Last weekend I attended a master class at Poets House. It was focused on collaboration and led by Anne Carson and Robert Currie. I’ve been intrigued by the Carson/Currie collaborations in recent years that I’ve seen around NYC, and the timing of it seemed perfect given my interests right now.
I’ve been wading into the waters of collaboration more and more. This past year I’ve worked with the painter Kristy Gordon and the composer Randall West, and have an upcoming collaboration debuting in April with composer John Glover. Since my creative work appears to be headed in this direction, I’ve been thinking it’s time to do some exercises to open myself up to a creative process that until very recently was a very solitary act.
Cue the Carson/Currie class. I’m long over the writing workshop, so I enjoyed having two days to just play with performance exercises, finding ways to use the body and gesture and objects and setting to perform ideas. Yes, words were often part of the performances, but the pressure wasn’t on making a written thing but making a performed moment far different than a reading of a poem to an audience. And I liked the title of the class – “Egocircus” – as it did force us to consider the ego and where it fits in collaboration. In the solitary act of writing the choices are on the page or behind the page, but the ego is always there, it’s just a matter of degree. In collaboration there are multiple egos at play, so it’s interesting to see how they clash and collide and combine to form something together.
The class was a nice reinforcement of what I’ve learned through my MoMA classes about the Cage/Cunningham collaborations, and the Fluxus movement. The ability to improvise is sometimes hard to open yourself up to when you’re so wedded to laboring over the right words in the right order, but I found through our exercises glimmers of ideas to pursue just by being forced to create something in the moment. Not everything flew; there were plenty of clunks. But the moments that did fly opened our eyes to the possibilities of what more could be done. My only complaint was that it was a group of writers. I would have loved a class made up of composers, dancers, visual artists and writers, though something on that level would need more time and more space.
Some quotes I took away that I’ll be thinking about as I work with John:
“Collaboration arises out of the problems in a text, as a solution to those textual problems” [paraphrased from Anne I believe]
Anne on the performance of her work: “[the] text was closed; the things that were added, opened it”
Robert on the process of collaboration: “come together and create one thought, one gesture”
And finally my favorite, as it describes my process in general, from Anne: “What question you ask of reality, how you get into that question; that’s the challenge of writing.”
So collaboration is the word right now. I’ll post more information about my April collaboration soon. And I’ll be taking another class through Poets House this spring, on Poetry & Comics, a hybrid form that I’ve been playing around with since 2005. It’s time to do something more formalized with it, to get out of my own head and ideas and learn from others about what is possible with the form. In many ways, hybrid forms are collaborations, and as my interest deepens in both, I’m exciting to see how my work will transform in the coming years.
Oh, and here’s a photo of the book/body I made for one of my collaborative exercises. We had to make an alphabet out of a space and as we were scanning the titles of poetry books in the Poets House library, we started pulling books that had body parts as part of the title. So it became a quest to find as many body parts to build a body out of books/book titles. Alphabet as building block, building a body, body as alphabet. Something along those lines.
