From the Mind of Many

We here at The Inkwell view collaboration as part of the DNA of theater.  But what happens when you throw some unruly dancers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and photographers into the mix?

Something spontaneous and uniquely its own.  Something special.

That's what we found out last Sunday in speaking with a two pairs of artists devoted to creating works that cross boundaries between theater, dance, music, and art. They spoke about their approach to interdisciplinary collaboration at our second in a series of panel discussions associated with the Source Festival (going on now through July 13th).

Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili are the founders of Synetic Theater and have created numerous award-winning performance pieces built from adaptations of literary classics, telling familiar and timeless stories through dance, film, and theater.  Our illustrious artistic director Jessi Burgess and I (your faithful blogger Anne) saw the last performance of Synetic's most recent creation, Carmen.  To depict the life, love, and death of the irresistible gypsy, the Synetic team confined the play within a metal cage.  Throughout the performance, the actors twirled, jumped, fought, and danced around the cage, perhaps speaking 100 to 200 words in total.  I've never seen anything so physically demanding on actors and dancers.  They were literally flipping over scaffolding and dropping to the stage.  I can find no other word to describe the performance but spectacular, in the sense that the imagery and movement always surprised, delighted, and astounded me.

(The photograph above is from Carmen.)

Paata is a trained actor, mime, and filmmaker.  Irina is a ballet dancer, mime, and choreographer.  Together they have developed a method of training actors in movement where gesture, dance, and acrobatics are the primary means of creating dramatic tension and forwarding the story.  And they've created a unique aesthetic for dramatic storytelling.

The collaborative process that Synetic Theater employs is intense and time-consuming.  Each piece takes three months to create, far longer than the usual four to six weeks most theater companies devote to a production.  For the first month, actors participate in a training camp on movement led by both Paata and Irina.  Throughout the second month, actors, Irina, and Paata play, improvising movement and dance as they learn the script.  In the final month, Paata takes the lead in shaping the piece and ruthless editing.  As Paata explained, his training as a filmmaker takes over.  Scenes are shortened to their core essence, so that just as audiences get a feel for the dramatic tension, the play jumps to the next scene. (To get a sense of their pieces, check out the trailers of Carmen and their most popular piece, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.)

How do two people stay married for 18 years (as Paata and Irina have done) and collaborate so closely each and every day?  Are there knock-down, dragged-out fights?  Of course, admits Irina.  But it's a fight about ideas in order to explore a shared vision.  The struggle and confusion are inherent to the collaboration.  And both feed off the "magnetic energy" of working with a range of different collaborators, from designers to musicians to actors.

Then how do you bring artists from different disciplines together to create something entirely new?  Paata and Irina have formed a core team in which they work.  Colin Hovde and Roy Gross — co-founders of Artists' Bloc and the second pair of collaborators participating in the panel — are creating a space for all sorts of interdisciplinary madness.

The sole purpose of Artists' Bloc is to find ways to encourage artists of every genre — painters, photographers, dancers, writers, actors, musicians, sculptors — to initiate collaboration and develop new work.  For the Source Festival, Colin and Roy curated seven new pieces made from all sorts of pairings of artists — a photographer with a playwright, a dancer with a filmmaker, an improv troup with a dance team, to name a few.

So what the heck did these folks create?  Is it theater? Is it visual art?  Is it film?  Is it dance?  None of the above, say Colin and Roy.  They have in fact thought long and hard about what interdisciplinary work is and have come up with the following definition:  the blending of media and perspectives from different artists from different disciplines that forms something entirely new, something that, if one artist or media or perspective is taken away, falls apart.

In addition to their work on the festival, Artists' Bloc runs the "12x6" series, six performances each year of 12-minute pieces created by collaborating artists.  Pieces are first viewed by fellow artists for feedback.  Then a number of selected for public performances.  The company also hosts The Lounge, a casual get-together of artists to discuss collaboration, hopefully sparking new projects.

One of the overriding messages of the panel discussion is that these interdisciplinary collaborations take time, much more time than is usually alloted for rehearsing a play.  It takes time to find the rhythm of the collaboration, to build trust among collaborators, and to hash out various aspects of a piece.  And all agreed that a successful interdisciplinary collaboration take more than two artists, especially when disagreements occur.  A third collaborator can diffuse tension, move the project away from a conflict that bogs it down, or simple create a majority voting block.

So are you ready to dive into an interdisciplinary collaboration?  Clear your calendar, open your mind, and join the Artists' Bloc.  Who knows what you'll create!

And don't miss The Inkwell's third and final panel discussion, New Works in Washington, this coming Sunday at 5:00 p.m. at the Source Theatre.  Trey Graham of the Washington City Paper, David Dower from Arena Stage, and Wooly Mammoth's Elissa Goetschius will talk about the virtues and challenges of creating new plays here in the nation's capital.  For more information, go to The Inkwell's calendar of events.