SHARING THE SPOILS OF A SHARED PRACTICE

Abstract

As my own practice as a performer has evolved, I have found myself seeking out new forms of collaboration, hoping to fuel my development and increase my sense of agency. This is, in some ways, a high-risk strategy: collaborative practices are, after all, a journey into the unknown precisely because of the bringing together of discrete elements, and with meaningful sharing comes vulnerability. What I hadn't anticipated was how many conversations I would find myself having about the ways in which the traditional models of, for example, commissioning, promotion, authorship or payment fail to serve, let alone nurture, true collaboration. This short article is a re-working of a position paper I presented at Southampton University in February 2019 as part of a Hartley Residency there that I used to explore the hot topic of ‘collaboration’. The main part of my residency was a paper I wrote entitled ‘The voice that calls the hand to write: exploring the adventure of agency and authorship within collaborative partnerships’. That paper was an opportunity for me to dig into what this buzziest of words, ‘collaboration’, actually means and to organise some of my thinking on the topic. What follows here is a gentle and rather personal musing on why and how we might want to share the spoils of a shared practice, and what some of the institutional obstacles to this desire might be.