Getting together: Collaboration across the arts
Why collaborate?
The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum points out the potential for collaborative projects and gives some examples of ways in which the separate arts disciplines can operate together. Bringing the arts infrastructure together encourages teachers and students to understand and practice interrelationships across all of the arts.
This website focuses on the 'performing' arts (dance, drama, and music), but there is also potential for collaboration with the visual arts and maybe film, writing, technology, and media.
Collaboration and sharing can solve practical problems – where resources are limited, you can justify more spaces or specialist facilities by joining forces. For example, by collaborating you could justify:
- a small theatre in addition to the school's main auditorium
- more lighting or sound equipment
- a shared recording studio
- an ICT suite for the arts
- a series of breakout rooms for arts classes
- a general study classroom for arts classes, in addition to the specialist teaching spaces.
Specialist arts teachers can feel isolated in a school, especially where there is only one specialist in each discipline. Shared facilities can solve this problem and encourage collaboration, innovation, and creativity.
Many dance, drama and music teachers like to share a teacher workroom and resource area. This could justify dedicated computing, copying, and video equipment for the arts programme.
Location of facilities
Location of facilities will always be a crucial factor in encouraging collaboration or making it close to impossible. Think carefully about where arts blocks are located on the school grounds. It might be necessary to balance immediate gains against the long-term potential for greater sharing and integration.
For example, if the music block is on one side of the school site and the drama and dance suite on the other side, collaboration – even in terms of sharing sound equipment or computers – may be impractical. If they are across a courtyard from each other, collaboration will be simple and even inevitable.
Schools that have undertaken large-scale redevelopment have addressed this issue. Many have opted not to share much in the way of equipment or facilities, but have clustered dance, drama and music around a central auditorium.
Sharing rooms and equipment
Broadly speaking, especially where whole performing arts suites are not an option, the dance, drama, and music departments often consider sharing:
- a large teaching, rehearsal, and performance space with specific qualities, such as excellent acoustics, total blackout, movable seating, excellent lighting, or projection facilities
- information and computing technology and facilities, for which the costs of updating and expertise make it difficult for small teaching departments to keep up
- a standard classroom with desks and chairs, where classes can concentrate on research, reading, and writing away from their performance-oriented classrooms
- a dedicated rehearsal room, perhaps where there is a room suitable for large groups that can be kept free, uncluttered, and ready to use.
In many schools, the different arts departments also share
- small performance spaces, especially acoustically superior spaces
- small breakout rooms – for individual practice, rehearsals, and group work
- sound and/or video recording and editing studios
- computer rooms with Internet access
- viewing and listening spaces (for music and videos)
- libraries for students (especially audiovisual)
- some storage spaces for shared equipment, such as staging, screens, lights, and curtains
- outside performance/rehearsal spaces (for example, an adjoining courtyard)
- teacher workrooms and resources
- sound equipment, especially mobile recording and mixing gear
- video equipment, especially mobile cameras and editing gear
- facilities for after-hours use, such as kitchen, toilets, foyer areas.