V. Collaboration, Interdisciplinary work and Empathy

In his single 1992, climate activist and artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’ rap includes the line "I'd have to be a fool to tell you I'm self-made." Like many of his lyrics, the text emphasises being a product of one's community, family and surrounding nature. In his work, this is a distinctly Native American perspective and meant as a powerful statement against White American capitalist and individualist narratives of the "self-made man". But community is a craving we all have. The mythos of the "self-made man" is very close to the 19th Century delusion of the "lone genius" and neither is helpful. Xiuhtezcatl is right when he points out that none of us are self-made, and that more awareness of this may benefit not just humanity but also the world we inhabit, and maybe the art we make – or at least the circumstances in which art is being made.

However, "Community arts" are often perceived as necessarily amateurish, with a focus on social engagement rather than artistic quality. It is almost as if the word “community” automatically decreases the value of the art with an assumption that it is “for a good cause”. In a way, the fan fiction community is like community arts. None of the people engaging with fandom are trained writers. None of these people own the original material. As a result of this non-commercial space, it is a highly collaborative environment. People give each other prompts, co-write stories, illustrate each other’s work. Nobody expects a professional-level writing style, but more often than not, we are positively surprised by the quality of what we read. In the case of Serenoid, we hired a professional singer that would have an authentic insight into the role and character due to the shared situation of being unable to see. One of the unique features of the project that I believe played a big role in attracting funding bodies, was that the project didn’t “engage and include” a disabled performer, but that Victoria’s perceptions and lived experience were vital to make the character of Xaven come alive and therefore, her disability became a specific strength that informed every aspect of the collaborative process, rather than an obstacle to be overcome.  

In this vein like the work on a piece of fan fiction, the work on Serenoid had to be collaborative from an early stage. With it referencing existing characters and an existing aesthetic, written collaboratively based on a prompt by a person outside the process and in consultation with Victoria even before the first words of a libretto were written - as naturally, I didn’t have immediate comprehension into what life is like as a blind person - its process resembled fan fiction writing more than a traditional material-librettist-composer relationship. The many pieces of fanfiction written about Geordi LaForge as an inspirational blind character helped us to understand aspects of Victoria’s experience that she didn’t hitherto feel addressed. I remember her first reaction to the libretto, when she told me it was “eerie” how accurately we had captured the experience of isolation and frustration and other people’s reaction to Xaven. When she asked me “How did you know all this”, part of the answer was that reading fan fiction had exposed Wyatt and myself to many perspectives. 

As in the fandom community, where people are often writers and visual artists who engage with at least one branch of a digital profession like coding or web design, a lot of the creative team fulfilled multiple roles. Wyatt also designed the leaflet and core illustration. Director Edie Bailey designed the lighting and was also instrumental in the stage design, as was Victoria Oruwari with me procuring most of the stage props. I was being producer, composer, co-librettist, but also costume designer. Lidia Rodríguez who was mainly responsible for Hair and Make-up (see video below) asked - to my utter surprise - to study the music score in our first meeting. As she was being paid for the whole day, she ended up styling the orchestra members as well, utilising her central skill set but also exhibiting an attitude of generosity and collaboration despite restraints on time and budget. None of us were precious about our roles. It was about the product and creating an open atmosphere where everybody was able to contribute, not who was being  credited. Edie Bailey told me they loved having “another creative voice to bounce ideas off of”, confirming that they “enjoy working closely with collaborators and people in the process because (…) it sparks a lot of things” and that “even under time pressure it felt somewhat equal, so that the artists and performers could feel empowered as well”. The story we wanted to tell took precedence over individual trajectories. Victoria also said to me in a rehearsal, that she didn’t understand herself as the “lead” or “prima donna”, but rather that we were all parts of one body. The environment we fostered, and that is also prevalent in fan fiction communities, was what Isabelle Stengers calls “experimental togetherness” in her Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices. She further defines this as “a dynamics of pragmatic learning of what works and how. This is the kind of active, fostering ‘milieu’ that practices need in order to be able to answer challenges and experiment changes”, which will necessarily arise when taking something from an online space into the physical world.  

Shaping a piece of what is considered Western classical music in a collaborative and open approach is nothing new – for example Heiner Goebbels describes such an approach in his work with Ensemble Modern: “Yes, that's why the collaboration with the Ensemble Modern was so workable. You see, the political challenge begins for me with the ways of production. (...) I try an open process, in which every light technician or wardrobe assistant can easily make suggestions and everyone in the crew always has a fair chance to make the best out of his field (...) . Black on White wouldn't have been possible without the strong inspiration and creativity not only by the staff, but also all the musicians included. They proposed to bring instruments; they developed characters, atmospheres, gestures (...)”. When describing this open approach in the same interview, Goebbels also states “I hope that an audience is able to conceive this respectful, decentralized perspective as a political quality, a gesture that liberates the senses.” He, too, is hopeful that an open approach will inform what audiences take away from the performance.

Although forms of collaboration occur in traditional opera, the many cross-disciplinary and mutual learning processes we went through during the production phase of Serenoid as described above, are not something that is prevalent in the world of opera. The music score might have been written by one person but this did not put me in a hierarchical position. We made many adjustments to the score during the process, maybe most importantly to Filipe’s part, and to Victoria’s part in order to accommodate potential difficulties with her not being able to see the conductor. When Filipe asked me to rewrite a few passages that were too high and uncomfortable in his voice, I immediately did so without question. This led to him going back on some of his suggestions, stating that he wanted to challenge himself to sing it as intended, now that he knew that he could trust me to accommodate him, if he struggled. 

Working with people with disabilities inherently doesn’t fit into the hierarchical structures of what is understood as “high art” in the Western world. Since each “disabled” person has individual needs, such a person will have to have a say in each and every aspect of the show. Victoria consulted on the libretto, had influence on the stage design, her costume and even aspects of the music score to ensure her safety would be guaranteed. Having such a person on board leaves no room for big egos and this obligation for an empathic and open approach is expanded to the entire ensemble.

Stage Design

The stage design had to be easy for Victoria to get around and to know at all times where she was. It was separated into two spaces, the “Ghost House” in which Corrie is found and spends the entire opera, and which was designated by a large rug placed on the floor, and the “Village Space” mostly inhabited by Merton and Xaven’s colleagues (chorus) which was the space around the rug. It was vital that the Cockpit is in a thrust/amphitheatre configuration because there was no elevated stage where anyone could have fallen off the edge. The entries to the Cockpit stage space lined up with the corner of the rug in such a way, that Victoria was able to walk with her hand on the wall for a while to know her direction and then count her steps until she hit the rug and felt its edge under her foot. A piece of cardboard was placed centrally under the rug so that she knew when she had reached the middle of it, from where she would sing her arias. The other three corners of the rug served as orientation points as well as metaphorical places in the story. Standing in front of it facing the ensemble behind it, the front left corner was Victoria’s entry point. The back left corner was where Corrie sat. Because her legs are destroyed and nonfunctional for most of the opera, she sits leant against a library ladder with her violin next to her.  The back right corner featured a broken chandelier. The front right corner became the “children’s chair”, a low chair with broken toys that was symbolic of Corrie’s past and her memories of the children she used to watch as well as the painful memory of being responsible for them getting hurt. She only approaches it when she comes to face these memories which are partly the reason why she doesn’t want to believe that she is capable of feeling. 

From the middle, it took Victoria six steps to reach each corner, and every rehearsal we built the entire set so she could get used to mapping it out. In addition, the electronics in the score were spatialised, and we built bell cues into the electronic score which would come out of the back left speaker in regular intervals so that Victoria knew where she was in case of her losing orientation. When she enters the village space in Scene II, she is guided by the chorus, who play her belittling colleagues, so the guidance is built into the mood of the scene. 

Music Score

The biggest difficulty to overcome was the lack of connection with the conductor. It became clear relatively early on, that Victoria had underestimated the difficulties with learning contemporary music. A lot of her lines had to be doubled for security and after several attempts to teach the cues in the score, and due to very restricted rehearsal time, we settled on using a bell cue every time Victoria would come in, which was triggered by myself as part of the cues in the electronic score. This way, I could function as a sub-conductor, getting the entries from watching the conductor for her. For future performances, we are looking at using haptic bracelets (find out how they function) which allow a blind performer to physically feel the beat of a conductor via a bracelet worn around their wrist. This is very new technology used experimentally by Paraorchestra, a UK group of disabled musicians. 

In the later scenes and with Victoria's consent, we would use touch-cues to guide here. Taryn gave her an unnoticable tap on the back or shoulder whilst touching her in the more romantic-coded scenes, because the bell would have been a disruptive noise to the atmosphere in those scenes. I recorded and made around seven different practice tracks for Victoria, one with me singing her own part so that she knew how the words fitted underneath the music, one with me singing Taryn's part, both of these with and without bell cues and click and one where her part was played by a loud flute midi so she could clearly pick it out without singing. 

Acting

Next to the collaborative approach, we needed a wholistic approach. Different questions came up, different scenarios emerged, different issues occurred from “normal” situations. One of the most striking moments was maybe when the director Edie asked Victoria to “look angry” in her rage aria, and Victoria told us she didn’t know how to make an “angry face”. It had never occurred to me that this needed to be taught or copied, I had hitherto assumed it was something that naturally happens. And so we spent ten minutes teaching Victoria how to make an “angry face” by describing how to pull the brows together and frown. 

Another moment that surprised all of us was when she asked “How do people kiss on stage”. We ended up settling for other gestures signifying romance between the two characters because it was a matter of finding a space that was comfortable for Taryn and Victoria and that could be initiated by both of them, rather than one taking the lead. 

We invited all the principal singers to collaborate in developing the characters in a short time by writing their characters’ backstory and their potential future. One of the most precious acting choices was when Victoria was asked to make a dismissive noise and produced a sort of hiss by sucking air in through her teeth. After an initial laugh she explained she would like to do this noise because it was a distinctly African reaction. “This is what you hear when an African person gets angry. It would be more true to me”, was her comment. So in exchange for teaching her about the angry face, she taught us about the angry noise. It gave a dimension to Xaven’s character that I couldn’t have written or imagined. 

All these situations suggests that any collaboration and interdisciplinary work – as opera inherently is – cannot afford the absence of empathy and are furthermore, a constant learning process on empathy. If the process doesn’t have that, how can it not show up in the work? “As the German film critic Georg Seesslen pointed out, "an artwork with many participants and collaborators, like in film or theatre, has to reflect the internal relationships. As an experienced spectator you can easily see if the director uses the actors and musicians in a hysterical repressive authoritarian way, or if he is able to create with them in a fruitful atmosphere. You can see by the performance if the director is an asshole." (Heiner Goebbels quoting Seesslen in an interview with Stathis Gourgouris) 

Trust in group settings and empathy for the audience

The fanfiction community understands this like none other. In a space that feels like everything is allowed, it is self-understood that everything is accepted. I’m not suggesting there aren’t any conflicts in this community, but I am saying that through its non-profit nature and through the fact that no one owns the actual material, it is generally understood as a space without hierarchies. In his paper Trust and Collective Agency, Bernd Lahno explores contextual relationships of trust in groups with goal-oriented activities. He writes: “In collective agency the individual mode of cooperation is transcended.” And further: “Group members perceive other group members as being connected to them by sharing the perspective and the goals and values of the group.”

Whilst it is an aspect of what trust in a group setting, such as a creatives-cast-ensemble setting preparing an opera premiere, can mean and look like, I find this perspective limiting. I believe that trust in the group and its goals arises, when people in a collective feel seen, and when they feel that their individual concerns will be taken into consideration when making decisions. The group agency is not the basis for trust, it merely gives the direction for an outcome that is achieved better when individuals don’t feel like the group goals, values and perspectives always or by necessity outweigh their own. Whilst the Vulcan philosophy in Star Trek – The Original Series also thematises the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, no one said that the needs of the few cannot be heard or inform the needs of the many with a valuable perspective or be accommodated if they don’t stand in direct conflict with the needs of the many. In the episode Is there no Truth in Beauty (1968), Spock is prompted by another character, Miranda, with “The glory of creation in its infinite diversity.” And he supplements “And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty.” With all due respect to Mr. Lahno, and despite the absence of an academic paper written by Mr. Spock which I could quote, I do find myself more aligned with the latter.

This approach also includes empathy for the audience. The material I read on this topic usually touches on empathy in the sense that music is a vehicle for emotional expression and receiving it as an audience member is an empathetic act, as it is an invitation to share in these emotions. I haven’t found much in terms of a composer’s empathy for the audience that wasn’t linked to whether or not you should “sell out”, as in change your practice to appease a broader audience. 

The empathy and care for the audience is informed by perceiving them as part of my peer group and thus being able to introduce something new (contemporary Western art music aesthetic) but in a setting of common ground that they can trust (a story that comes out of their environment, was written and shaped by people like them and understands their concerns).  

In the case of the potentially sight-impaired members of the audience, the idea was to spatialise the electronic score in a quadraphonic set-up, in order to give the blind and partially sighted audience a fuller experience instead of just accepting that they would only have half of the information because they can’t see the stage. In addition to this we organised a touch tour before the performance, in order to give these audience members the opportunity to encounter the characters, the set and important props in the story to be better able to follow it without seeing the stage. I also reached out to the Amber Trust, a London-based charity that gives music lessons to blind children and sent out a call to invite people to attend an open rehearsal. This has nothing to do with changing my musical style, it has to do with considering and accommodating potential needs of an audience that might be attracted to the work. Sadly, these efforts weren’t picked up by the blind community. Victoria’s input regarding the failure of these efforts to reach the blind community is as follows:

“I think it was its scale. Its scale and it's the fact that it's classical music and a lot of blind people are really into pop. (…)I think it's just a matter of how many blind people go and see go to gigs. (…) When we did my thing at South Bank, I don't think any blind person came. And I think I did tell my blind friends about it, but I don't know what they were doing because it was just one evening. Because it was just one day, it was very difficult to kind of get everybody in there.” I was hoping to make something that would also inspire the blind community, through Victoria. This is however not measurable if it doesn’t reach them. I hope that if I can stage the show again, taking the feedback on board, more people from this community will be able to attend.

This empathy for a performer and audience with unusual needs expands to an empathy for everyone involved. Bernd Lahno argues for an attitude of "trust in integrity. (…) Trust in integrity is often encapsulated in routines and based on a normative framework that is produced by the group’s social structure and the institutional background.” The audience we want to reach is able to trust us because our story arc is empathic to the younger and more diverse audience we want to speak to, because it addresses their concerns of isolation and loneliness, the alternative kind of relationship and connection they might wish to have but don’t see represented in any other places than online niche communities, their own potential for connection even if they feel “different” or alienated, and the feeling that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s original vision of “infinite diversity in infinite combination” is reflected in the people through which stories are being told. It doesn’t have anything to do with “diversity hire” and “inclusion” or even “representation”. It comes from a space that is already diverse and doesn’t need to include anybody, because it is already made up of everybody, including the creators of the art that is made by its members. No one is being artificially “let in” after years of pretending they don’t exist and there is no separation between artist and audience as people. We, all together, come out of the shadows and we do it with people who serve the story and therefore the people we speak to. “Community made” adds to the value in this setting, instead of subtracting from it. And none of these considerations or accommodations mean compromising on musical ideas or style of music.