A Few Thoughts About Collaborating — and us cycling around London
By: Ghost
Tags: Collaboration, Contemporary Art, Performance, Activism, Politics

It was summer time last year in London. We hopped on our bikes and cycled for twenty-five minutes, from Hackney to Angel. We were both wearing tank tops, exposing our arms to the warm sun rays. Sweat ran down from our heads, protected by helmets, to our backs, with backpacks on. We arrived at a café, crowded but welcoming. It was our first time there. We were unfamiliar with the place. It was also our first time meeting the French-Vietnamese photographer Nhu Xuan Hua (Xuan). After having a cup of coffee together, we decided to work with one another on her new performance piece with Camden Arts Centre and Tutto Questo Sentire. Two months later, Theatre of Remembrance was presented.

Collaboration has been a core element of Ghost and John’s artistic practice. We are currently preparing for an online study room gathering with Live Art Development Agency about our collaboration in January this year with Angela Wai Nok Hui and the artistic friendship that came out of it. Looking back at our previous collaborations, there were numerous projects where we collaborated with different artists under different circumstances. The collaborations could be put into categories in many ways: we initiated the project or were invited to join, with East Asian artists or with artists from a range of ethnicities, with a stricter framework or a more fluid one. Some were one-off projects, such as the time we performed at the EP launch of an independent pop singer, Vaughan Music. Some were more long-term, where we were able to form strong bonds with the artists and develop deep trust in each other, such as with the lighting designer, Charles Webber.

There were also numerous ways in which artists came together. Some were more intentional and planned: Xuan dug us up from Instagram and invited us for a cup of coffee through direct messages. Some were more organic: we met Angela at an exhibition event in Bow Arts Centre, later learnt that we share similar views on performance as a tool of political expression, then decided to collaborate and produced the piece Skirmishes.

Another example of these collaborations was with Papergang Theatre. The theatre company invited ten Hong Kong and British East Asian artists to collectively produce a show,. It was a production that included performance artists from different media and disciplines: spoken text, acting, movement and music. We were all actively involved in the creative processes, building a performance that would show multiple facets of our views on the a controversial issue. During the rehearsal process, sometimes we dispersed into different corners of the room and worked on our own parts, sometimes we gathered and exchanged ideas. A great deal of time was spent on checking in with each other, listening to each other’s thoughts and opinions on specific issues. It felt like we were constantly finding a common ground: not only for us, artists of different disciplines, to come together and perform, but also for us to reach a point of consensus on this very sensitive and difficult subject that we were handling. This common ground let each one of us have our own voice, yet together we formed another entity greater than the sum of all of us.

Skirmishes by Ghost and John and Angela Wai Nok Hui; Photo: Dominic Farlam

In recent years, the issue of political oppression in Hong Kong has come to international attention and become our main drive to make works that reflect on our perspective and record this time of instability that we are all going through. We focus on experimental artistic practice that emphasises collaboration between art forms and audience experience. Through our artistic processes, we are constantly studying the post-colonial trauma of our city, questioning the cultural identity of being a Hongkonger.

The collaborations with other artists, who brought in their own artistic practices and their own world views, have provided us with opportunities to review our own artistic practices and our own world views from different perspectives. As clichéd as it may be, it is always true that what we practise makes us what we are. The way we are making and presenting art forms our artistic identity and slowly rewires our ways of thinking, then literally transports us to be different parts of a greater ecology. We have been privileged enough to perform at different spaces, from the prestigious Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall at the Royal College of Music in the project The Musical Offering: Back Reimagined, to the Live Art Club at VFD Dalston as ShumGhostJohn. By placing ourselves physically in these different spaces with different groups of artists and audience, we were able to continuously review what kind of message we want to convey and how we are reaching out to the rest of the world.

It would be interesting to compare the experience of when we have invited other artists to collaborate with us, as in Meniscus and when other artists have invited us, as in Theatre of Remembrance. In both cases, we were contributing our abilities as performance artists. However, we were much less engaged in the ideological and structural input when we were the ones invited. Theatre of Remembrance was about a very personal episode in Nhu Xuan Hua’s family and her Vietnamese cultural identity. We were more of a listener, processor and then executor in the whole process. During the collaboration process of Meniscus, we constantly asked ourselves: how can we simultaneously be the speaker and the listener, even though the subject matter of the work is very private and personal to ourselves? The real craft in collaboration then becomes finding a way to reach common ground with our collaborators, both in terms of artistic capacity and resonance in their world views and moral values.

Collaborations are indeed very tiring, sometimes frustrating. Collaboration may not be a core value for many artists. Collaboration requires something extraordinary from an artist, which sometimes becomes too demanding. What we, however, still truly believe in, is the power of willingness to jump on a bike, cycle to the next bar, pub, café, and all the miracles that come after.

This article is originally published on Dance Journal/hk on 12 June 2020.