The Bigger Picture

When aspiring choreographer Amelia Munro graduates from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts this spring, she’ll have spent plenty of hours alone in the studio—exploring, generating, and discarding movement. But she’ll also know what it’s like to be one of eight very different artists chiming in on the same project.

“I found that for me, the more the merrier,” the 22-year-old dance major says of partnering with two choreographers, three designers, a composer, and a writer on Light Before Dawn, an original work that premiered at Tisch last spring. The team was one of six groups that came together through the Choreographers, Composers, and Designers Workshop, a two-semester, cross-departmental course led by professor Kay Cummings. “It was one of the most fulfilling choreographic experiences I’ve had,” Munro says. “There was this constant inspiration back and forth between us. Our designers, our composer—I would never have thought of the ideas they brought forth. When I saw the final product, I said, ‘Wow, I was a part of that?’ ”

The collaborative process, as Munro discovered, can throw open the doors of the choreographic process. And in today’s rough financial climate, the ability to communicate across disciplines is a particularly vital survival skill. “Working collaboratively is the very nature of contemporary choreography,” says Allyson Green, chair of the department of theatre and dance at the University of California, San Diego. “But in this economic time especially, I think you need to be really flexible in your creative solutions and ideas, and trained to work in a lot of different contexts.” At Tisch, UC San Diego, and California Institute of the Arts, educators have found ways to foster this kind of flexibility, ensuring that students become not only strong choreographers but also effective collaborators.

As an artist whose work seamlessly marries dance with text, song, visual design, and film, Annie-B Parson is an expert in mining mediums beyond movement. “A choreographer’s challenge is to understand that the possibilities of what could happen onstage are broader than what their training is,” says Parson, who co-directs Big Dance Theater and teaches choreography in the Experimental Theatre Wing at Tisch. “You want to get the most you can from your collaborator, because they’re this great asset; they’re offering to problem solve through another avenue.” But even in professional choreography, she observes, those other avenues often go unexplored. “I think choreographers don’t always understand that their designers can be as central to their personal expression as their dancers can be. It’s their job to see the whole work in their imaginative scope, and their imagination shouldn’t stop with the movement—it needs to extend into the lights, the clothes, and the sound design.”

Integrating sound, light, fabric, scenery, and text is what Cummings asks of students in her Choreographers, Composers, and Designers Workshop. The productions that come out of the class, Cummings says, “are choreographed using the set and using the costumes, so that these elements are actually a function of the dance and not just giving additional information or beauty.” In dialogues with their collaborators, choreographers are challenged to examine their work from angles that they may not have considered otherwise. “The designers in the class ask different questions than choreography teachers usually ask, which can be really useful,” Cummings notes. “For instance, many students begin making a dance for the stage but don’t think about what the stage represents. A lighting designer would say, Are you indoors or are you outdoors? You start to think about it, and that informs the work, makes it more specific, so that it takes on layers of meaning for the choreographer.”

At UC San Diego—where, according to Green, crossing disciplines is “a constant topic of conversation”—artistic teamwork is the focus of a new Dance/Theatre MFA program, now in its second year. In their first quarter, MFA candidates enroll in Collective Creation, a course that brings together choreographers, directors, playwrights, actors, designers (costume, set, light, sound, and digital media), and stage managers. “We wanted them to think of themselves as a company of artists working collectively,” Green explains. “The big question is often, Who’s driving the ship? So from project to project, we deliberately change who’s leading. Some things are director-driven, some choreographer-driven, and some require everyone to be part of the solution.”

At UCSD’s undergraduate level, too, “All of the arts are looking for ways in which they can cross,” says Green. In elective courses, dancers can probe the intersections between choreography and dramatic text, dance and cognitive science, music and dance composition. In their improvisation classes, they find themselves side by side with musicians and visual artists. And outside of class, many pursue collaborative independent projects. One 2008 graduate, Rebecca Bruno, says that her work with a sound designer and visual artist at UCSD “profoundly changed” her creative outlook. “I see what I do from more angles now. I think a lot about the sounds, a lot about the visual elements, and how they can work cohesively or in counterpoint.”

On some campuses, collaboration arises not only through curriculum but through the sheer density of the artistic population. At California Institute of the Arts, the schools of dance, theater, art, music, film, and critical studies are all housed under one sprawling roof. “Because of the proximity of the arts here, there’s a lot of collaboration going on,” says Stephan Koplowitz, dean of the school of dance. “And that’s partly because the students are living in dorms with musicians or filmmakers—anyone you bump into is an artist.”

While Koplowitz strongly encourages collaboration, he notes that young choreographers, eager to jump into projects with their peers, can risk losing sight of their own vision. “I firmly believe that in order to be a good collaborator, you must be fully present in your own voice first,” he says. He recalls one promising dance major “who was doing all these wonderful things—animation projects, film projects—but they were all him giving to other people’s vision.” If students take a step back from collaboration, he believes, “it doesn’t mean that they’re losing out, because they’re deepening their relationship to their own point of view. Then when they leave school, when it really matters, they’ll attract people to work with them, because of the power and the clarity of their vision.”

Siobhan Burke is Dance Magazine’s education editor.

Photo of NYU dance students in Light Before Dawn, 2009, by Ella Bromblin, courtesy of NYU

Originally published in Dance Magazine, April 2010