From my opera “Évariste” at Téte a Téte London UK opera festival in 2015. Director Shirley Keane was particularly good at achieving playfulness in that production and I learned a lot from her.
Introduction
During my Doctorate research at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London I aimed to achieve an unorthodox collaborative creative process between composer and performers in new opera. As I ultimately discovered, such creative collaboration is in big part dependent on playfulness. So, during my research and ever since then, I have been developing methods that help me and my operatic collaborators to achieve collaborative and creative playfulness. To succeed, certain ideas of hierarchies and formalities which are often ingrained in all of us must first be broken down. After having worked with many professional singers trained in the UK, Iceland and Sweden I have noticed that installing such hierarchies and formalities is often part of classical singers’ training. For instance, creating (often unconsciously) the image of “the composer” as someone you listen to and follow rather than someone you collaborate with, and this is very understandable and useful in many cases of course. But, having a sense of how to collaborate creatively and actively can be just as useful to a modern musician, I would argue.
In my experience, a good way to start is to support informality and trust within the group, abolishing the fear of “failing” or “being judged”. Such fears can be the worst enemies of creativity and of a flowing exchange.
What follows are preliminary methods that I have been developing with singers and vocal students for the past couple of years and are still a work in progress. These methods might be common for many actors and dancers, but are less known in a musical/operatic setting. By adding the music layer to these exercises they become a bit more complex and, to the best of my knowledge, the use of these methods by musicians remains under-practised and under-researched.
Warm-up exercise / Overcoming self-censorship
This is an example of a group exercise process where participators will get a chance to develop their understanding of how creativity and collaboration work, how support and empathy towards fellow collaborators can go a long way, and how to overcome creative-blocks by overcoming automatic self-censorship.
The first goal is to get the creative juices flowing in the group and to achieve that I use several fun games that focus on underlining how participants think when they try to be creative, not on what they create. One simple example is the “what do you have in your pocket?” game. One participant steps up in front of the group (the group leader should ideally go first to help break the ice) and the group asks him/her “what do you have in your pocket?”. Without preparing anything in advance the participant should answer with the first thing that comes into his/her mind. “A fridge!”. A silly answer, but that is ok! As long as you say the first thing that pops into your head. The group then proceeds to ask more about the item. “What colour is it?”. “It is pink!”. And so on. If a participant has to stop to think, then normally it is not because they can’t think of anything, it’s rather that they are censoring themselves, or trying to come up with something clever. Normally, in this situation, the spontaneous thought is more surprising and ultimately cleverer. If someone is hesitating too much then that person takes a little break while another has a go. We keep doing this until the game flows from one person to the next without any major hesitation. For the exercise to work the leader has to make sure that the atmosphere is supportive, informal and fun.
Main exercise / Long-form improv.
I used group playfulness to choreograph few scenes in this 2020 production of my opera “Music and the Brain” at Salurinn, Kópavogur, Iceland. This dance is one example.
Once the group has got the hang of a few games like this, then the leader introduces the main exercise: the collaborative creation of something that might be called an “abstract performance installation”. It could also be categorised as a type of long-form improv. This might sound a bit intimidating to some, but you will never be made to do anything you are not comfortable with. Each of us starts by writing down on a piece of paper a completely made up, light-hearted sentence of at least 10 words. One might write: “Yesterday I tried strawberry ice cream for the first time.” We then spread out in a big empty room and start walking independently and recite our sentences in an undertone all at once, over and over, at different speeds. The result could be described as a sound sculpture where no one sentence or participant is the focus point (at least not at first). The leader then starts to introduce game rules. For instance: “when you hear a clap, you freeze until you hear another clap.” After the leader has introduced a few rules then the group gets a chance to add rules. The leader directs this process slightly so that by the end we have a set of rules that interlock and create a sort of a performance-game where our sound-sculpture is always bubbling and changing. Nothing is ever set in stone, except the game rules. This could take anything from an hour to a couple of days and it is ok to have fun!
In preparation for and during the game the leader should strive to follow the bullet points of what could be considered a good game/educational design by making sure that the exercise…
provides rules,
develops skills,
has goals,
includes feedback
and provides agency (i.e. control).
Ideally I would like to rehearse this game/exercise/performance with the group for long enough so that all individuals within the group get comfortable enough to stop self-analysing and simply “do”. For that to happen repetition and patience is key so each run of the game might take up towards 20 minutes or longer, or until the leader signals the end.
It is vital to note that the artistic outcome is not the focus at this point. The focus is that by the end we will have created a state where (ideally) all group members participate in the co-created game without (or with less) self-judgement, self-censoring, fear of failure and full trust in their collaborators.
On a more personal note, some of the possible additional wellbeing benefits of participating in a process like this are related to the benefits of meditation.
-Dr. Helgi R. Ingvarsson
The author is a composer, singer, conductor and educator.
Further reading:
Hayden, S., & Windsor, L. (2007, April). Collaboration and the Composer: Case Studies from the end of the 20th century. Tempo, 61, 28-39.
Ingvarsson, H. R. (2018). Opening Opera: Developing a framework that allows for the interactive creative processes of improvised theatre in the productions of new music-dramas". London, England: Guildhall School of Music and Drama. http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/21324/
Johnstone, K. (1979). Impro: Improvisation and the theatre. London: Bloomsbury.
Miell, D., & Littleton, K. (Eds.). (2004). Collaborative creativity: Contemporary perspectives. London: Free Association books.
Picknett, M. D. (2014). Devising Music: Applying Creative Approaches from Dance and Theatre to Music Composition. London: Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Sawyer, R. K. (2003). Group Creativity: Music, theatre, collaboration. New York and London: Routledge.
Sawyer, R. K. (2007). Group Genius: The creative power of collaboration. New York: Basic Books.
Styles, L. (2016). Collaboration as Compositional Process; a Transdisciplinary Perspective. London: Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.
Wilen, S. (2017). Singing in Action: An inquiry into the creative working processes and practises of classical and contemporary vocal improvisation. Sweden: Lund University.