this can have a stymying effect on other members of the group who may have things to contribute but be less likely to due to various reasons of feeling less able to put forward their views, whether restricted by the topic, the methodology or personal reasons. I would be interested in further exploring the ways in which an environment can be created in which everyone feels able to contribute more equitably.
Conclusion
There are many ways to define success, and the success of a creative project even more so, as there is little quantitative measure. My experiences have led me to the conclusion that the greatest metric of success is actually defined before the piece is even started, when the goals of the project are laid out. A project that becomes a long-running professional stage musical is no more successful than a project intended to inspire creativity in a small group of strangers, as long as the goal that was laid out beforehand matches the end product. Similarly, although by Hayes’ standards if that small group project became a long-running stage musical it would be considered successful, from a more process-led instead of product-led standpoint it should not be considered a greater success than if it remained in the rehearsal room serving as a way to encourage cooperation among strangers.
In the creative field success is typically defined from a very commercial standpoint. And while this can be an important aspect of a career in the creative arts there are other ways to utilise collaborative creation that do not necessarily rely on the typical measures of theatrical success. Applied theatre is perhaps the most obvious example of this, with examples such as Dr Kim Wiltshire using youth theatre to address issues affecting teens or the company Estopo Balaio using theatre in Sao Paolo as a way to ‘empower individuals engaged in group activities, (foster) a sense of community and… (respond) to a visceral need for reflection and transformative practice’. My most important reflection from the three case studies is in redefining the intention of working creatively and working in a creative space.
Bibliography
Butterworth, J. (2009) ‘Too many cooks? A framework for dance making and devising’, in Contemporary Choreography. Routledge.
Candy, L. (2019) The Creative Reflective Practitioner: Research Through Making and Practice. 1st edition. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Wiltshire, K 2015, ‘Project XXX: Using multimedia theatre to explore sexual and emotional health issues’, Journal of Applied Arts & Health, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 33-45. https://doi.org/10.1386/jaah.6.1.33_1
Spadotto, J. and Saito, N. (2023) ‘Igniting transformational change through applied theatre: Jardim Romano’s Floods and Estopô Balaio unleashing an overflow of possibilities’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 22(1), pp. 102–111. doi: 10.1080/14767724.2023.2243829.
Hayes, A. 2024, ‘7 Powerful Ways to Measure Project Success,’ Available online: https://project.co/measure-project-success/ [Accessed: 27 October 2025]
Robinson, D. (2015) A Practical Guide to Ensemble Devising, London: Palgrave
