Collaboration Nation

 Here is the speech I gave as part of the Collaboration Nation panel at the 2010 Emerging Writers Festival. I provide the notes from the talk I gave rather than making it all coherent and such. I like it!

I am playwright/theatre researcher/ writing teacher/dramaturg/former director/former actor/ former agent. I have experienced the collaborative nature of theatre but today we talk about writing.

Two paradoxical points

TWO PARTS

A)   PLAYWRIGHTING IS ALWAYS COLLABORATIVE –audience/reception/words are not empty

B)   The playwright is always alone.

“I’m never alone. I’m alone all the time.”

• A)Theatre is by its very nature collaborative. Not written to be read, the exchange between the writer and the audience may be the last in the change of events of creating a play, but that relationship is with the writer from the first breath of creation of the performance piece. Who is a playwright without an audience?
• 
  
• And why is this so – because of what the audience is seeking

“I think at some level people still come to the theatre
for the truth. The kind of truth I’m talking about is not
the kind of truth which can be written into law, but a
truth of questioning, a truth of disturbance. Theatre is
not a place where you can successfully ask questions
which have rational answers.” Michael Gurr

• The import of the audience - the ultimate collaborative partner. Many people argue that theatre must be entertaining to be good, and this is true, but what that statement seems to be really saying is that theatre must be written with audience in mind. If not, why write in that form? Theatre is written to be uttered by live beings to live beings in a real time/space occasion. But it is more than this...
• Your audience create the piece. They create the finished product. And they do this in the exchange, the collaboration that takes place between the words you so innocently inscribed on the page and the the act of their utterance through the mouth of the performer, and yet again to the ear of the receiver, the audience, who makes of your words what they will. ”Spectators are very aware of the moment when a performance takes off. A “presence” is manifest, something has “happened”. The performers have touched or moved the audience and some kind of collaboration, collective special theatrical life, is born.” Schechner

·         The collaborative potency of theatre is more potent –doubled - than with other writing forms (which it could be argued will all be received by an audience in one form or another) because of theatre's presence. There is a real time exchange taking place which is the collaboration between those who crafted and those who will create it in the act of receiving it. The audience on any given night change your piece by their response to it. In being drawn to the collective presence of theatre, I suggest that the audience and theatre makers are hoping for and intending a transformation, made possible through theatre’s actuality, its very being-ness. ‘Theatrical communication situations are not…fundamentally different from other forms of fiction, but in theater they appear in a radicalized form’ (Helbo et al. 1987:104), and what is most radical about theatre and the audience’s engagement with it is their mutual presence42. Combined with the collective presence of theatre makers, performers and spectators, the reason that theatre retains its appeal and cultural viability in the face of far more realistic media of this century and the last, is the direct and urgent ‘ present-ness’ of the theatrical event.

·         "When a word is spoken live, there is always risk, and there is always impact. Words are like swords, which the writer can choose to wield violently, to guard and protect, to lay down without a fight, which is so often what happens in theatre, when we are really wishing for so much more. “I was speaking of speaking, and speaking is a world unto itself. We speak ourselves into the world. Speaking has a weight of action, not merely a weight of words. Speaking is an act, and should never be considered a retreat from action. Language has more than a rhetorical function in speech – as J. L. Austin has it, it DOES THINGS. When I say – I AM THE KING – I am doing something. I am making myself the king, and in doing this to myself I am doing it to you. Depending on my mode of speech, I am bludgeoning you, I am begging you, I am deceiving you. These are not intentions, not motivations. These words are not subtext. They are actions. They are words. And they have a life of their own. Once spoken, they can’t be taken back. Words are not boomerangs. They have power, and their powers are different to mine. Words are weapons. Words are empty. Words are weighty. Words are cheap. Don’t be afraid of them or they’ll eat you alive”. David Williams

• "And while I’m speaking of speaking – every time I open my mouth, a decision is made, and this decision is not always mine. The act of speaking catches me by surprise, grabs me and shakes up what I think I know. Words rolls out, and come into life in the world. And words also bring themselves into the world, into life. Words carry me away, as much as they are carried by me. Speaking... Speaking is unpredictable, uncertain. Every utterance, no matter how unequivocal it may appear to be, is really a stammer, every gesture a twitch. The impulse to speak, the impulse to move, carries me away.”DW

**Truly exciting theatre is written whether in isolation or with others with full awareness of the exchange taking place between the stage space and the audience space, aware that the product is never a finished piece but an ongoing collaboration which will lead it into directions you never dreamed of.

• B)The rise of the role of the dramaturge is particularly telling of how theatre can rarely be written well in isolation. My role as dramaturg – to be that imaginary audience, whom you are not writing for but through, and with. Or else go write a novel. The midwife. The person that reminds you that you are not alone. The one who rescues you from isolation.
• The relationship between director and writer, and especially the great benefit that can be brought to a play if a writer is able to participate/collaborate in the rehearsal process.
• Knowing when to surrender and when to take a stand, in the collaboration between writer and director/actors etc
• COMMUNICATION AND SURRENDER
• It is the director that makes the playwright.
• Collaborative writing as the first edit - a great way to kill off your darlings
• Creating "on the floor" opens doors
• Many models to collaboration

• 'We were originally kind of co-writing it, we did that over a really short period of time... [Chris] would come to my apartment at night after I had been at work. And it was his idea because he wanted to do it on Ern Malley, and I didn't like Ern Malley. And he would come over and play the guitar and say, 'Can you write a scene with the mosquito and Ern?' And then I'd do that and I'd give that to him and while he read that I would do another one. And he wrote the songs. And then I went to the cellar a few times and watched them improvising and thought, 'Errgh, well this is going to be great.' (Laughs) I thought it was going to be really bad. Chris was kind of editing my stuff together, and he'd call me up and say, 'I think we need a scene between Ethel and Ern'. And so I'd write a scene and then e-mail it. Or then I'd have a crazy night and have these realisations and write a scene and e-mail it to them (2006). Lally Katz