When I first walked down Acton Street at the end of 2010 and saw a massive sign: ‘Centre for Creative Collaboration’, I thought, ‘That’s me’. I didn’t quite know what this centre might be, but creative collaboration is what I spend my hours grappling with and obsessing over. I have been trying to understand it and use it for years. I am writing a PhD about it. It has never been easy for me, but I believe in it. My residency, which began a few months after I first saw the sign, has brought up more questions than answers, but I think now; that’s a good thing.

My task now: to articulate, briefly, what this place is. You would think I would know by now. But this is a difficult question. At the very least, I should be able to say what it has been for me. I have asked many of the other residents the same question, and now I should answer it for myself.

Ten years ago, I went to a theatre school where I learned about collaborative theatre making. Every week we put on a short scene devised by us. No one directed, and we all acted. It was always difficult and sometimes painfully so, but occasionally you would have a brilliant success. These successes showed me that a group can create something much richer and more surprising than one writer can.

Though I entered the school with acting ambitions, I realised over those two years that I feel most comfortable with writing; I see myself creating theatre more than enacting it. After graduating, I worked on a few fully collaborative theatre pieces that were, in some sense, failures, and then spent time writing on my own because I needed to take my work into my own hands. After a few years of this, I found I was missing the input of others. Last year, when I began my PhD, I knew that I wanted to understand how writers, who typically work alone and cherish the control they have over their work, manage to open their process enough to work with a group of opinionated actors and a director. The times I have tried this have been difficult to say the least: wrong group, wrong writer, or wrong approach, I don’t know. If I could spend time with this question of writing and creating, creative collaboration, as my vocation, perhaps I could understand how to do it myself. There were obvious challenges to this, which is perhaps why academics have not charted collaborative processes satisfactorily yet: they are hard to plan for and frequently change midstream, and seem to be impossible to talk about after the fact. So I had a good idea that it wouldn’t be simple.

But maybe the Centre for Creative Collaboration (c4cc), which is in a funded, experimental pilot phase, could help me get closer to understanding what happens when people bring their creative energies together, or at the very least why they do so.

So I applied to become a resident. After a bit of a grilling from one of the board members about what my intentions were and how I would give back to the Centre, I decided that I would give myself the project of interviewing as many of the residents as I could, attempt to draw some conclusions in the form of some writing, and offer this to the Centre. These interviews, would also give me a variety of perspectives on collaboration.

But first I had to understand what this place was. I spent a few weeks sitting around c4cc to listen and watch. I was immediately struck by the lack of structure. It had an energy of its own that wasn’t organised or masterplanned. Sitting up on the balcony around the central atrium, I could hear everything, I could peak downstairs at the informal meetings that happened down there, the scheduled networking sessions, events, and conferences. See visitors ponder the photos on the wall. Hear difficult conversations between collaborators trying to find common terms. Watch newcomers come in and try to figure out just what is going on in here, like I was doing. I could watch as people talked across the space, and down into it.

And also working with others. I met a theatre producer who told me about an idea he had been thinking about, and we began to work together. I talked to many people at the weekly informal networking session, Tuttle, who helped give me a new perspective on my ideas. And I had my own perspective on theirs. And talking, always talking, to the other residents to learn who they were and what their work was. These were small steps, but I felt I was part of the place.

It’s hard to pin down what I learned in those weeks. As I recall, it was more of a feeling. It was a sense of how simple and how complex it all was. Creative collaboration was really all there was to it—you came here and you worked—though what that means is as subjective and nuanced as it could be.

There was a set of observations also. I saw how an idea would come out of a conversation that started: ‘How’s work going?’. Someone would say, ‘That reminds me of...’ or ‘I should introduce you to...’ or ‘Send me an email...’. I saw how radical open-mindedness and cheeriness were the norm. How you made a point of starting conversations in the kitchen over tea. And I saw the waves of people that came in here some days, and the quiet days that followed. And how you never really knew which to expect.

The interviews confirmed my vague feeling. I was amazed how articulate the residents were about their working process. There was a huge array of approaches, but in essence it was simple, everyone said. There was no real catch. You set yourself up in the space, and you worked with others. If you pursued your project, made yourself open to unpredictability and available to others then collaborations would propose themselves. It was a question of mindset.

But the complexities emerged as well. I heard about ‘failed’ collaborations and ideas that went nowhere, disagreements and differences of opinion. When asked about why things didn’t work, there were always perfectly good reasons. And it was always complicated.

I was able to gather a few definitions of collaboration: To some it was as simple as sharing ideas and offering advice, to others it was mutual help on separate individual projects. To some it was taking charge of different parts of one project, and to others still it was creating and executing a concept together from start to finish.

I asked my interviewees if they thought everyone should collaborate in their working lives, and I don’t think anyone said no. Many said it took a special approach to your work, a certain mindset (that word again) and a willingness to take more time with your ideas, but that the benefits for all were clear.

Most of my interviewees agreed that collaboration was harder than it seemed. Several of them referred to a set of conditions that needed to be in place in order for collaboration to really happen. I heard about neutrality, mutual trust, structure and leadership. One person summed up the preconditions by saying that all parties have to come to the ‘acceptance that a group of minds is always going to be stronger than a single mind’—in other words, you have to want it for it work. All of this corresponded with my experience. And thinking of my failures, I knew well that it’s not often that you find all these qualities in a group of partners.

I heard also from several of my interviewees about something called ‘true collaboration’. The implication that there is such a thing as ‘false collaboration’ immediately rang true for me. I know that many so-called collaborative creative processes are in fact red herrings. As little agreement as there was about what collaboration is, it is clear to most people what it is not. I have experienced this myself in the theatre world, where a creative process is called collaborative, but all the members of the team are beholden to one creative mind who can’t let go of his or her singular vision, or where the institutional context of the work makes the leveling of an equal playing field impossible.

One interviewee said there was a difference between ‘teamwork’ and collaboration. Teamwork is working together on a project—even if it is framed by a hierarchical power structure where the terms of the project are predetermined by a relatively small number of people. Collaboration is working together on a project with all partners having significant input on the outcome. The line between the two is fuzzy. Collaboration does not mean everyone is the same, or that every partner is equally responsible for everything. Many interviewees stressed this point. To collaborate, you need to bring different skill sets together, with the stress at times on one skill over the others. Then the output will be something wholly new, a product that could only have been created by this particular group of people.
   
Another resident said that collaboration is necessarily a re-imagining of the way work is structured. And this, I realised, gets to the crux of this place. What all of us are doing here is re-imagining. We are going about our work, our projects, starting our businesses, meeting our deadlines, pleasing clients, seeking profit, putting up plays, but doing all this with a mind toward new ways of getting there. In some way we are building the future. I realise that’s quite grand, but I think it’s true.
   
Amongst all these thoughts and observations, I was to write an article summing up my findings. What is this place? The mission I had set for myself of defining the c4cc seemed hopelessly difficult. What right did I have to delineate the possibilities of the Centre in some academic argument? What conclusion could I possible draw except to say, banally, it is what you make of it?
   
Instead of conclusions I had questions; this place, I understand now, isn’t about answers, but inquiry. We don’t know where this grand experiment will take us, but we will try things and ask questions along the way: How do you achieve something predetermined, like the launch of a product or the production of a piece of art, if you keep the process indeterminate? How do you find ‘true’ collaboration if the idea is yours, and you therefore ‘own’ the idea more than your collaborators do? What happens with a collaboratively-generated idea once a partnership disbands? How do you recreate success if each process is unique? These questions are just a start.
   
At this point, we are not answering questions, really, but asking them. Any answers we embody through our work processes are not definitive responses, rather, attempts.
   
Where does all this leave me with my project? With my desire to ‘figure out’ this creative collaboration thing? Full of questions. Without formulae. What I know a little more intuitively now is that there are no formulae. Collaboration, actually, is the anti-formula. The point of a process guided by inquiry is that we don’t know what’s on the other side of the equation, or even what’s on this side. My hope is that by articulating the questions that c4cc asks, I will know what questions to ask myself in my practice and research. I don’t expect answers, really, but I do hope for some new lines of enquiry to help me come closer to finding out how collaborative practice can actually work for me. So far, what I have learned is that I will have to create the models for myself. Damn. I knew it wouldn’t be easy.

Among all the challenges and uncertainty, the caveats and conditions, the question begs itself: Why bother? There is more than a love of challenges that draws me to this minefield. I still believe in the value of collaboration, for some reasons that are easy to articulate and some that aren’t. I believe in the power of a group to come up with something more compelling, inventive and surprising than an individual can. And, like all of the residents at the Centre, I believe that collaboration is the future of both work and creativity. But more than that, I have a feeling that all of us who work this way, in spite of the challenges, are onto something exciting. That there is much we have yet to figure out. That the more these ways of working catch on, the more new ways of working, ways we haven’t discovered yet, will be created. That this search for individual and innovative ways of getting our work done will make our work matter more, to us and to the people it serves.