Here’s the thing about collaboration: you cannot fake it. Either you trust someone enough to let them break your carefully constructed vision, or you don’t. Either you’re willing to build something that couldn’t exist without the other person’s hands in it, or you’re just delegating.
I’ve been lucky, maybe just stubborn enough to keep showing up, to work with people who understand that collaboration isn’t about compromised. It’s about alchemy.
There’s the Collected Works, the theater company I co-directed, where we took Jean Genet’s The Balcony and staged it at San Francisco’s Old Mint, because sometimes a play about power and illusion demands you perform it in a building where they used to literally make money.
There’s the work with puppeteer Niki Ulehla. That one burned quickly, making work that feels like it might change everything. Until it doesn’t. Until it flames out, the way these things sometimes do. Some collaborations aren’t meant to last. They’re meant to be incandescent for a moment, then become ash.
Then there’s We Players and Ava Roy, a relationship that’s spanned over twenty-five years, though not continuously. Circling back, the way you do when work matters more than complications. It started at Stanford with a site-specific production of Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language. Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade. Then there was Shakespeare: Macbeth, Lear, the Sonnets. The work changes as you both change. You understand different things at different ages. Sometimes you need distance. Sometimes you come back. Sometimes you need distance.
There’s Alonzo King LINES Ballet. This collaboration took me places I didn’t know existed, filming in Europe, photo shoots on remote tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, gallery openings where the work lives on walls instead of stages, three-story video projections that turn buildings into moving sculptures. Working with Alonzo and his dancers fundamentally changed the way I see the human body move through space. You think you understand movement, and then you watch a LINES dancer, Babatunji, Adji, Shuaib, all of whom defy physics in a way that makes you question what a body is actually capable of. You’re chasing that with a camera on a cliff, through the ruins of Sutro Baths, through a tropical rain forest, through China Town, and finally you find yourself on top of a volcano. The end result being the images you’ve captured are projected three stories high on a building facade, and you realize you’ve given up documenting dance, you’ve been trying to capture something closer to flight, or better still, the materialization of cloud coming into existence.
Through it all, there’s been site-specific dance collaborations with Aleta Hayes and the Chocolate Heads, bodies moving through the Cantor Art Museum, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. Watching dance happen where it’s not supposed to, which is just wrong cause you should be able to everywhere, but that’s when you remember that all spaces are just waiting for the right provocation.
Then there are the brilliant, unpredictable collaborations with artists like Ryan Tacata and Angrette McCloskey. Sometimes at the Franconia Performance Salon, sometimes at the Performance Art Institute, that shady, creepy cavern of a place that always left you feeling vaguely unclean, like you needed a shower and possibly a tetanus shot. But that’s where some of the best work happens. In the spaces that make you uncomfortable, with the people who refuse to make it easy.
What follows are the projects born from these partnerships, proof that the best work is never done alone.
It’s very dramatic when two people come together to work something out. It’s easy to take a gun and annihilate your opposition, but what is really exciting to me is to see people with differing views come together and finally respect each other.
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