Interdisciplinary Collaboration

My thinking on the subject of interdisciplinary collaboration began in high school in my IB Art class. A significant portion of the course work was in maintaining our sketchbooks or “Investigative Workbooks” as the IB program called them. The book was for more than just sketches, it was also a place for us to record research on other artists and sources of inspiration. We were encouraged to make connections between our research and our work. I quickly discovered that I was very good at making those connections and explaining them, not only did I connect my work to other artist's work, but also to things we were studying in other classes, things I saw on television, and particularly between visual art and my after school activities in theatre.

In college, that ability to grasp the connections between seemingly disparate elements has served me well both within my classes and in my outside projects. But through those experiences I have realized it is more important than the ability to make connections, it is about interdisciplinary cooperation, both within my own experiences and when working with a group of people. No matter what the topic, different disciplines provide different perspectives, different ways of thinking, and different possible solutions to problems.

Theatre and Media Arts are both artistic mediums that frequently pursue projects too large for any one person to complete on their own. Instead, these fields bring together teams of artists who are each highly specialized in a specific area, be that lighting, sound, acting, cinematography, directing, screenwriting, or stage managing. Those artists work together, each contributing their own specific skill set and point of view, to create a final work that is far larger, more complex, and more impactful than anything any one of them could have created by themselves. Every one of the plays I have been involved with while working for the Theatre Department here at USC has had a different combination of people to make up the creative team resulting in a completely different look and feel to every play (see pictures below).

Beyond that, theatre productions are influenced by so many subjects outside of the theatre world, most commonly history, literature, music, and visual art, but it can be anything, chemistry, biology, anthropology, aeroscience, politics, truly anything at all can provide subject matter or inspiration for a play. One simple example is provided by my concept for Anton Chekov's The Cherry Orchard which I wrote for my Directing class. In this take on the classic Russian play, I have moved the setting from an estate in Russia in 1904 to a Southern plantation in 1875. This move is made possible by an equal knowledge of history and play analysis in order to recognize the similarities between the two places and make that jump.

Finally, in my Freelancing class this semester we spent some time discussing the interdisciplinary nature of creativity. We read an article, completed a reading response assignment on it, and discussed scientific research suggesting that creativity results from the interaction of different ideas from different disciplines, be that people with different specialties working in a group or the result of a single artist with wide ranging interests. This was a revealing discussion for me because it articulated what I had already experienced both within and outside of the classroom. I've found that my own most creative ideas come at times when I've found ways to apply knowledge I have from multiple disciplines to a problem. For example, I may be working on a visual art project, but when I can draw on my theatre and movie making experience, and my love of history and anthropology, and then combine that with an artistic technique such as sculpture or printmaking, the result is much more interesting than if I were to confine myself only to subject that are typical in visual art. I've also found that when working on a group project, the group is most successful when everyone brings a different perspective to the problem. That's when the group produces something no one would have ever thought of by themselves.

Through my experiences in college, I have learned the importance of collaboration and by studying the nature of creativity I have discovered that it's not enough just to work with other people. The best results come from interdisciplinary collaboration, situations where people and ideas from different backgrounds mesh to result in a truly creative solution. This is true not only in the arts, but in scientific and technological pursuits as well. When multiple perspectives meet, the result is something no one would have ever expected.