When I decided to write about performing arts for (Salt) I knew I wanted give the reader insight into artist’s lives and work. I think that if you can get to know an artist by gaining a behind-the-scenes peek into their process you can better appreciate the work. Now I’m not advocating for an expose, “how the sausage is made,” mystery and romance negating hidden camera scenario; rather, I’d like to write about the time, thought, and expression each performance has at its core. The concept explored and the work of the artist are sometimes not fully understood without enhancement of the written word. In any play countless hours of thought, feeling, practice, and conversation between a group of people have made the singularity you’re watching.
Collaboration is at the heart of every performance piece, even if it’s a solo show. For example, I’ve been working on this absurd, devised clown duo thing with my dear friends Nick Holland and Frances Lister called Slouch and Grouch. When we get together to make up new comedic sketches we’ll often start with a simple conceit: this remote control manipulates time or this steering wheel can transport the driver to new dimensions. Within that frame we start creating a story, a scene, and characters, until at some point we’re all on the same creative wavelength. Then the magic happens. Ideas are batted about, some disappear and others stick around. By the time we all need to get home to bed, we’ve made something out of nothing together and it’s hard to know where any one person’s ideas begin and end. It is a truly collective creation and when it’s clicking along, it’s electric.
I love to make new work this way. It feels like together we have more than the power of three. As cliché as it is, we’ve made a thing greater than the sum of its parts, a thing with the best parts of each member of the group. Over the next few issues I will explore several facets of collaborative creation in a panoply of media and disciplines. I started by thinking of all the kinds of art that are born from collaboration and then I went out to find excellent examples of bands, partnerships, and companies in Northern Colorado, and beyond, that are making art through a cooperative process. I interviewed a playwright, a filmmaker, two theatre companies, a culinary arts team, a dance company, and a band. Each group of people has a different insight into the process of making something out of nothing together. I learned valuable lessons from each. You will too.
Space
The first time I saw the alt-folk band Whippoorwill play was in the backyard of Cloverlick Banjo Shop at the grand opening party surrounded by messy-haired children playing in the dirt. Friends shared beers, pet each other’s dogs, and passed around the babies, giving the show the closeness of a family gathering. Our host, Mark “Rooster” Austin, gave me a warm hug, lifting my bare feet from the wet grass. Two open-faced cowgirls stood on the ramshackle stage in front of an old camper. Their voices, raspy and sweet as they sang their original songs. Staci Foster and Alysia Kraft’s voices harmonized as tightly as the closeness I felt with everyone in the backyard at that moment. The sun shone down on their banjo and guitars and Tobias Bank, formerly of Von Stomper, on drums. Every so often while performing Foster and Kraft turn towards each other and nod, take a step sideways and glance, or smile at the sounds the other is making. Just watch them perform their song “My Baby” and you’ll see what I mean. With a lean or a nod as they play, they weave through a magic space between them embodying their collaborative partnership. Their sense of presence highlights the intimacy of proximity. Sitting on a picnic blanket, together with friends and loved ones, their collaborative secret of space was clear to me. Get together. Share space. Just play.
Whippoorwill started with Kraft and Foster on the porch of a mutual friend in Austin, hardly talking, but letting their songs speak for them. Both musicians were playing SXSW in 2013 and that night Whippoorwill was named for the bird song that filled the short gaps between songs. The duo just “passed the guitar back and forth and communicated that way. There was an immediate creative spark, right away,” Foster tells me. “How do you know when you have that with someone?” I ask. “It just flows. Your chest kind of opens up and it just flows.” This chance meeting, this shared time and space and instant musical connection stuck with them both even after they parted ways that night to continue on their respective tours. Yet that spark blazed on and Foster moved from Austin to Fort Collins to continue making music with Kraft who is the lead singer of the Fort Collins based band The Patti Fiasco. The two fell in love. According to Foster, “Alysia [Kraft] is the heartbeat of Whippoorwill. She’s driven and so when she gets it in her head to write a song right then, nothing can deter her.” When I ask how it works to live with your chief collaborator Foster replies, “You know, I can be making dinner and she’s playing something in the other room and I’ll start to hum along. I’ll come into the room to sing along and pretty soon we just stop whatever we’re doing and write the song. It’s spontaneous.”
By sharing a space and life together Foster and Kraft can pick up on each other’s moods and write songs when inspiration strikes. Foster had hitherto only played solo and so the team songwriting experience was new to her but it is clear, when you hear their co-written music, that they work well together. “Two is my favorite number of collaborators,” Foster says. “Just me and one other person. That’s how I am in real life, too. Better one-on-one.” Their partnership evolved as did their sound and after a few years of playing acoustic as a duo, drummer Tobias Bank joined the band. Space was shared, just like on the porch in Austin, and after a potluck all three played together without talking much and it just felt right. Whippoorwill became a trio.
The band’s method of writing songs is highly collaborative. Foster describes playing voice memos on her phone, a sketchbook of song idea, melodies, or themes she’s collected over the years and when all three members perk up at a certain track they take it into the music room and explore it. “No matter what, we’ll try anyone’s idea. At least once,” Bank says. Sometimes almost nothing of the original idea remains, but like your grandfather’s ax that’s had the handle and the head replaced, it still somehow retains the original spirit. These three musicians prove that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and Banks remarks that, “That’s the beauty of playing in a band. No one even has enough limbs to play all those instruments so it’s always a collaboration.”
When I asked about decision-making as a group and editing, Banks and Foster said they didn’t really have problems with that. “We’re all just going to agree on going with whatever sounds the best. We’re all evolving with each song, growing and changing our sound. With three members now instead of two we’ve got a tie-breaker and a healthy balance. Yeah, the best sound is going to win out,” Foster says.
Whippoorwill and I talked about collaboration on tour and the cross-pollination of playing with other bands like the Lonesome Heroes while on the road as well as working with others on promotion, booking, and other creative projects. The band is currently in the studio recording their first album with Bank which is slated for release this autumn. Bassist and lap steel player Jesse Bates will join the trio on a couple tracks. They look forward to making an official music video for a new song called “Change Gonna Come” with Laramie, Wyoming based video artist Mike Vanata. Whippoorwill will play at FOCOMX at the Magic Rat at 8:00 on April 29th and open for one of my top bands, Big Thief, on Tuesday, April 24th at The Bluebird in Denver. We talk for a long time about shared space and the places we love that provide that for artists like The Artery, The Lyric, friend’s living rooms, and Cloverlick Banjo Shop where filmmakers, musicians, and artists have formed a critical mass and encourage each other to greater creativity. Places like Cloverlick provide a space for musicians to play together and that is where true community and collaborative partnerships begin and flourish.
Amalgam
Novelist Laura Pritchett and I sat at the Bean Cycle as my friend Andrew Bohn collaboratively held my daughter Imogen while she napped. “So how’d you decide to write a play about dirt?” I asked. “I didn’t!” she laughed. She wrote a research essay called “An Ode to Germs, Guts, and Gardens” published in High Country News all about soil and gut bacteria. Then on a walk one day a friend, who had read her essay on dirt, asked if she’d ever thought of writing a play about it. Pritchett replied, “That’s crazy talk! Who would write a play about dirt?“ Yet from this conversation between friends in the great outdoors the first germ of the idea was collaborative planted. Soon Pritchett had written a rough draft of the play, found supportive producers at Bas Bleu, and an amazing director in Jeffrey Bigger. The play opens on April 5th and runs for five consecutive weekends. From a little dancing nematode of an idea to a colony of bacterium, the piece became its own culture through collaboration.
I love unlikely combinations, unusual pairings. Before I tried Roquefort blue cheese with honey I thought it sounded disgusting but a pushy French person with superior culinary taste and sophistication bullied me into it and I was converted. It’s so good; salty, funky, sweet, creamy. Try it. Like peanut butter and pickles, collaboration brings together flavors that wouldn’t normally work together to create something completely new. Pursuant to writing an entire play about mud, Pritchett spoke to many soil and environmental scientists; people you wouldn’t normally associate with theatrefolk, to say the least. “I have always loved writing about science, trying to turn it into a story that is interesting to the layperson so I brought to it my love of science.” Like in her writing, “Dirt, a Terra Nova Experience” looks at the plight of the earth we share through the lens of art.
Her earthy voice projects humanity and character onto hard science in a way that resonates throughout her writing. A chimerical creation of soil science facts paired with high stakes story-telling follows Estella, a young scientist in a metal underground bunker. Alone in the post-apocalyptic desert she waits for microbes and worms to return to heal the soil and reflects on the history, culture, and myth of dirt. On this lonely path she discovers that perhaps humanity has learned humility and its proper place as carbon on this earth. ‘It’s visceral, not a dry lecture on ecology. Pritchett’s countenance grows serious when she says “We are dirt, matter, carbon. Primitive. Some of this might ruffle some feathers.”
Collaboration between the arts and sciences is exciting for both parties and most of all for the audience. There will be three different talk-backs following performances of the play on a variety of environment topics. Though the play dramatizes the story of the soil to great effect, sometimes the specific terminology used by soil scientists or ecologists can be inaccessible to the layperson. Pritchett notes that she had “several meetings with scientists and starting out I’d just say, ‘Tell me about your work, but try to put it in interesting language’ and these soil scientists are so fascinating. They’d use metaphors that made it make sense. We’d get together and just geek out, and I love geeks. They gave me great imagery. One guy says [of the soil] ‘There are 10,000 ways to make a living and everybody’s got their own job down there and if you disrupt one of them the whole society collapses.’ Even now in rehearsal I hear a good line and wonder, ‘Did I write that?’”
From the writer’s perspective, collaboration is a brave new world. Used to working in solitude, Pritchett has been astounded by the joy of the collaborative process. As a working novelist and writer she’s “sitting alone 90% of the time, getting feedback from my agent and editor, which is not the same as collaboration.” The creation of this play has been her first experience with making theatre and she’s “absolutely in love” although she admits that “working alone is so much more efficient! But the brilliance I see in other people way outweighs the efficiency.” The way she describes the rehearsal, revision, and workshopping process reminds me of the human life cycle. Dust to dust. After notes from the director Jeffrey Bigger she goes home after and revises if “it sounds weird or the words falter” when spoken by the actors.
“Since starting this process a few months ago huge changes have been made to the play based on what we discovered in rehearsal. An actor can take in words and character into their bones and give it breath. They cut out all the unnecessary words intuitively, almost. They find inconsistencies and correct them. They give the characters flesh and blood,” Pritchett remarks. If the ensemble gets stuck on a line rewrite sometimes the director and writer will just ask the actor, “What would you do in this situation?”
Pritchett has found writing a play collaboratively to be a strange amalgam of solitude and community, art and science, storytelling and story-listening. She says, “I’ve have never had a time in my life I’ve made so little money, setting aside my paid work and magazine writing I could be doing to work on this.” Her eyes sparkle and we share an understanding look. “I’ve never been so happy. I’m broke and delighted. I know it’s not sustainable but I’m just so happy.” I know exactly what she means.