Collaboration - a tribute to Alan Daiches.

This is not what I am supposed to be doing.  I am supposed to be swimming laps in the pool.  Or cycling to nowhere.  Or running up a hill.  But my legs won't collaborate and my heart isn't quite in it. All the different bits are working on separate projects.

After a Twitter conversation yesterday I started to think about collaboration.  It's an interesting word defined as,

"The art of working jointly together."

This doesn't sound dangerous - does it?  And yet we are often torn about working in cahoots with others, sharing our ideas (in case someone steals them), and developing projects together in case someone runs off with what little funding there is.  Well, think bigger.

As Ken Robinson says, it isn't just a matter of talking within organisations but talking across them.  As he points out, this is vital for our survival.  Collaboration is all there is if we want to meet the future. For too long everything has been packed in boxes and kept apart. Keeping things internal and tight means only one thing - the law of entropy.  And we all know what happens with that. Boom! (And not in a good way.)

Two stories about collaboration:-

1.  I was once slapped across the face by a fellow poet for allegedly 'stealing' an idea.  I really hadn't.  We'd had a conversation and I wrote something based on that conversation.  As she struck my face I can recall the distinct clatter as my (very trendy) glasses scuttled across the road.  I was so shocked, I picked them up, got in the car and went home.  We never really worked together again. This is a shame because that partnership was the funniest and best time I have ever had in my life.  I have never laughed more, never felt more excited, determined or scared. Our work as poets, as history will testify, was better together than it was apart. And yet, it was hard to square the circle of both of our ambitions and hopes, and hard to separate who had thought up what once the collaboration began. And difficult if we wrote something apart and succeeded where the other might have failed.  We were also younger, and more driven and that can get in the way too. It did.

2. Alan Daiches, friend of the youth theatre, driver of projects and totally committed to the cause spent many, many unpaid hours working for the better good. He was, of course, like us all, not perfect - but he was a very big part of the reason that the youth theatre was built, and a very big part of the funding bids that went into that process as well as sitting on committees and representing the youth theatre at events.  He also had a lot of experience writing applications for other projects so that the arts team within the youth theatre could get on with delivering the day to day work with the young people.  He exemplified what collaboration means in practice.  The studio theatre is named for him along with a quote of his,

"We can achieve anything, as long as you don't mind who gets the credit."

This is a maxim that sits at the heart of partnership working.  Some years on from his death, the current crop of young people we have, have no idea of him or of the hours he put in to making the building a reality - which is exactly the way he would have liked it.  I like to think that the collaboration continues silently in all the joint operations that take place between the young people and that studio through the creation of shows, through workshops and through a myriad other uses that take place day after day - big and small.  They all count.

Right.  Now for breakfast.

Mandy :)