VISIONARY COLLABORATION: Conversations with Steve Kirkham

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VISIONARY COLLABORATION: CONVERSATIONS WITH STEVE KIRKHAM

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The questions below are links to video documents of interviews and conversations between Steve Kirkham and student from De Montfort University.

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Steve was asked questions that relate to his own experience in industry. His experience as a movement director, choreographer, performer and teacher allows Steve to answer the questions from an array of viewpoints. The students proceed to query topics that are personal to themselves when working in collaboration.

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Starting up: Rules, Expectations and Organisation

1. What would make you want to work with someone?
2. What qualities do you look for in a collaborator?
3. Do you feel the need to establish ground rules?
4. Do you have personal ground rules?
5. What do you expect of your collaborators?
6. Does collaboration help diminish the ‘usual’ idealistic dancer?
7. How do you divide responsibility or organisation?

Being Creative Collaboratively

• Do you seen a place in the industry for co-choreographers?
• How do you deal with other dancers contributions, when you are making together?
• What is your understanding of yourself as a collaborator?

1. Part 1 Stages
   • How have you become involved with collaborations?
   • The initial stages
   • When you start a collaboration, do you have certain aims you set out to achieve?
   • Does editing happen in the early stages of the creative process?
   • What enables you to go forward in collaborations?
   • How do you stay engaged when the idea changes from what you thought it would be?
2. Part 2 Choreographic methods
   • How have you cultivated your approach to collaborating throughout your career?
   • What strategies do you employ to engender co-creativity?
   • How do you select creative ideas?
   • Editing and re-drafting as a feature of process
3. Part 3 Time apart
   • Have certain collaborations worked better than others, and why?
4. Part 4 Disagreement
   • To what extent do you welcome disagreement in collaboration?
   • Have disagreements ever become destructive?
   • What advice would you give for managing disagreements?
   • Have you been in a collaboration that has derailed?

Valuing Collaboration

1. How have your individual qualities been enhanced by collaboration?
2. What skills have you gained from collaborating?
3. Have you noticed change in yourself over time?
4. How critical are you of your collaborators’ input and ideas?
5. What do you value in a dancers contribution?

Sustaining and Maintaining Collaboration

1. What do you think is necessary for dancers and performers to cultivate within themselves?
2. What is essential for collaboration?
3. Have you found that by working in a more democratic way it has helped move away from the traditional hierarchy?
4. Are there collaborations you have sought to sustain and why?
5. What goals would you like to achieve in the future?
6. Does a sense of self develop more through collaboration, then working as an individual?
7. Are you aware of compromise operating within the creative process?

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