Collaboration as 'enablement'

As mentioned previously, 2009 is going to be my 'year of playing nicely with others'. I will be staging at least three different theatre / comedy shows and I've already started meeting with potential collaborators. And already there's frustration: meetings postponed at short notice, late starts and no-shows.

It's vital that ground rules are lain down early where 'creative' projects are concerned, especially where the relationship is supposed to be a collaboration of equals. Otherwise a strange version of 'enabling' (in the addiction therapy sense) can take hold.

I've been a comedy performer of sorts for 20 years. In that time I've had any number of really talented writing and performing partners. Many of them frankly more talented than me. Yet it's rare that they're as organised as I am and therein lies the rub. The dynamic becomes one where I'm looking after more and more of the practical aspects of the project and my partner's role is just to turn up with the funny.

This damages me because I slip into a quasi-stage manager / producer role. The relationship becomes an asymmetric one where I'm the boring den mother controlling the unruly creative children or else I'm the corporate greedhead with some as yet unseen angle to exploit the honest but naive performers.

In other words, I have a history of 'enabling' other performers' inability to get their shit together such that it affects my ability to look after my own creative career. I end up as the bad guy and that's just no fun.

There is an obvious caveat: I am writing about collaborations that start out as 'symmetrical' then mutate. There are any number of highly successful teams where different people take different roles, which is fine as long as those roles are defined clearly and preferably in advance.