Interdisciplinary Collaboration

by Alyssa Timin

Interdisciplinary collaborations across the visual and performing arts are becoming increasingly popular. In comprehending this trend, it is difficult to overstate the significance of composer John Cage. His influence looms large in the many inheritors of Black Mountain College’s utopian vision, the intermedia mischief of the Fluxus movement, and acoustic adventures of electronic musicians around the world. Cage’s view of composition as an opportunity for listening – for abdicating control as well as exercising it – has inspired countless alliances dedicated to making something meaningfully more than the sum of its parts. This drive to create hybrid, multi-layered events has not just modified the role of artists, but also the roles of audiences and arts professionals.

Today’s art enthusiasts on the hunt for DIY teamwork will no doubt still find themselves in out of the way project rooms, cooperative gallery spaces, and roughly converted warehouses, where only loose boundaries may exist between stage and house, work and context, performance and life. At its essence, the spirit of this art tends to suggest a temporary meeting of materials and resources, as though what is worth remembering is that we all agreed for a little while to do what was possible there.

One venue that adopted this egalitarian ethos early on is Greenwich Village’s Judson Memorial Church. Especially during the 1960s, it served as a crucial meeting place for participants in dance, theater, and visual avant-gardes. In particular, the choreographer Yvonne Rainer helped to develop a collective, process-oriented movement that has become a touchstone for collaborative artists. Also in New York, The Kitchen has supported the interdisciplinary efforts of artists such as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass and Meredith Monk since 1971, and it continues to embrace new media and globalizing dialogues in step with each wave of the contemporary art world.

Through organizations such as these, interdisciplinary collaboration has expanded beyond close-knit experimental communities into large-scale productions. The current arts field witnesses a proliferation of projects that incorporate digital images into – or onto – theater, dance, and music performances. Likewise, performers give their talents over to the transformative magic of visual representation.

A recent example is Cast No Shadow, a collaboration between filmmaker Isaac Julien and choreographer Russell Maliphant. At the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), three large screens shared the stage with a group of dancers, who also appeared occasionally in Julien’s pristine footage of the arctic north, the African city Ouagadougou, and Italian architecture. At its most engrossing, projections of the dancers on a scrim alternated with the actual individuals behind it, seemingly precipitating reality from illusion. In a flash, the dancers’ bodies disrupted the sense of distance that Julien’s exotic locales evoked.

Maliphant’s choreography requires a constant balancing act by and between his dancers, and this sense of exchange pervaded not only what took place onstage, but also what went on behind the scenes to bring Cast No Shadow to Brooklyn that night. Increasingly, interdisciplinary collaborations mean not only cooperation between artists, but cooperation between institutions. The multimedia production was not only part of BAM’s 2007 Next Wave Festival, but simultaneously part of PERFORMA07, the second annual festival of performance art in New York City. PERFORMA commissioned the piece in connection with Dance Umbrella and Sadler’s Wells, both of London, and PERFORMA and Sadler’s Wells were named as producers.

This group approach to commissioning, producing, and presenting reflects the complex realities of touring large-scale works internationally. In recent years, production companies like Pomegranate Arts have sprung up to manage the demands of contemporary projects, as technology evolves more quickly and artists envision more sophisticated integration of media. For interdisciplinary work to succeed, producers and administrators must seek out points of agreement among a dizzying number of parties.

Few producers understand this task as well as the team behind Lincoln Center Festival, which brings elaborate interdisciplinary works to realization each July. Associate Producer Boo Froebel remarks, “Every artist has his or her own vision. When there’s more than one primary artist involved, then it becomes a shared vision.” The unique nature of these projects, however, means that their ultimate forms can be unpredictable. “Sometimes,” she says, “the melding of visions results in a complete hybrid, something completely other [from the independent work of each artist]. Sometimes they do not merge, but compliment and contrast one another in interesting ways.”

Froebel sees the current cultural climate as being defined by “mixology,” by sampling, borrowing, and collage, and in this way views collaboration as paradigmatic of the time. Her experience producing work by interdisciplinary collectives shows these alliances thrive on friction as frequently as agreement; in either case, what matters is that the dynamic is artistically productive. Still, she understandably adds, the friendly collaborations are more fun.

For arts administrators, Froebel notes, the crucial thing to keep in mind about collaborations is that the lines of communication have to be clear. The question is, she points out, “Who are [producers] approaching to get their decisions?” Regarding cases where multiple artists are involved in a project, Froebel explains: “The process of communication becomes much more important and needs to be in place as early as possible.”

As we know them today, interdisciplinary collaborations became a part of American art during the middle decades of the 20^th century. The ball that John Cage put into motion was picked up by members of the 1960s avant-garde, and during the next twenty years, venues in urban centers found audiences for the genre-defying practices of conceptual artists interested in movement, musicians intrigued by video, and theater directors struck by a painterly obsession with light. Now, charmed by the endless promises of digital media, artists seem to have set their mark on the implications of this nebulous, quicksilver technology. Works like Cast No Shadow ask whether any obstacle between creative disciplines is finally insurmountable. Arts professionals, we imagine, will be among the first to find out.

Comments

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Don't know what is wrong what is rite but i know that every one has there own point of view and same goes to this one

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i went to the same school as patrick. i remeber those girls from my school who wrote in. they were white trash...i always felt so bad for them.