The start of the collaborative process for the creation of ‘Life Lessons, a contemporary response to an American classic’, had started very much in the same way that I always make work; an idea, some text, a few music tracks. Josh, James and I all have very similar interests musically, having worked together on other projects, music has always been a big part of our practice. Whether this frames the work we create or acts as an underscore for the performance we make, music always plays a part.

We had started in the studio on day one of this collaboration spending hours listening over and over to tracks we liked, each offering up our favourites, ‘Pink Floyd’, ‘Underworld’ ‘David Bowie’, ‘Moody Blues’ and then making our responses to the tracks, a few words or actions that summarised the music for us.

For me the kind of music I listen to is always an underscore for my current mood, I’ll listen to prog rock when I’m in the mood to be creative, or Mike Oldfield if I’m feeling upbeat. Talking over our interpretations to the tracks we had shared it became clear to us that the kind of music we liked had a link to our own personal narratives, we all listen to music that has meaning to us, and the tracks we had shared became a starting point for the kind of work that we were going to make.

It was these tracks that led us to begin a process of image making, a physical response to the track, that would act as a go to for our next step in the process. At this early stage in the creation it was just a simple moment of making a response to the music, the text and context would come later.

For me as an artist, I am always striving to create something that exists for the very sake of just existing, a moment of performance that is there because it feels right. I have always been interested in the work of Forced Entertainment, and their imaged based theatre creating something without an initial context or narrative and embracing the very fact that it works because it does.

For this to work for me, a level of investment is always crucial for the work to develop. Investment on a personal level and as a collaborative, we all have to invest in the process of making the work. In this early stage of the process we had one simple rule; Listen to the tracks and make a response to them. This was our rule for investment, even if we didn’t enjoy a particular track we had to respond and see what came of it.

Forced Entertainments ceative director Tim Etchells states on investment; ‘Investment is what happens when the performers before us seem bound up unspeakably with what they’re doing- it seems to matter to them, it appears to hurt them or threatens to pleasure them, it seems to touch them, in some quiet and terrible way. Investment is the bottom line- without it nothing matters…’ (Etchells 1999: 48). What Etchells says about investment is at the very heart of what we were working towards in the very early stages of this project. It is this notion of being ‘bound up unspeakably’ that was important to us in this session, the work we created in that studio didn’t have to have purpose and some of it might have been discarded in the finished product, but it was the investment in the moment that was important. Investment in creating something, allowing us to develop material, images, text and sound that would contribute to the finished product, this was a vital stage in our collaborative process and understanding how each of us works in the collaboration, investment became a rule that we would bring back to each and every session. Invest in everything we do, and the work would flow, if we didn’t the work would become stifled.