collective creation

a little bit of context…

i thought i would use this space to begin gathering my thoughts and experiences about an experiment i would call collective creation.

i have been collaborating on devised performance for four decades. my curiosity about collectives began during my university years (1985–1990), when a group of rutgers university dance students came together to produce our first show under the name hub-ub. we were young, ambitious, and deeply influenced by an earlier generation of artists who had been making work in lofts and storefronts in soho in the 1960s.

many of those artists were our teachers. their experiments with non-hierarchical structures and their questioning of the relationship between audience and performer left a lasting imprint on us. artists like simone forti, yvonne rainer, steve paxton, phillip corner, and meredith monk, to name only a few. they modeled a way of working that felt porous, democratic, and alive.

hub-ub created half a dozen shows together, including a lunchtime performance at the american dance festival at duke university in 1987. we were inventing as we went — figuring out how to share authorship, how to disagree, how to compose collectively without a single guiding voice. eventually, we graduated and the collective naturally dissolved. like many collectives, hub-ub was bound to a moment in time.

a funny anecdote: recently, while working a shift at the park slope food coop in brooklyn, i overheard someone talking about jazz and the program at mason gross school of the arts in new brunswick. i mentioned that i teach there now and had been an undergraduate dance student in the 1980s. he asked if i remembered a group called hub-ub.

i’m not exaggerating — my jaw dropped.

it turns out he had been a member of the whole earth ensemble, a jazz group that occasionally collaborated with us. a small world, but also a reminder: collective creation generates networks that echo across decades.

i carried these ideas with me when i moved to vancouver in 1990 to attend simon fraser university. to my surprise, these collective histories were not unique to new york. vancouver had its own experimental lineage from the 1960s. many of my professors had worked at edam with peter bingham. martin bartlett — experimental composer and founder of edam — was heading the interdisciplinary graduate program at sfu.

a year later, i was collaborating with jud martell and sarah whitford of radix theatre, slipping comfortably into a devising process rooted in collective creation. after several smaller projects, we created our first large-scale work, instruments of torture, funded by an exploration grant from the canada council for the arts. around $10,000 — our first grant. after years of working for free, being paid felt almost extravagant.

i remember a meeting with an arts officer at the city of vancouver. he asked why our company didn’t have an artistic director. we looked at one another, slightly confused. i said, “it’s because we all had overbearing fathers.” everyone laughed — including the officer. after an awkward pause, he dropped the question. we did not receive the funding.

looking back, that moment says a lot. collective creation is not only an aesthetic choice; it is a structural one. it resists hierarchy. it complicates funding models. it challenges institutional expectations.

my own journey eventually took me to montreal for three years, where lucy simic met sabrina reeves and technically started bluemouth. but the 25-year experiment that became bluemouth truly began when lucy, sabrina, and i moved to toronto and began collaborating with sound designer richard windeyer.

that origin story — and the particular mechanics of how bluemouth evolved its collective process — will be the subject of the next post.

this series will trace a few recurring questions:

what does it actually mean to create collectively?
how does authorship function without a singular voice?
how do collectives survive — or fail?
and what kinds of art are only possible through this kind of shared experiment?

to be continued.