Collaborating Backstage

Breaking Barriers for the Creative Network

Timo Niermann

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350073098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Stagecraft & Scenography

Collaboration is the most important facet of any theatrical company. From the performers on stage to the choreographers, designers and technicians working behind the scenes, this book considers all departments working on a production and instructs them on how to unify their individual skills towards a shared goal.
From Vaudeville to classical opera, this book establishes the skills that each specialist brings to the production process before demonstrating how each individual contribution can be utilized in tandem with all other creative teams. With particular focus on enhancing interdepartmental communication, Collaborating Backstage examines all the challenges that may befall artistic companies and projects made up of many different parts. This book explains how to understand technical jargon within teams that speak a variety of languages and come from different cultural backgrounds; how to recognise and follow the 'unwritten rules' of theatre; and how best to achieve the ultimate creative potential of a team working completely in sync. Underpinned by incisive theories on performance, communication and creativity, Collaborating Backstage is full of helpful illustrations and innovative methods to achieve effective working relationships in the theatre.

1

CREATIVITY BACKSTAGE

What this Chapter is About

In every stage production, there are creative processes that innately require cooperation. This applies to all team members who bring their expertise to a production. The final performance is based on both the interplay of established skills and innovative adaptability. These two elements form the basis of every team member’s “bag of experience,”¹ a term used to describe one’s personal repertoire of building blocks that can be accessed and combined to aid a new creation. On a larger scale, every stage production also possesses a big bag of experiences in the form of its departments and individual members. The more variety that exists in this “bag,” the more fruitful the team’s work might be. This first chapter presents theories to enhance personal as well as team productivity.

Creative Productions

Whether stage productions strive to generate stunning images, humorous stories, or intellectually challenging theories, they always seek to include new aspects. Each stage production aims for an unseen look or a groundbreaking perspective to create its own place in the landscape of presentations. Therefore, the performing arts are usually associated with creativity—they are perceived as an innovative genre.

This definition, however, does not apply to all people working in the field. While directors and designers are part of the so-called “creative team,” other job profiles such as stage manager and technician seem limited in their creativity. They are mostly seen as executive roles, which do not provide input to the creative development of a performance. However, this distinction is not entirely accurate—individuals fulfilling such job profiles possess highly creative potential, too, even if they are not involved in contriving and planning a new show.

I dedicate this first chapter to demonstrating that everyone working backstage delivers essential input for the overall creative process. Over the next few sections, I analyze in detail what it means to work “creatively” and how all the different work areas embody innovative as well as non-creative aspects.

The knowledge offered in this book provides a small glimpse into the extensive material about creativity. It aims to supports a general insight of how creative processes can be enhanced to develop practical tools for working in stage productions later on. The first step toward a better understanding is to perceive the interplay of people’s skills and their creative potential.

Skills and Creativity

In any creative process, an innovative product or action comes into being through original approaches or new ideas. According to author Linda Naimann, a central aspect is the moment of novelty as well as its direct implementation.²

A non-creative activity, on the other hand, is usually connected to repetition, regular recurrence, and tradition. Any repeated work such as sorting out and filing away documents is associated with a standard pattern and therefore the opposite of creativity (see Table 1.1).

EXAMPLE 1.1

At the age of 19, I went backpacking in South East Asia with Robin, my friend and performance partner. One night, we crossed the border from Thailand to Malaysia and ended up in a little town called Kota Bharu. We couldn’t find a hostel in which to stay overnight, but we noticed that a vibrant night market was about to open. Since we had to catch a shuttle boat early next morning, we decided to just stay up and kill time by wandering around the colorful stalls. Here, I happened to watch one of the best performances I ever remember. There was an old Malaysian man who prepared pancakes. The way he poured the dough into his pan, how he cut the bananas and sprinkled peanuts while joking with his customers was so hilarious, that we didn’t want to miss a moment of the captivating, comic entertainment. The longer we stayed, the more we saw his tricks repeated. The pancake man had developed a handful of skills that he could bring to bear according to the situation. He combined his artistic gimmicks with a few standard jokes—just enough material to entertain his clients during the time they waited in line. With the next customers, he would start all over again. The interplay of his well-established repertoire and its flexible adaptation made this performance unforgettable.

Table 1.1 Creative vs. non-creative actions

Creative actions	Non-creative actions
•innovative	•routine
•new	•pattern
•constructive	•tradition
•original	•ritual
•visionary	•repetition
•inventive	•automated
•ingenious	•old

When creative people develop an original and innovative idea, they always utilize repetitive patterns. They need established routines that can be used for alternation. Psychologist and author of Flow Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues: “Creativity involves changing a way of doing things, or a way of thinking and that, in turn, requires having mastered the old ways of doing or thinking.”³ The Malaysian pancake master owned a repertoire of standard tricks. Similarly, ballet dancers and acrobats practice the exact same movements year after year. And a light designer uses established techniques for every scene he or she creates. All these routines form people’s basis for being creative. Whether choosing the most appropriate joke while preparing pancakes, developing a stage character, or deciding how to combine lamps and colors to create new images—looking again at Table 1.1, creativity always combines both the creative and non-creative. Csikszentmihalyi continues: “A musician must learn musical tradition, the notation system, the way instruments are played before she can think of writing a new song.”⁴ With no technique, there is nothing to innovate with, and without any new ideas, someone’s performance is unlikely to be inventive. As both the creative and non-creative are equally valuable for each job, from now on, I refer to the latter as “skills” rather than using the negative allusion “non-creative actions.”

We can picture the symbiosis of skills and creativity as strong roots supporting playful leaves. The balance of these two components is not set: in some cases, a well-developed trunk carries a few blossoms; in other cases, the roots are thin and delicate but support an enormous crown. The more each part is established, the more impressive the overall craft or product will turn out. Figure 1.1 presents the balance of skills and creativity. Focusing mostly on skills ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Creativity backstage
• 2 The scenery of cooperation
• 3 Intercultural alignment
• 4 Improving conditions
• 5 The Creative exchange
• 6 Tools and Tricks
• 7 Summary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright