Fostering Collaborative Leadership Through Playbuilding

Playbuilding is one of the diverse theatrical forms of applied theatre, which “refers to theatre not usually made within traditional theatre buildings, but made with and within communities… constructed to address key social issues, or to tell the stories of people who have been routinely dismissed or silenced” (O'Connor & Anderson, 2015, p. 31). Playbuilding is a term that speaks to a group of people collaboratively investigating issues of concern to them and then turning their perceptions into a dramatic script (Weigler, 2001, p. xiii). As a dynamic and interactive process it enables individual creativity and at the same time develops strong group cooperation and commitment (Bray, 1991). At its heart, playbuilding engages people through collaborative leadership. Collaborative leadership conceptualizes leadership as shared among group members who are empowered to participate in leading the group rather than relying on an individual leader (Pearce & Conger, 2003). Playbuilding provides a context for collaborative leadership because, as Beare (2011) explains, the collective theatre-making process engages participants through a process of scriptwriting, rehearsing, performing, and reflecting to collaboratively cocreate and present an original script based on the strengths, interests, and social interactions of the participants.

Fostering collaborative leadership through playbuilding is rooted within core adult learning principles such as experiential (Kolb, 1984; Kolb & Kolb 2017), transformative (Dirkx, 2006; Mezirow, 2000; O'Sullivan & Morrell, 2002), reflective (Schön, 1984), and whole-person learning (Yorks & Kasl, 2002). Taylor (2011) noted that learning in the twenty-first century is emergent, embedded, and embodied (p. 31). It is emergent because we are continuously creating new knowledge as new conditions and challenges are encountered, it is embedded such that meaning and value are linked to a particular time and place, and embodied in that we are an integral part of what we seek to understand—we shape reality by our very presence (pp. 31–32). Similarly, fostering collaborative leadership through playbuilding enables an embedded, emergent, and embodied learning experience.

Discussing the links between playbuilding, collaborative leadership, and learning, we the authors, Kathy, Will, Tracey, and David, decided that our writing process could also be an example of collaborative leadership and learning in action. To invite different perspectives, we chose to each write a separate piece allowing for convergent and divergent threads to emerge. We used as a writing prompt the following three questions: How does your work foster collaborative leadership? What does the container (or structure) look like and why? And how does playbuilding lead to the emergence of social learning and leadership? In this chapter, we each offer a narrative from our various playbuilding experiences: within community (Will), within secondary schools (Tracey and David), and within university (Kathy). We conclude by addressing a key thread that emerges across all our stories: the importance of structures to foster collaborative leadership through playbuilding.

Within Community: Will

As a freelance community-based theatre artist, my work involves partnering with people in different communities to cocreate plays about the stories that matter to them. I am committed to producing theatre that is vital and fun to watch so that a broader audience—people who may not know about a particular community's insights and perspectives—are drawn in and say, well this is interesting: I never saw that before. As a result of these theatre performances, conversations are started and cross-cultural exchanges are nurtured. Although these projects are liberatory simply in the way they enable people in communities to be heard and seen, the work offers another significant layer of value. The very process of creating the performance material is, by design, intended to foster collaborative leadership and social learning among the participants.

When professional theatre artists collaborate with communities, the partnership is often seen as a marriage of two groups bringing their separate fields of expertise to the endeavor. The community members typically bring the stories and cultural insights that contribute the content of the work, whereas the artists offer their knowledge of the form of theatre making. In my own work, and in my observations of similar work in the field, I have found inherent liabilities in this kind of bifurcated relationship. First, if the professional artists are sincere about engaging with community members in authentically collaborative partnerships, there is inevitably a kind of delicate dance they must do. The challenge lies in finding the right balance between applying their skills and talents to craft an aesthetically compelling show and stepping back to support the participants’ agency in telling their stories on their own terms, even when the participants may not have the dramaturgical chops to translate their local knowledge into evocative staging.

Navigating this balance is something that we in the field are accustomed to managing. The second and, I believe, more concerning liability has to do with leaving the participants with a useful legacy from their time spent on a project. Although there will always be opportunities for community participants to learn about creative processes as they are building a show, a relationship that relies on arts experts to stage the play limits the capacity of the participants to create future theatre projects independently, once the professional artists are gone.

In response to these two challenges, I have taken a page from the work of radical educator Paulo Freire. Freire (2000) put stock in teaching literacy so that, once equipped with the capacity to find self-expression through language, students are able to meet teachers in a relationship of shared and equal status as coinvestigators in learning. For me, as a theatre artist working in community, that means teaching literacy in the language of theatre. This is not what you may think. I don't teach about the playwright's traditional concerns with character, situation/circumstance, and narrative arc. I teach the language of theatre staging itself. I teach how actors and directors can orchestrate staging that will convey to their audiences nuanced meaning about the characters’ relationships, their feelings, social circumstances, and inner conflicts. Among the vocabulary of theatrical staging I share with community members, one of my favorite teachable terms is gest.

The concept of a gest was introduced by the playwright, director, and poet Bertolt Brecht. In German, it's gestus (Willet, 1959, p. 173). Brecht's translator John Willett came up with the archaic English term gest, which happens to work as a nifty portmanteau: a combination of gist—as in the essence of something, and gesture—a single physical action. A gest is not a metaphor or a symbol but rather a well-chosen action in a performance that quintessentially embodies a relationship, an emotional state, or the complexities of a character's social circumstances. For example, I once saw two extraordinary gests in a production of The Merchant of Venice. Shylock's daughter Jessica, on her first visit to Portia's mansion at Belmont, rushed across the stage to thank her wealthy hostess with a gleefully unrestrained and overextended bear hug of an embrace. That single gesture perfectly captured how Jessica was utterly out of her depth in the drawing rooms of Venetian aristocracy. All of Portia's friends rolled their eyes in disdain. In contrast, at the conclusion of Jessica's hug, Portia gently took the Jewish woman's hands in her own, looked warmly into her eyes, and thanked her for her visit. It was a gest of grace and generosity. What's so remarkable about a gest is that it has the potential to pack a wallop when it comes to communicating complex ideas on stage. If the actors have done their work well and found a gest that truly nails the core sense of what's happening at that moment in the scene, the audience gets it. They can experience a deep feeling of recognition that reaches them beyond the level of explanatory language and is built into the very performance of the action. Gests represent just one of the many ways in which meaning in performance isn't conveyed through the playwright's words.

I have discovered that once the concept is understood, anyone with a keen eye will start to recognize gests and be able to replicate them. A familiarity with this vocabulary of theatrical staging enables community members to turn their observational skills and insights about their experiences directly into theatrical expression. Gests are rarely perfect the first time they are attempted in rehearsal. Brecht and his company of actors were known for spending days inventing, trying out, and refining their gests (Rouse, 1982). When working with community participants, I invite the ensemble to take their time experimenting to negotiate among themselves how to make their gests more exquisitely reveal the truth of their experiences. Contributions come in from all corners and laughter that rings with delight often follows the discovery of an adjustment that has suddenly made the meaning of someone's initial idea crystal clear. Contradictions are not just acceptable; they are welcome. A gest can often incorporate the tension of different perspectives and honor that difference. If the difference between two ways of understanding an experience turns out to be irreconcilable, the participants create two separate gests that acknowledge distinct experiences of the same phenomenon depending on one's point of view.

This is social learning and collective leadership in practice. The group's vigorous creative work almost eclipses what is going on—a collective of people who are speaking their truths. They are being heard by one another and acknowledged for their contributions. What's more, their collaborative work all builds toward creating something tangible. It leads to an evocative articulation of their insights rendered as aesthetically compelling moments of theatrical staging. At some point, depending on the intended outcome of the work, a playwright may be brought into the mix along with a director and designers. But the guts of the theatrical expression have already been conceived and refined collaboratively by the ensemble. The group has the agency of having produced the material themselves, and anyone among them can expertly explain the artistic choices they have made and why they have made them. This is a creative skill they can carry with them and continue to develop as a legacy of their collaboration with the professional artist.

Within Secondary Schools: Tracey and David

David has been cocreating original theatre productions with students in secondary schools since 1998 (Beare, 2009, 2011; Beare & Belliveau, 2007) and Tracey joined the process in 2006. Many years of cocreating plays have led us to some fundamental truths about working as a collaborative team. Collaboration involves intensive interaction of complex, and sometimes conflicting, ideas, knowledge, skills, experiences, and human desires. Working together with 200+ students, parents, and staff challenges us to explore multiple viewpoints or pathways. The process of giving, taking, and sharing power allows many people (both youth and adults) to take turns leading and following and listening and responding. As described by Patterson, McKenna-Crook, and Swick Ellington (2006), social change stems from developing relationships between stakeholders. In our teaching practice, people come first, and the curriculum and art-making practices are a natural by-product that stems from focusing on the strengths of the students, and the big ideas of the inquiry process. Tapping into the magic of each individual leads to new and unpredictable possibilities.

Based on social learning and group development theories, we design our cross-curricular practice around three key concepts in order to develop a healthy collaborative theatre-making process (Beare, 2003, 2011; Schutz, 1958; Zins, Bloodworth, Weissberg, & Walberg, 2004). First the members of the group develop a sense of inclusion and belonging. Next, firm boundaries and control are formed. Third, there are opportunities for people to form relationships with one another. Overall, these three basic concepts help to develop a healthier, functional group dynamic, which in turn, supports the group to engage in meaningful theatre-making practices.

In order to highlight our practice of collaborative leadership, we reflect on our 2014 production, The Shocking Tale of Kathryn Grey. For this project, we were engaged in an intensive 10-month cross-curricular playbuilding process, which involved working collaboratively with four teachers, 50+ parent volunteers, and 170+ students. All the senior students played one of seven characters to represent different time periods of Kathryn's life. The Shocking Tale of Kathryn Grey became a psychological play based on a young woman struggling with mental health issues related to anxiety, a topic selected by the students because it was relevant to their own lived experiences. The practice of collaborative leadership required us to engage in an ongoing dialogue with numerous stakeholders, which allowed the process of playbuilding to unfold in an organic and holistic manner. For this play, we collectively agreed not to provide easy answers about mental health, but rather to explore the complex issues and barriers that come with the topic.

The protagonist of the play, Kathryn Grey, firmly believed her inability to trust her romantic partner was because her father had abandoned her family when she was a child. In order to visually illustrate Kathryn's inner world, the group decided to build a set with seven arches that represented Kathryn's brain—each arch was to be a portal to a different place in her memory. Although the set was ambitious and provided an abstract framework to examine these issues, the group as a whole struggled to make sense of its complexity. In short, we were artistically stuck, and this caused a lot of tension in our process.

The internationally renowned Canadian theatre artist Robert Lepage (in Charest, 1995) explained that conflict and tension can serve the theatre-making process. For Lepage, sometimes tension in rehearsals often opens up and leads to exciting new performances or technical discoveries. In this case, critical moments are viewed less as mistakes, errors, mishaps, and dead ends and more as natural and healthy components of the experimental trial and error learning process of the collective theatre-making process—creative missteps have the potential to evoke unexpected curiosity, inquiry, dialogue, and beautiful art.

The story of Kathryn Grey was percolating as the various stakeholders were regulating the wide range of tension points. For example, while David was dealing with mentoring new teachers, Tracey was dealing with personal family issues. Also, although the students first designed a play about an artist in an art revolution, it unexpectedly transformed into a story related to mental health. In addition, senior students were involved in directing younger peers in various scenes, whereas everyone was dealing with the day-to-day rewards, pressures, and challenges of academic studies, work, family, and peer relationships. Collectively, we continuously struggled to balance our school and personal lives, and we were challenged to be flexible and patient with each other.

Over the years of collaborating as leaders, we have refined our ability to work with the tensions that arise from the process. For example, one common tension in the play-creating process was when we realized a tension point where we did not know how to end the Kathryn Grey story. Something did not feel right, but time restrictions forced the group to start building the set. As the volunteers were building this complex brain-portal set, there was an “AHA!” moment, and then the various subgroups began to collectively reimagine the set, characters, and script. As collaborative leaders, we support students and one another to create meaning from a wide range of emerging and unpredictable ideas, and, consequently, to make new connections between them.

While working on the script, the senior students in Tracey's English 12 class were simultaneously studying Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane as a way to explore cocurricular links and themes connected to the students’ play cocreation. Although we did not know it at the time, our exploration of Gaiman's focus on water imagery and the theme of parental abandonment played into the new idea that the set was not Kathryn's brain, but, in fact, a bridge. This led to rapid-fire discoveries that Kathryn's father had not abandoned the family as she first believed but had died in a car accident after going off this bridge into a Northern Ontario Lake. This moment was the tipping point of the entire 10-month process and the point when the story and characters finally came to life. At that point, the construction team modified the set as a bridge, and the writing team got busy rewriting the second half of the play. In short, as collaborative leaders, we were open to the solutions that organically evolved from the tensions of collaborating.

As we become more aware of the tension within the collaborative process, we organically develop ways to address it in a respectful and artful manner. For example, we give lots of time for students to and to learn from mistakes and wrong turns. That is why we spread the process out over 10 months. While we do not work on this project every day or every class, we give lots of space and support for students to fail, get stuck, and explore dead ends. What we have discovered through collaboration is that the power of our work does not stem from getting it right, but importantly, from doing it together. Exploring together, dwelling together, struggling together, and creating together enriches the process as a whole. In other words, the tension is not an unwanted distraction or failure but rather a core component of the complex social interactions and social learning that participants and leaders experience throughout the entire playbuilding process.

Within University: Kathy

Starting as a social worker in the 1980s, I believed that for people to find solutions to some of the wicked problems we face today, transforming perspectives and effective collaborations are essential. Recognizing that knowledge and creativity are powerful drivers for economic, social, cultural, and environmental sustainability (United Nations, 2008), I felt impelled to delve deeper into creative and collaborative action. To this end, I began to develop my skills in arts-based, experiential adult education. I also turned to theatre-based research. Looking deeper into theatre-based research, I discovered more research was needed to discern how practitioners develop an integrated perspective—interconnecting art, science, and education—and claim their identity as artist/researcher/educator. As a result, for my doctoral research (Bishop, 2014), I inquired into how the identity of artist, researcher, and educator is developed, both in myself and in others, through the collective art-making of playbuilding as qualitative research (Norris, 2009). Participants consisted of a cohort of applied theatre graduate students from the University of Victoria. All experienced applied theatre practitioners, we progressed from exploring our individual experiences, using theatre games and techniques such as body sculptures and improvisations (Boal, 2002) and collective experiences through Playback theatre (Fox, 2003) to create a collective play comprised of vignettes based on our common experiences.

One of the key tensions during our process was determining who would take the lead, when, and how. In the role of educator, I saw my role as facilitator and clearly outlined the course as a playbuilding as qualitative research project. Participants received credit for a directed studies course if they chose that option. My dissertation supervisor, who was also the chair of the theatre department, oversaw this piece so as to eliminate any potential power over issues concerning the research. I structured the course curriculum around generating and interpreting data then devising and performing. As the lead researcher, I also set the project up for us to be coparticipant theatre-based artist-researchers. On the first day, we discussed the need at times for someone to take the lead. I was clear that I would take the lead if necessary and highlighted that I enthusiastically believed in the power of the collaborative playbuilding process and that together we could enact all the necessary pieces.

During the generating process, our work flowed easily. I came prepared with activities that I had sequenced for us to go deeper into our exploration. Some of the activities did not work, and my colleagues in generous spirit of learning and growth would make suggestions for future. As we started the interpreting process, this became a bit more complicated. Through our work, we began to see that some of us held opposing beliefs about theatre. We came from a collective understanding that applied theatre was theatre for extratheatrical purposes such as social change, community building, and education (Neelands & Dobson, 2008, p. 185). For me, it was a natural extension that it could also be for research. However, some of my colleagues reacted strongly against this belief. Their position was that theatre was a creative process and should not be limited by expectations about outcomes of conventional research. As an artist-researcher, I reveled in the tension and the joy of bringing together theatre and research (albeit I despaired at times too). Our collaboration focused on exploring preconceived notions we held of each form and the possibilities of bringing them together. As a result, we devised the character of the pregnant grim reaper (who encapsulated our belief in theatre's ability to explore the human condition affectively, metaphorically, and fully embracing life and death while simultaneously conveying our research data). The pregnant grim reaper, our provocateur, questioned the researcher in the play: “Are you killing theatre or giving birth to a new form?” It enabled us to personify “mental models” (Senge, 2006) and underlying assumptions. This was a highlight of the play for me, and it worked well. There were other aspects that did not work so well.

During the devising process when scenes started to emerge, there was much questioning around whether it was true to the data and at the same time entertaining as theatre. Often, my colleagues would turn to me for final say. Seeing myself as a facilitator of the process, I sought to create the space for colleagues to work it out themselves and come to a mutual understanding. As time pressures started to mount, we divided up the scenes to rehearse. At one rehearsal, when I was at another rehearsal, three of the participants met and agreed for one of them to take on the role of directing the others in a scene that she was not part of. A dispute arose around the content of the scene. There was disagreement on whether the scene was exaggerating one aspect of the data to make an interesting story but was no longer true to the essential data. Although I later debriefed this with the participants individually, and we discussed it collectively, I was still in my role as facilitator. I saw this role encompassing researching and collective directing. We moved forward and were able to put together a performance piece that was entertaining and true to our data.

In further exploration, I learned that this participant did not always feel safe through the devising process because she wanted me to step up as a director rather than facilitator. I realized that part of creating safety is attending to the shifting emphasis of different roles at various times in the process. I am now attuned to the ongoing need to shift my role from facilitator (in which I focus on the process of the group) to director (in which I focus on the art form). As a result of this research, I learned that collaborative doesn't mean leaderless. Leadership is about reading the group, navigating what they may want or need, and shifting roles accordingly to lead and learn throughout the playbuilding process.

Across All of Our Experiences

Across all our experiences, we explore how collaborative leaders are working in between the spaces of rules and no rules, structure and freedom, the container and creativity, complex social interaction skills and art-making skills. A significant through line is the importance of structures to foster collaborative leadership through playbuilding. For Will, this involves teaching the concept of gests; for David and Tracey, this is addressed in creating a curriculum based on inclusion, control, and relationships; and for Kathy, this is the awareness of shifting roles within the work. We concur that playbuilding as a learning medium has the power to build new languages, enable listening (really listening) to others, and allow us to navigate tensions and change, to become socially aware, and/or to transform perspectives on ways of being and doing. This is supported by other research. Larson and Brown (2007) found that when compared to the students’ experiences in a regular academic classroom, more emotional learning occurred in the theatre program because it exposed youth to the wider range of complex social interactions. Playbuilding offers what Thompson (2003) spoke of as “garlanding” or “wrapping people in” (p. 201). It creates a space for mutual exploration and creativity. By having structures in place throughout the playbuilding process, adult educators can set the frame, offer prompts, elevate the inquiry, steward tensions, coauthor and provide support and guidance. Thus, playbuilding offers a container that enables people to practice the skills of working, creating, and leading collaboratively. When we surrender to that, we can create a powerful piece of art, whether a play, education program, or leadership endeavor.