Positive negatives: or the subtle arts of compromise

How slippery a term 'collaboration' is. Definitions aplenty tend to return to the notion of 'working together' (or 'co-working'), and on this sort of basis we should be able to conclude that in all performance-making collaborations are vital because performance tends to involve the input of a wide range of practitioners, working together. Amongst these practitioners we can list stage, sound and lighting designers, stage manager and many others who work alongside both performers and-in general terms-a lead decision-maker. Does this model fit widespread understandings of the meaning of the terms collaboration or 'Collaborative Theatre' ? The lead decision-maker might be the stage director or choreographer, familiar to many performance-making traditions, or might equally be one key member of a performance collective-as is the case of the long-established and internationally-renowned UK company Forced Entertainment and key decision-maker Tim Etchells, and, in theory at least, the Théâtre du Soleil, Paris, and the central decision-making role of Ariane Mnouchkine. However, few of the chapters included in this collection seem to be concerned with collaborations viewed from this default perspective. Instead, collaborative performance-making in many of these chapters seems to assume the status of a particular genre or mode of performance-making.

© Susan Melrose 2016.
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of a book chapter published in Collaboration in Performance Practice: Premises, Workings and Failures. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137462466_13