Necessity Is The Mother of Collaboration

The Marlowshpere (#21)

Musical America Worldwide (online) reported recently that three Ohio arts groups had merged. The story was reported as follows:

In what its principals are touting as an historic first for the U.S., the Dayton Philharmonic, Dayton Ballet, and Dayton Opera have merged to form a new entity, the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance [DPAA].

Each maintains its own artistic director, but the three boards have been dissolved and a new 39-member DPAA board has been formed. The president and CEO is Paul A. Helfrich, former CEO of the Dayton Philharmonic, by far the largest of the three organizations. That the number of staff positions has actually increased from 21 for the combined groups to a total of 22 for the one, says, Helfrich, is indicative of how lean staffing has been in the recent past. The DPAA budget is $7.6 million.

Certainly,  this organizational merger—motivated, I’m sure, by economic necessity—is an extreme example of collaboration, but it is collaboration nonetheless.

 

National Performing Arts Convention

This recent event is reminiscent of the “realizations” that emerged from the National Performing Arts Convention (NPAC), a gathering of approximately 4,000 performing artists, executives of 31 national service organizations in the performing arts, and exhibitors, at Denver, Colorado’s Convention Center, June 10-14, 2008.

The centerpiece of the proceedings was a consensus building “process” organized and executed by AmericaSpeaks that has for more than a decade used a 21st Century Town Meeting® model to bring together more than 130,000 citizens in deliberations about critical policy issues, and then connect the results to decision-makers.

Over the course of four days and much discussion in small groups and ultimately a concluding general session, conferees came to the realization that all performing arts groups, whether in music, dance, or theatre, needed to move towards three objectives for future growth and survival: (1) internal organizational consensus building with regard to mission, (2) community outreach, and (3) collaboration with other performing arts organizations.

 

Collaboration Among Performing Arts Organizations

Collaboration is not only borne of economic necessity, such as the DPAA referenced above, it is also a result of aesthetic and creative opportunity. For example, there has long been a collaborative relationship with any Broadway or Off-Broadway musical, which, by definition, incorporates music, drama, and dance. Films of all kinds, including the recent Oscar-winning black & white homage to silent film “The Artist,” use music. Television and radio commercials are replete with music, as are virtually every television program, including the news.

For me, the opportunity to collaborate is always welcome. Collaboration adds to the energy and the compelling nature of a performance. It also adds potentially to the level of creativity and quality of the work. Collaboration strengthens the entire enterprise partly because it can bring disparate audiences to the same event.

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of collaborating with Rae Charles, a young choreographer completing her studies at New York University. We were introduced to each other by NYU Professor Andy Teirstein, a composer-colleague.

Ms. Charles ultimately created a seven-minute piece—“Hush” with three dancers using portions of three tracks from my “Les sentiments d’amour” classical album. This is a collection of 20 short character pieces in the French chanson tradition (MEII Enterprises 2006). When we first met her concept for the piece was still formative. In fact, she initially was looking for music in the jazz vein. Just by chance, I happened to bring my “Sentiments” album with me to an early rehearsal. I played a few cuts for her and left the album for her to listen to more carefully outside the rehearsal nvironment.  According to Ms. Charles, she selected the music from the “Sentiments” album because of its flow and innate “musical” space that fit her choreographic style.

In addition to Ms. Charles, I have previously collaborated with singer/lyricists Ellen Woloshin, Anne Mironchik, Janet Lawson, Rachel Kara Perez, Amy Cervini, and Amelie Cherubin on creating music with lyrics. These collaborations are still evolving.


Forthcoming Collaborative Opportunities

Later this year I’m planning on recording several more compositions for an evolving album entitled “Obrigado Brasil: Original Compositions Inspired by the Music and Culture of Brazil.” Several of the sambas and bossa novas on this forthcoming album are drawn from previous albums. For this project I have so far contacted two Brazilian artists, one of which will contribute artwork to the CD front cover. Several more Brazilian artists will be contacted to collaborate with this project. Each will be attached, so to speak, to one or two album tracks and be featured in all promotion activities, on the CD itself, and perhaps displays at actual performances.

One more example. This coming September begins the 21st year of the Milt Hinton Jazz Perspectives Series at Baruch College (The City University of New York). I’ve had the privilege of serving as senior curator of this series since 2000. The forthcoming season has a theme of “Women in Jazz.” As part of the (academic) year-long program, we are hoping to mount a photographic exhibit in late fall 2012 of jazz performers–all taken by women photographers. For spring 2013 we’re working on a film series that documents women jazz performers. And, oh, yes, in between there’ll be performances by women jazz players, including pianist Renee Rosnes in early December 2012.

This combination of music performance, photography and film model might lead to other performing and fine arts creative ventures—including dance–connected to the Hinton series.

All in all, I have found collaboration brings fresh perspective to my creative endeavors. I encourage artists regardless of discipline to actively seek out potential collaborators. Don’t wait for the collaborative opportunity to come to you!

Please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com if you have any comments on this or any other of my blogs.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
July 30, 2012

© Eugene Marlow 2012

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