Sweet F.A.

The collaborative practice-as-research project Sweet FA took place at the University of Portsmouth during 2009. This would result in a large-scale production of a new musical at the New Theatre Royal in Portsmouth during September of 2009. The project brought together the distinct skills of the Creative Arts team, and in particular the use of music, theatre, video and computer animation. Among the benefits gained from the collaborative experience were conceptual insights into how different ‘voices’ ‘speak’ with one another. In this respect, we can see ‘voice’ to reflect not only the different collaborators involved in the project—students, professionals and researchers of different disciplines and backgrounds; but also the different media involved—music, theatre, video, computer animation, choreography, etc. Inherent within this process—as with much collaborative work—are ethical notions of control, trust, experience and decision-making. Collaborating with both students and working professionals magnified all of these issues in both enabling and obstructing ways. The process revealed dynamics of collaboration which were unfamiliar, at times awkward, and very often political; factors of ego, expectation, peer pressure, confidence, anxiety and desire all seeped into the solution (the liquid process of the project), and it is in reflecting on these elements that our understanding of collaborative practice has been able to develop. Subsequent reports of the project and the insights gained have been presented in conference papers at ‘Song, Stage and Screen V’ (University of Winchester, 2010) and Performance Studies International 18 (University of Leeds, 2012). The project has contributed to the developing understanding of practice as research at the University of Portsmouth, and of its dissemination, both in the 2011 international symposium ‘Articulating Practice’ and in publications such as Symonds, Dominic (forthcoming), ‘Powerful spirit: notes on some practice as research and the uses and endurance of opera’, in Symonds, D. and P. Karantonis (forthcoming) The Legacy of Opera, Amsterdam: Rodopi Press.