After weeks of deliberation on the type of work the collaborative wanted to make it was clear that this drive towards intimacy through image making and musicality was where we wanted to sit our work within. It became clear for us that the images and writing we were making in response to our music were a hark to emotions and feelings, almost a telling a narrative.

 

This narrative that was emerging from the work we had generated was telling of love and loss, of family and dreams. We hadn’t started out in this process to work with narrative, we wanted to let the music we had found drive the work, but there was something so formidable about the story these images where telling that I felt like we had a need to contextualise the world we had created.

 

I suggested to James and Josh that we take a look at Arthur Millers ‘Death of a Salesman’, as having read the play before it was ringing so true to the work we were creating. It’s a story about dreams, love and idealism, all things that were coming out of the work we where creating.

 

We decided to have a read through of the play script as a group to understand more of the context of millers work and how it related back to the work we were creating. What we discovered was an underlying theme of ‘episodes’ within his work. We had already created episodic like images, and as when we began to think about what they meant it was clear that ‘Death of a salesman’ was almost a mirror image of what we had created. This similarity couldn’t go ignored, and it was decided that we would then use Millers play as a frame work to present our collaborative work. A work in episodes that explored both our own work and the work of Miller.  

 

It was becoming a collaboration between us the theatre makers and between Arthur Miller himself, we were creating a contemporary response to his work and as we make links between our work and his, the question of authorship arose. Who was the author behind what we were creating? We had begun to take moments form his work and marry them with our own and it was becoming more and more a collaboration between the late Miller and us the theatre makers.

 

‘Work produced from within an ensemble has in a sense an invisible author, a composite persona…. It is this collective expression which contains the histories and contributions of all the members and is in a true sense the author of the work.’ (MacDonald in Heddon and Klein 2012: 161)

 

What McDonald states of the work of a collaborative group was true of what we were creating in our own work. It was at the end of the day a group work, each member of the collaborative had each brought something new to the table at every stage in the process, and the lines of true authorship was becoming blurred somewhat. This was for us a nice feeling, the work we had created was a response to both music and Miller’s work, and we didn’t feel like one had precedent over the other. Our original work was blending well with Miller’s play and it felt as if both works were becoming one.

 

This did raise questions also around how our process of collaborative writing was developing, yes we had made original responses to various stimuli, Millers work included. But how this was translated into a score was a real turning point for me as part of the collaborative, I was interested more in understanding were this line of authorship stood. Through my own research I found the answer in the work of collaborative researcher and artist Vera John Steiner.

 

‘Generative ideas emerge from joint thinking, from significant conversations, and from sustained, shared struggles to achieve new insights by partners in thought.’ (Steiner 2000: 3)

 

Steiner describes almost perfectly the basis of collaborative practice; many ideas from individuals forming one line of flight. In the case of the work we had created, we had worked together as a three to write and develop our responses but had also worked alongside a pre-existing body of work. We made work in response to Miller’s text, and to stimuli of our own, we talked between the three of us to understand what we had made, but always drew ourselves back to the text for clarification. Arthur Miller had become our fourth collaborator, and we now began to understand in more depth what collaboration really meant. It is a need for different artists to make work that compliments one another, in the case of our work it was important that our Postdramatic style complimented and opposed Miller’s naturalistic play.

 

‘Two different artistic styles, when closely observed and respected, can provide revealing mirrors for each partner. These mirrors add a third dimension, a deeper view, to their knowledge of themselves.’ (Steiner 2000: 63)

 

What Steiner suggests is that two completely differing artistic styles when working closely together create a new world for the work to explore. In the case of ‘Life Lessons; a contemporary response to an American Classic’ we were creating a work that ran alongside a pre-existing text, something tangible and readable.

 

What we discovered in the process of this work was a new form of collaboration; collaboration with an existing form, but putting our own stamp on it, creating something new, with the original always following closely along.