Reflecting our project makes me linking it to the “Cask theory?---every piece of wood of a cask must be in the same high level. It happens to have the same rule with our colleagues. That is, the dancing team, music team and tech team in both sides are all in the same high level. With this united effort, we achieved success though we had come upon some unexpected obstacles.
I don’t want to repeat the advantages which everybody has discussed a lot, but I do find some problems we had and have some suggestions. To begin with, I think we still have communication problems during our collaboration. Despite we have high speed internet connected, it doesn’t mean we can communicate with UCSC side very well. For example, setting up and testing at the beginning of each classes usually take much of class time; If two people in each side want to exchange their opinions via I2, the else might have to stop rehearsal. Sometimes we even have to use cellular phone to contact UCSC people due to the internet setting problems. Also, the sound quality with the I2 connection was not as well as we expected sometimes due to the microphone setting problems. So it’s much difficult for me to catch what the UCSE people saying since I also have language problem. In short, we wouldn’t have the same connection problems came back in every class if we had all facilities set up fixedly.
Since we are doing a collaborative project, interaction should be an important feature. To some extent, however, our project was limited in this feature. Personally, I think we could certainly improve our project with more interaction between performers and audience, music team and dancing team, and performers in each side. First, we know a well-designed audience’s involvement could be the most exciting part of a performance, but it is also the hardest part for the performer. Usually, asking simple questions or asking the audience to imitate something (such as singing, speaking, gesture or whatever) are the common ways of the stage-auditorium interaction. I used to be in a rhythm workshop that presented by Mr. Pleasant. The exciting stage-auditorium interaction really impressed me a lot. I think it is a nice example of audience's interaction. This is the WMV format movie of the workshop which I took with my digital camera.
If you cannot see this movie, please click on this link http://homepages.nyu.edu/~dl1049/movies/Rhythms.WMV to download it. Then you can play it on your computer with Windows Media Player.
As to the interaction between music team and dancing team, I think we did better in the sixth floor studio than in the theatre. The theatre setting problem is: musicians couldn’t see the dancers?performance very clearly especially at the first two performances when music team were not on the stage. I think a simple way to solve this problem is: we can put another monitor (maybe a laptop) in front of the music team so that they can see the dancers?performance there. Musicians could do a better improvisation with a clear visual guide.
In conclusion, this collaboration is a fortune for me. I learn a lot technically and theoretically in this project. I will use this “Cask Theory?in my future collaborative work. Also, I would like to present my graceful acknowledgement to Dr. Gilbert and my colleagues for their sincere help.
