On Collaboration Working notes for choreographers and directors
Dance UK News, Autumn issue 2008In opera, musicals and text based theatre, choreographers are part of a team (with a designer, a conductor or music director, lighting designer, fight director, sound designer etc.) who work within the envelope of the directorial vision. However, the choreographer and director work very closely with the same performers in the rehearsal room. This can be a situation where vision, chemistry, and logistics can get all mixed up in the delivery of the choreographic work. Here are some notes as a sort of personal glossary on the qualities I have found essential for successful collaborative practice where my own choreographic signature has to be subsumed into the delivery of a single result. This often involves a complex inter-personal web of relating, in situations where shared imaginations have the potential to give form to groundbreaking ideas.
1. Empathy
The ability to understand and share another person's feelings and ideas, and to respond intuitively to the emergent premise and the resulting work. This quality helps the imaginative currency to be well oiled - helps the flow of ideas and allowing them to deepen - stops things getting stuck and helps to release the best in others.
2. Abrasion - asking the awkward question(s)
This quality helps turn corners in an overly nice or over empathised environment. It stems from a need for better guidance as to who is leading/following the train of thought. Like emery paper for striking matches can cause sparks - ignites thinking processes.
3. Listening
Not second-guessing the other person or people such as the director, other collaborators or the performers. Hearing more than speaking. Allowing a train of thought to reach its conclusion. Not interrupting. Then asking a further question when appropriate.
4. Sharing a viewpoint on the emergent material or work
Offering what occurs as an observation. Giving flashes of insight, which occur in viewing the work in progress or what is occurring as the work unfolds. Pick your moment for that.
If its an off the wall spur of the moment thing then it can be the one element that can solve a moment or an act, or the work as a whole. Trust it - share it - relax if it seems not to bite or get taken up. Collaborators need thinking time.
5. Dogged pragmatism - logistical insights.
Viewing a challenge or problem in the cold light of day.
Sorting out the nuts and bolts that make a 'vision', a moment, or a transition work
How many - when - what - why?
Without killing an idea how can it realistically be made to work?
What needs to adapt to make any particular flight of fancy become a reality without losing its magic?
6. Yielding
To the whole, toward the resultant work, to other ideas, giving way where needed. Committing to the emergent results. Reflecting on what is important to the story and the creation of the whole. Not getting upset if an element you have contributed goes by the way side.
7. Valuing
Appreciating and acknowledging the ownership of the contributed ideas.
It may be that by half way into the working process no one even knows, remembers or cares where, how or when the best idea came up. It shouldn't matter. However straightforward acknowledgment that there are team members with authorship insights involved in the work. The director's appreciation of the contribution to the result is vital.
8. Raising the game
A constant process of searching to make stronger more investigative choices -all the time - probing deeper by accepting what is going on but pushing the boundaries.
9. Working with performers
This is about engaging with another group of collaborators and relationships in the process but these people 'carry' the work of everyone. Their discoveries and contributions are inevitably shaping the work. Sensitivity to them, their expectations; how their relationship with director and choreographer is different yet inter-related in their performance and reception of notes and technical insights.
10. Life in the fast lane
This is when the project is culminating, when the pressure is on because of the limits of technical time when problems may be occurring. Vital to retain respect for other collaborators; working with the team, listening and contributing but not forcing or driving; accepting if something doesn't work and making changes for the better. This tests the best of temperaments for the job. Keeping ones cool is vital. As is keeping objectivity
©Kate Flatt Autumn 2008
Finding - and owning - a Voice: Choreographic Signature and Intellectual Property in Collaborative Theatre Practices.
by Kate Flatt and Susan Melrose From Dance Theatre Journal Volume 22 - 2 Signature: n. A sign, stamp, or mark impressed, as by a seal. A mark or sign made by an individual on an instrument or document to signify knowledge, approval, acceptance, or obligation. 1
What are the 'ownership' issues that apply specifically to professional choreographic work, where that work is subsumed into a production signed by another practitioner? Kate Flatt's professional choreographic work over a number of decades has encompassed the creation of both sole-authored dance works and collaborative work. More recently, her choreographic practice has fed into opera and text based theatre productions signed by a professional director. We argue here that this is not an entirely unusual circumstance in today's theatre, not least where the skills base required of the theatre director may well go beyond her or his own training in and for the profession. But what can actually result from a reputedly collaborative practice is the formal under recognition of the choreographic input, and nowhere is this under-recognition more striking than in
writing about performance, whether by professional reviewers, or by published academics. In "Finding - and owning - a Voice", we attempt to sketch out a professional situation specific to choreographic collaborations which remain largely invisible - one of contemporary theatre's trade secrets - for the simplest of reasons, which is that the theatre director tends to sign the work in question, thereby claiming (aesthetic and intellectual-property) ownership over it.
Setting the (research) scene
The present enquiry is centred on dance-making practices, in the context of scripted (as
distinct from devised) theatre performance making. It signals what might be called an overlap field, where the disciplinary expertise of a choreographer does not so much 'lend itself to' the creative undertaking of a professional theatre director, but instead operates as a vital component of creative process. As such, choreographic expertise produces certain sorts of otherwise unavailable insights - specific for example to characterisation and staging overall - and it enables the theatre director to take those onboard in her or his own process of textual exploration, work with the performer, and theatrical production. Kate Flatt has recently worked with a number of innovative theatre or opera directors, including Katie Mitchell2 and David Lan3. None of the dramatic works drawn on in these stagings is conventionally dance-based, or indeed 'movement-based', in contemporary understandings of the term; yet each has identified choreography as vital to its aesthetic.
1 Signature in creative practice is a relatively diffuse notion in the sense that it involves identifiable, individuating qualities whose nature and boundaries will tend to be fluid, but it seems to stand for something much more concrete in the professions, where a practitioner's name tends to be associated variously with a way of making work, a body of work made, with identifiable features in the work itself, and with a judgement or measure of quality, possibly of authority, approval and acceptance, shared to a lesser or greater extent by a wider community.
Flatt's own expert enquiries, in these critically noted productions, are centred on, but not limited to, dance making practices in theatre performance by actors. They have explored indicatively, the relationship between dance as a relatively abstract medium (not necessarily concerned with notions of dramatic character linked to the work of individual performers), and the psychological realism of some 20thC approaches to dramatic theatre, seeking to demonstrate how, at the overlap between these two disciplinary worlds, a catalytic4 process bringing together different fields of performance-making mastery can engender new performance-making practices. We want to argue that Flatt's own creative and professional choreographic undertakings, in mainstream theatre production, constitute an ongoing 'applied research' enquiry, of a highly complex kind, and that at the same time they throw into question certain aspects of collaborative performance-making practices. One key aspect is centred on the issue of intellectual property ownership in collaborative performance-making. Unlike the sometimes solitary individual practitioner-researcher in some areas of the visual arts, the performance practitioner rarely works alone, and rarely masters all of the practices central to her art. She must, by definition, draw on others' creative input, whether it is a case of Michael Nyman's original composition, with Shobana Jeyasingh, or the Quay Brothers, working with Kim Brandstrup. Interestingly enough, the practitioners identified above have been taken on in terms of, and leave their own creative signature, on the work of the choreographers concerned, without contributing, however, to the development of the work of the dancers involved in major stagings. In the case of the script-based theatre productions identified above, material generated by the choreographer herself, in the developmental processes of the production, tends to be assimilated into the director's own creative undertaking. While - if it is successful - the choreographic input is recognised within the profession, it tends to go 'unsigned' in the wider sphere. Where that choreographic input constitutes an ongoing research undertaking, by the professional concerned, all sorts of issues having to do with confidentiality, the rights to document process, and the ownership of discoveries emerging as though by accident within the rehearsal and workshop processes are highlighted. Ethical questions of ownership and recognition will emerge here: they need to be posed more formally, but they are outside the scope of this paper, as such.
KF: Two questions that have emerged for me in the process over recent years concern first the signature of the choreographer herself, in the context of director led theatre: what does it consist of, and where, in the professional outcome, can it be identified? Second: how is the imprint of the choreographer recognised in an integrated performance structure? I would argue that if the outcome is successful, the work of choreographer and director should be seamlessly integrated, so that it appears that the choreographer as signature practitioner has not been there at all - hence the notion of 'invisible choreography' that I am exploring more generally - but aesthetic seamlessness should not, surely, be equivalent to erasure.
What might choreographic signature in collaborative practices 'look like'?
'Signature' is difficult to identify where professional practice is collaborative, but it is
equally difficult to theorise in the university, wherever emphasis in late 20thC terms has been placed on the role of cultural systems in generating new work, rather than on the artistic invention of singular individuals. In etymological terms, 'signature' can be seen as an imprint or mark, as eidos, or as karakter, pressed into a soft substance like clay. The clay 'takes its mark', and retains it. In dance terms this already presents us with a problem: dance is a fluid and often a collaborative medium; it operates outside of writing, without dependence on writing, and it can seem to be 'carried' in performance by the performers in space and time. Choreographic signature may on the other hand be identified in the way the choreographer has shaped action and dance material which,
viewed from a quite particular distance, replicates to some extent the position of the spectator. This latter observation would suggest that 'signature' itself, in choreographic terms, is both visual, and a matter of outside perception (although some practitioners might prefer to argue that choreographic signature is also a matter of a way of working, a way of making work, and that the 'mark' here is embodied and performer-interactive. It might lie between dance-making, music, the play of light and a more generally visual and spatial aesthetics; or in the interface between a complex idea and the 'resistant materialities' of performer and performance objects). In everyday terms, we might want to argue that more than anything else, it is the way the action is shaped that makes the Kim Brandstrup signature different from that of Rosemary Butcher, or Shobana Jeyasingh. In more technical terms, that different 'shaping' might be recognisable in -
amongst other things - the distinctive articulation, by the individual choreographer, of action in time and space. 'Signature' might also suppose that something apparently personal, or individual, or singular to the maker has become manifest in the work; yet if this is the case, we might wonder what the personal, individual or singular might mean where the discipline can still be recognized as such. Certainly singularity can only emerge in terms of, and be referenced in terms of, the generalities of choreography, in a particular cultural context. We want to argue that the imprint or signature in - for example - Rosemary Lee's work, might be recognisable by her choice of performers or in her medium of presentation, as much as in the actual material content of the dance. These factors might need to be added to the notion of "shaping action and dance material". Other examples might be the imprint of the maker through the dance music relationship of Mark Morris; as the schematic unpredictability in the work of Jonathan Burrows; or the use of choreographic imagery visible in Siobhan Davies' work. In summary, choreographic signature might be identifiable in terms of the impress ('in the work' - where a schematic representation of identity can be recognised) of all or any of the following:
• choice of performers or company;
• choice of training background of performers;
• choice of medium of presentation,
• choice of collaborators;
• shaping action and dance material;
• characteristic relationship of music and dance
• degree of schematic conformity (e.g. narrative dance has a high degree of schematic conformity) or schematic unpredictability;
• characteristic use of choreographic imagery.
Our sense (we use the term deliberately) is that many of us would recognise the mark or impress of an established performance- maker (Lloyd Newson; Rosemary Butcher; Wayne McGregor; Shobana Jeyasingh; Kim Brandstrup) even if we were to remove elements specific to staging more generally, and even if different sections of sole authored choreographic material were to be performed by different dancers. This would suggest that the impress is both finer in its detail and more 'impress-ive' in its overall mark on 'the work' in question, than might initially be supposed.
KF: For a choreographer like myself, working in a situation where a director leads a team and 'signs' the results of her or his work, it is significantly more problematic to identify a separate choreographic 'signature'. As programme credit, I have been variously named as movement director, dance advisor, 'etiquette consultant', movement coach, dance arranger, 'director of movement', or simply 'movement'. Does the audience know which 'moments' have actually been 'signed' by the choreographer? Probably not, unless they are already familiar with my work or that of the director. It is also the case that an attempt to measure actual minutes of recognisable dance or movement material is not necessarily a helpful guide to signature content. In the Three Sisters at the RNT (2003) the performance lasted 3.5 hours. In quantitative terms, the sum total of visible material that might have something to do with a choreographer actually amounted to no more than 60 seconds in Act 1, 5-6 minutes in Act II, a minute in Act III and 3.5 minutes in Act IV. However I was present almost daily through over two months of rehearsal and had the credit 'choreographer' in the programme.
If, when we return quite specifically to choreographic signature in dramatic theatre
production, that signature, in quantitative terms may be slight (as is indicated in the case above), it might also be argued that in qualitative terms, the choreographer's expertise in the articulation of action - and not just bodywork-focused skills - is such as to have affected the professional actors' performances overall. Directors trained in the tradition starting from text-work around the table are rarely themselves movement-trained to professional levels, yet distinctive contemporary theatre practice is often highly demanding in precisely those terms. In similarly qualitative terms, the work of the director may well have been influenced by the choreographer's process - yet it might well be argued that 'influence' no more constitutes signature in performance-making than does the input of the lighting designer. We should want to make another case, which is that in certain instances of collaboration, the choreographer intrudes her expertise, in timely manner, into the work approached more conventionally on the basis of the traditionally-trained director's own expertise. Theatre production, in the early 21st century, has been transformed by a number of forces, some of which are typified by the work in the 1990s of Theatre de Complicite (hence, in turn, by the ludic work in movement and gesture of Jacques Lecoq). From this perspective, the mark of the collaborative choreographer would seem, ideally, to inhabis the work of the performer and the mise en scene (or staging) overall: it inhabits the directorial signature - hence the crisis for the choreographer, in terms of (intellectual) property ownership. A key problem for the expert choreographer, in this precise context, comes from the fact of looking from a choreographer's perspective at the action in space and time, rather than from the director's viewpoint of the unfolding of events. Creating or establishing action in a choreographic sense can be fraught with difficulty within the directorial rehearsal arena where the actions improvised by the actor can be viewed as psychological rather than more simply physical, and unlikely to emerge on the basis of conventional theatrical blocking. The actors' improvisation and lack of 'fixed' action present a problem for the development of material and establishing of timed action in a specific location. How can any choreographic material occurring as a fixed, repeatable time structure, be included in a continually-improvised series of mini-narratives, where action is seen as directed by the character's 'thought', and overdetermined, in turn, by an emergent 'performance text' authored by the theatre director her or himself? When, additionally, use of the Stanislavskian principle of the 'fourth wall' between the proscenium stage and the audience is strictly observed - with clear impact on position and movement-orientation of the performers - the consequence is that choreographic notions of stage pictures, spatial design or conventions of orientation toward the front of the stage are instantly redundant. On this basis, we are arguing for the identification of a shared schematic development of theatrical signature, in which the choreographer's input is both demonstrable, and invisible - at least as far as product is concerned. We are equally arguing that this apparently invisible mark, as far as product is concerned, will tend to be identifiable, for other professionals, in terms of and on the basis of the evidence of process, in the making itself. It will tend to be communicated, by the performers themselves, via the oral economy of professional practice, and it will rarely be identified as such, as a consequence, by the academic writer (as expert spectator). If that is the case, then our argument here is that we need urgently to inspect creative process, to inspect the working practices, in order to identify choreographic collaboration, rather than - as is more general - the artistic outcome as such.
'In theory', and 'on the ground'
In research terms, dance and theatre making processes can be looked at - but rarely are - as epistemic (or 'knowledge-centred') practices, or as complex practices through which knowledge is produced. In epistemic terms, theatre production is widely viewed - by both reviewers and academics - in terms of a quite particular and relatively limited range of models of intelligibility. Issues specific to, and understandings of theatre production, tend still to focus largely on dramatic authorship, directing and acting, even if major shifts in performance-making in the late 20th century forced some writers to broaden their view in order to take onboard the creative intervention of a range of other practitioners and tastes. Devised, collaborative and interdisciplinary performance making was rarely professionally reviewed in mainstream writing in the UK before the 1990s, and it
remains the case that the urge to attribute authorship tends to determine how writers view, and propagate a view of, performance-making. Now, interdisciplinary and collaborative practices offer writers a doubly complex scenario, as well as the requirement that they identify (in epistemic terms) changing models of intelligibility, not least when these new works are produced at the interface between a number of instances
of disciplinary mastery. In that making, it is also the case that collaborative practice tends to involve heuristic processes of exploration and discovery, of invention of the not-yet-known, where the amassing of performance material can seem to be 'un-authored' at source, to emerge on the basis of ongoing catalytic development, where the decisive input of one or another practitioner may seem to come from any point in the group undertaking, with the consequence that the creative sum is greater than the addition of its individual parts. They thus pose the choreographer-researcher a quite particular problem if she attempts to document that process. What seems to emerge in professional collaborative
practice, is that schematisation as signature development (i.e. as something that seems to be mapped out in and leave its mark, schematically, on, the work) is interwoven between several creative voices or inputs. Conversation as exchange between director and choreographer may also involve re-configuring through ongoing discussion - apparently informal - of shared directives, often quite loosely specified ideas, the origin of which tends toward anonymity as the work develops, if not as it ends up. The director subsumes the results into her or his own insights or elaboration. In that experience, vagueness and incomplete suggestions are normal but the incomplete and the as-yet under-explored tend to offer vitally unstabilised paradigms for further investigation. It is this lack of early stabilisation, coupled with different instances of individual mastery, that makes the production process a heady one, and one resistant to easy capture. It is also one difficult even for expert spectators to identify after the event. Everyone concerned in the production processes (including performers, director and choreographer) seems happy to work on hunches, employing faculties referred to by Schön in The Reflective Practitioner5 as 'knowing in action', prior to bringing these hunches into productive interface with the logics of production that apply. Both choreographer and director (as well as performers) appear to employ expert or professional intuition, tacit knowing and very swift as well as fleeting decision-making. All participants tend to make sense of problems by being 'versed in the entire process of reflection-in-action', dealing well 'with uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict' (Schön: 50). All operate, in Schön's terms, by reflecting upon 'understandings implicit in actions, which surface, are criticised, restructured', and then 'embodied in further action' (50). Any problem framed, by any participant, may then be reframed, in the search for a solution, revealing a new working practice and a different outcome from the one that either 'may have initially imagined' (41). In director-choreographer collaboration, creative interaction with the performers will mean sharing the rehearsal floor, negotiating a complex range of thoughts and ideas within an often, undeclared and shifting sense of hierarchy. Direct communication between the parties involved requires patience and a subtle sense of timing if conflict and contradiction are to be avoided, and if the professional energy of the rehearsal room is to be maintained. There is rarely an opportunity to discuss any freshly emerging thoughts or ideas. It can be hard, given the speed of action together with professional sensitivities, even to catch the eye of the other person whilst watching performers relay the results of a three hour session of trial and error.
In place of a conclusion
We have attempted in this paper to outline some of the issues specific to ownership in
collaborative practices, suggesting that dramatic theatre in the professional sphere is unusual, amongst art practices more generally, in that it tends to depend upon the creative and professional input of a range of practitioners, each of whom has - so to speak - a stake in the enterprise. It tends to be the case in the performing arts professions and/or crafts more generally that future employment depends upon others' appraisal of the quality of the input of the last few shows. Expertise, curiously enough, in these professions, does not seem to be 'held' by the expert (as might be the case in an academic, a doctor, or a lawyer), but rather it is required repeatedly to be evidenced
anew. Where individual practitioners are independent or quasi-independent - by which we mean not attached to a given theatre institution - the marketplace within which we
operate is a curious one, regulated by factors which tend to lack transparency and accountability. An ability to 'work with' a renowned signature practitioner, without challenging her or his ownership of the work overall, while undertaking to provide, over the time of a production, what he or she seems to need in order to excel, can seem, in the terms we have set out above, to be as important as the quality of the expert input. We propose to conclude here with one account of professional choreographic practice, provided in the context of a major theatre production, which seems to us to exemplify the situation set out above. What emerges is the very clear indication that choreographic input itself determines - and leaves its im-press on - key aspects of work on characterisation by the actors concerned, under the expert staging belonging, seemingly to the director in question.
request a dance etc. The improvisation was extremely revealing about the characters and informed through a free flow of nonverbal encounters, which highlighted the tension of unrequited desire. The actors' engagement in the improvisation was a break-though in how the subtle tensions of the play could be revealed, and in my judgement they carried this experience forward into the work. Whilst it did not result in specific material to be included in the finished work, it is one example of how choreographic signature is present but embedded invisibly in process.
KF: The staging of Three Sisters at the Royal National Theatre followed a period of research funded by NESTA where I was the director's consultant on principles of ballet, modern dance and choreographic processes. She was curious to find approaches from dance, which could be 'air-lifted' into her own theatre making process. Initial discussions on Three Sisters outlined the casting and the precise time that the play would be set. I had identified the waltz as an appropriate dance for the period had also brought in a video of the early 20th century American cakewalk and ragtime. We decided that I should work with the actors on the waltz but also include the later dances which would provide a common movement language to draw on.
The director talked about psychological realism, to be investigated with the actors and the need to be very precise with this. Four dramatic themes were identified (time, death, family and unrequited desire) and she explained the system of script analysis to be used. I proposed, in relation to the theme of time, to do abstract movement work, training the actors in precise use of slow motion, freeze frame and fast forward. We discussed the shape of the rehearsal day and when my work would happen. The next time we met was for two days research and development period at the National Theatre Studio where some of these ideas were explored and we began to establish further frames of investigation for the rehearsal period. Even at this early stage, the notion of potential signature content was apparent. One of the directorial aims in this case was to make the 'performance text', in tandem with the spoken text, believable emotionally, and physically. The performers endeavour to replicate the life of real people, whose stories and emotions must be convincing as the play unfolds. The actors are given tasks to fulfil, such as exploring the back history of the character and identifying an emotion or state by staging events using the other actors. The actors develop a very high stake in the process, through the scrupulous playing of 'psychological' actions. Further events and actions were drawn from many 'mini-narratives' defined through the director's exhaustive script analysis. My own modus operandi as a dance maker is rooted in abstraction and how dance movement is articulated as a flow of time and space. In this instance the theatre director's approach was rooted in psychological realism, and Stanislavskian principles. We look with different eyes, each through a different lens at what unfolds as the material content of the performance emerges. The aim of my sessions on movement and dance was for each actor to be so familiar with the material experienced, that they could draw upon it for any scene in improvisation. I used five different approaches: formal, didactic dance instruction, exploratory abstract movement work on concepts relating to time, group improvisation, individual dance instruction specific to a character, and dance directing using video reference in the development of a dance sequence. The material developed in these workshops created a body of learnt material and skills and a common language as a currency of play, shared by all performers. Far from formal didactic experiences, the dance workshops were interactive, with both badinage and peer rivalry becoming significant factors in the improvement of the company's waltzing. The director closely observed my process, taking notes, and later sharing her observations with the actors.
As she worked on specific scenes, she was able to draw on this pool of prepared material, by encouraging the actors to dance with specific psychological intentions. By this means, the dance language became realised as part of the performance text. As a currency of experience for Three Sisters, the waltz provided an unexpectedly apposite vehicle for developing the major theme of the play - unrequited desire. I had a professional hunch that the sexual attraction embodied in the dance would reap rewards understanding this complex theme. I brought in a CD of the Piano Quintet (1976) by Alfred Schnittke (specifically the 2nd movement Tempo di Valse) as a further reference for the actors. Schnittke's waltz is disturbing, with a fragmented feel to it, like snatches of memory. This helped in a sensory way as a musical metaphor for the theme of unrequited desire. I planned, with the director, an improvisation in which the actors could explore the theme. Working together in a spontaneous, catalytic partnership, the structure for the improvisation was defined. A rule emerged: any performer could dance with anyone else. Chairs were placed randomly in the space, which allowed actors to sit out, or join in, to dance alone or to follow social convention and request a dance etc. The improvisation was extremely revealing about the characters and informed through a free flow of nonverbal encounters, which highlighted the tension of unrequited desire. The actors' engagement in the improvisation was a break-though in how the subtle tensions of the play could be revealed, and in my judgement they carried this experience forward into the work. Whilst it did not result in specific material to be included in the finished work, it is one example of how choreographic signature is present but embedded invisibly in process.
Notes
1 Signature in creative practice is a relatively diffuse notion in the sense that it involves identifiable, individuating qualities whose nature and boundaries will tend to be fluid, but it seems to stand for something much more concrete in the professions, where a practitioner's name tends to be associated variously with a way of making work, a body of work made, with identifiable features in the work itself, and with a judgement or measure of quality, possibly of authority, approval and acceptance, shared to a lesser or greater extent by a wider community.
2 Chekhov's Three Sisters, the Royal National Theatre, London 2003 and Strindberg's Dream Play, The Cottesloe, RNT, London 2005
3 Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, Young Vic, London 2004 and Marlowe's Dr Faustus, Young Vic, London, 2002
4 A catalysis occurs when two unlike materials are transformed through heat into a new outcome which is greater than the sum of its constituent parts - see S. Melrose, A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text, Macmillan 1994
5 D. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action, Basic Books, 1983
© Susan Melrose and Kate Flatt 2006
The Seriously Imaginative Business of Choreography
2002 Animated Magazine Foundation for Community Dance
I have heard the word choreography used by a journalist in relation to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. It was not in connection with what they might or might not have been doing in the Oval office but referred instead to the awe-inspiring manipulation undertaken by Kenneth Starr and his supporting network. If the media can use the word choreography to describe Starr's surreptitious engineering feats and the power shifts they have caused, then it is time to recognise that the rest of the world has caught up with the choreographer's true operating potential. Until recently, I have often felt despair at the popular media image of the choreographer, which seemed to have not got beyond the pantomime personality who wears a medallion, or the woman from Fame whose main activity is to count 'straight eights' loudly. Instead, in a range of non-danced meetings, contributions in the form of flexible inversions, extensions, and lateral leaps of thinking often come, though not exclusively, from the choreographers present. I also find myself choreographing areas of work or life unrelated to dance, using tools that are sharpened and maintained in the dance studio.
So what are these choreographic abilities? I have heard writer Tom Paulin refer to research as "having an idea and seeing it through" (1). Choreographic practice is a form of ongoing research, with imagination as the primary tool. Choreographers can initiate an idea, nurture, research, coordinate, develop and realise it, without a prescription for the final outcome. As they invent and map out dance material, grapple with ways to articulate form in the territory of feeling, a host of flexible thinking skills are utilised. Imaginative systems of organisation are applied to fleeting passages of time and space called movement, and conduits emerge for this fluid and living material called dance. The choreographer's ability to produce feeling response and physical empathy through their work, need no longer be perceived as only mystical or intuitive. Choreographers are consciously pragmatic in editing, shaping, cutting and pasting, often against the clock. Tomorrow they could casually start to reshape the rhythm of yesterday's material, find a new area of movement investigation and then decide in a flash that it would be better done by two in the down left corner. Could this subtle process of coordinating the intimate delicacy of space between dancers be made explicit and offered to those who manage, control or direct work forces in business and industry?Choreographers do not belong to an exclusive artistic club and have much to offer other worlds of work. They do not, like Starr, indulge in covert manipulation, but they could be as brazenly confident in recognising the value of the remarkable skills they possess. The time is ripe for choreographers to become more articulate and actively promote their working practices in a wider arena. It would appear that the world of business is more than ready for its workforce to operate like choreographers. There is a need expressed by the business community for engagement with imagination and feeling. The leaps of thinking possessed by choreographers bring flexibility that can aid the process of mapping out uncharted waters in both business and industry. For choreographers, the new challenge is to choreograph experiences for the business community which inform, liberate and enlighten, without dismantling or over simplifying the artform. And no one knows how that could end.
© Kate Flatt, Freelance Choreographer.
(1) Tom Paulin on News Night Review