Collaboration and What Would Garrick Do?

Location: Performance Research Network Collaboration Workshop, Newcastle University, UK

As this was a short contribution to a roundtable, based on one of my book projects, I provide the entirety of my script below.

Thinking of something to say today was difficult. I find talking about collaboration difficult. On one hand, I can say, in a meeting or some other events, that I have collaborated with theatre professionals and speak – easily and vaguely – in the general. On the other hand, and with much more time than I have now, I can point to individual moments of collaboration, and talk through the intricate development of work. But, today and with this talk, I realize that it’s very hard for me to speak about collaboration in medium-size chunks. I think this is because framing collaboration is a challenge. I can’t claim to have resolved that issue today. So what follows is a bunch of inadequate framings, in the hope that layering them one over the other provides a kind of personal reflection on collaboration.

I’m here because I’ve been working on a collaborative project called What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century. This is me speaking at the general level. I’ll stay here for a moment longer and acknowledge my four main collaborators:

Daniel-John Williams and members of The DJW School of Acting in Stockton-upon-Tees,
Steve Woods and the Act2Cam youth and community film company in Whitley Bay,
Dan Lemon and members of The Actors Forge in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
Elaine McGirr and students at Bristol University.

I call these people ‘main’ collaborators, and already even this general frame is showing a little strain. Maybe I need to think in larger terms, and think instead that collaboration is just a part of my research practice in general. But then its nature and its effect both become difficult to track, and I feel like I’m denying some of what collaboration is. I want to see its messiness, in other words. I want to apply my inadequate framings and see what doesn’t fit within those frames. Because what doesn’t fit is meaningful, just as my use of ‘main’ collaborator raises the useful question of what might make a collaborator main or not.

What Would Garrick Do? is the title that I gave the book when I proposed it to Bloomsbury in the summer of 2019. I offered them a book that would combine an account of historical thinking about acting with suggestions for how to use that thinking in rehearsal now. Those suggestions would take the form of exercises developed in collaborative workshops with theatre professionals. I didn’t define the collaboration any further, because I couldn’t. I’m not sure to what extent any collaboration can be defined in advance. Rereading the proposal now, I realize that I was actually using earlier examples of collaborative work – at Northern Stage, at the Orange Tree in Richmond – as a way of convincingly projecting what I hoped future collaboration might create. But was such earlier work really distinct from what I would end up doing in 2021 and 2022? Where did collaboration start?

Once Bloomsbury issued me with a contract, I turned to the Faculty Impact Fund for the money to support my proposed collaboration. My application for funding required more detail about the nature of that collaboration than my book proposal. I ended up outlining three types of collaborative workshop, based on who would be present at the rehearsal and what they would be doing.

The first was a ‘presentation’ workshop, where I planned and presented exercises and then led the group through them.

The second was an ‘observation’ workshop, where I was present but the group’s leader was running things.

The third was an ‘independent’ workshop, which I did not attend, but rather – like a cook testing recipes – sent instructions and suggestions, then met to debrief afterwards (or received a written report).

This was the frame that got me some funding, but collaborative work did not fit neatly into it. My involvement varied in each kind of workshop. Some presentations were more like dialogues with participants, rather than something led. Some observation sessions had moments where I was asked to intervene or clarify. And every independent workshop negotiated in a slightly different way between the indicated content and what actually happened on the day.

And then there was everything that happened outside these formal moments of collaboration. The odd email from Dan when he came across an interesting article that made him think of something we’ve discussed. Tweets from Daniel-John when one of his students did well. Conversations in a pub with Steve about how to win funding for theatrical work and how to make it more accessible. Discussions about what was on in Newcastle, or in London, or on the TV – our favourite actors, or books about acting. All of this was collaborative, although the labour was not so specifically directed.

Let’s zoom in a little further and give just one example of collaboration in a workshop. We were working, in an ‘observation’ session on an exercise called ‘Macklin’s Garden’, named after something the Irish theatre manager Charles Macklin made young pupils do: walk, in pairs, up and down a garden and repeat the same lines over and over. After Daniel-John had run the exercise and then given the performers a break, he said to me that he thought that his students were learning to ‘Simplify, but intensify’, and I agreed, pointing out that repetition was a key part of that. Future iterations of the exercise included this ‘simplify but intensify’ prompt between repetitions.

I’m able to return to this moment of collaboration because Daniel-John sent me – as was his wont – a 3,000-word document recording his experience of and reflections on the workshop. Documents like this were invaluable to me as I was writing up the final manuscript of What Would Garrick Do? But they were also another way of framing collaboration. As I returned to the documents, lifting quotations, or summarizing sections to support my own writing, I wondered what kind of collaboration I was undertaking. Some of the points made by 2021 Daniel-John were dismissed by 2023 Daniel-John, but that didn’t make either less invalid. And, as the writer of the published account of this collaboration, I had a lot of power to represent it as I wished. And a lot of responsibility too.

One final point. The book will be published in January 2024. I tried to write it in such a way that it remains an ‘open’ text, and so suitable for others to use and work from. The exercises are suggestions for things that actors might do, but – along with the essays on eighteenth-century theatre theory and practice – they’re (hopefully) also inspirations and provocations that can be taken in different directions. Such a book, then, comes out of collaboration but also aims at a kind of future collaboration. I’d like to think that those who buy it will, in a certain sense, be collaborators that I may never meet. Although I would like to.

Does collaboration have an end point? What would it look like? I’ll end here with a summary of the questions I’ve raised in this wandering monologue:

What makes someone a ‘main’ collaborator? What scales measure collaboration?
When does a collaboration begin or end? What does an individual’s collaboration look like?
What different kinds of presence occur within a collaboration?
How is that collaboration mediated and remediated?
How does the possibility of future collaboration (either continued or new) shape current work?