Collaboration

I write a list of all the different collaborations I am involved with at present, but there are too many words...about work, family, professional practice, health care, community...I press delete and start again.

In my working life I have worked on many, many collaborative projects in my creative arts practice, community arts practice and creative arts therapy practice.

I have found collaboration to be: challenging, cumbersome, frustrating, hard to show up, hard to time manage.

It's a dance navigating and negotiating different priorities and expectations.

It can also be rich, diverse, empowering and very useful in getting a job done, cultivating different ideas, sharing workloads, getting different perspectives and drawing upon a variety of skills.

Extra resources, extra skills, extra knowledge, inter-relational, dialogue, problem-solving.

To share interests, responsibilities, possibilities, to reflect, mirror, support, create togetherness.

For this prompt I decide to explore the theme at home with my daughter, as an extension of what I did with her for the last prompt.

After the shared experience of art making I reflect:

Collaboration is a dance.

I yield, I push.

I retreat, I allow,

I assert, I give in and let go.

I am aware that I have separate values & needs in this collaboration.

In the space between

the process leads our dance.

The ebb & flow of energy,

vulnerability, excitement & curiosity.

 Trust in the self & other.

I play with the images we created together exploring the different tensions and celebrations of the experience of collaboration.