Blood and Bones Part 7: Collaboration and Negotiation

“How many friends do you have?” barked Skidmore down the telephone one evening.  Skidmore is a young chap I run into from time to time in bars and cafes. He wears tight trousers and, I regret to say, his baseball cap back to front. I’m not sure how many friends Skidmore has but he always seems to be hanging out with a different group every time I meet him. 

I replied that, for me, at the last count it was well over 600.  Thank you very much.

“I don’t mean Facebook Friends, I mean actual, flesh and blood face-to-face friends. Playwrights! That’s the trouble with you old fogeys.  You think the world revolves around Facebook.  If I didn’t phone you from time to time you wouldn’t have any friends at all. You need to get out more.”

I declined Skidmore’s invitation to accompany him to a lap-dance club and, no doubt, to pick up the tab.  I’m too old for all that now but I had a surreptitious glance through my contacts list to see how many people I can actually call face to face friends.  And that reminded me of a piece of research by a professor Allen who discovered that the more often people meet each other face to face, the more likely they are to phone each other.  He came up with a graph which became known as the Allen Curve demonstrating that the closer we are to our peers physically the more we will share communication and information with them.

We do not keep separate sets of people, some of which we communicate in one medium and some by another. The more often we see someone face-to-face, the more likely it is that we will telephone the person or communicate in some other medium."

And when I considered Skidmore’s original broadside I suppose the answer might better be, “How many friends do you think I need?

 In his book that asks that very question (“How Many Friends Does One Person Need?”) Professor Robin Dunbar puts the number of others that we can comfortably interact with at somewhere between 100 and 250, probably about 150.  This is the size of the tribe or working group.   And surprisingly enough if I count family and friends and theatre contacts that’s approximately the number of folk I do keep up with.    And Skidmore himself. So, for once I fit into the “normal” category and, if he hadn’t run off to do whatever it was he wanted to do with tonight’s gang I should have phoned Skidmore back and told him.

But the kind of friends I have and the places I go to socialise are changing.

And I do have a nagging feeling that there is something in what Skidmore says. Maybe, Margaret Thatcher was right after all. “There is no such thing as society.” Or maybe it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Either way, for the health of us all we need to audit our social capital.  

The old places of social interaction are becoming empty and closing down, churches, pubs, working men’s clubs but many other social venues are taking their places, coffee bars, night clubs.  Exactly the sort of places where Skidmore spends his time and his (or other people’s) money.

However, we do seem to be losing out in the rough and tumble of face to face discourse and reasoned argument.  Real conversation.  And if we follow the Allen Curve the truth still remains that we are social beings and we need face to face physical contact to function effectively as human beings. Perhaps I should have accepted Skidmore’s invitation after all and got into some sort of dialectic with the lap dancers.  Perhaps not. Nevertheless, this whole area is part of the role that live theatre has given away too easily and needs to regain.  Live theatre can be a forum for debate and argument as well as providing the ritual experiences that we all crave and, for many, has been lost with the disappearance of the religious service or political rally.

Theatre is where we can go to engage with real human beings doing real human things and thinking real human thoughts.  It is a human scale activity engaged in by groups of people for people about people.

Social interaction is a neat strategy for survival and it begins with the birth of a baby which is so utterly helpless that it requires complete devotion from its parents

Biologists have suggested that this initial, nurturing, grooming phase of our lives where we are so utterly dependent on others is the origin of our capacity for language. The language that incorporates touch, smell, sound as well as words.

In a migrating herd of buffalo or antelope we can see social groupings numbering in the thousands.  This is a strategy for protection from predators where the sick or wounded may be safe amongst the crowd And hunting is necessarily a social behaviour for homo sapiens because the human frame is so much weaker and slower than its prey. What we couldn't do with individual physical strength alone, we needed to do together. The result being the capacity to develop language and abstract thought. One human being has not the time in its life to master all the skills necessary for an urban lifestyle; we depend on a complex web of bus drivers, bricklayers, electricians, computer engineers, designers, playwrights and so on and so on to enable us to live.  Like it or not we are part of a huge web of interactions and trades in ideas and things. So hunted or hunting, social dependence and working together, seems to be the way to go. 

In an article in New Scientist, Dan Jones reasons that our main driving force is that of argument.  He quotes the work of Mercier and Sperber who put forward the idea that our brains are designed to argue a point of view, right or wrong.  The thing being that, through argument within a group we arrive at a proper consensus for action.

So that forum for discourse and debate is an essential part of our humanity. And that leads us to a central mechanism of human interaction, that of negotiation and persuasion. 

Any new parent will tell you that babies learn the art of negotiation from a very early age. They enter a world in which relationships and networks are already formed.  Now, somehow, they have to worm their way into this complex web and assert their own place within it. They have to learn how to get their own way, to be fed when hungry or changed when uncomfortable. 

In short we are thinking and aware, we are individuals.  Our DNA tells us that But, at the same time, we can only operate as individuals within a social framework.  We may see that social scaffolding as family, tribe, nation or species but it always draws us from individual action to something more complex, considered, strategic.  We need to work together to create ends that are far bigger than one single idea.  Imagination has to be cranked up by our interactions.  We argue and negotiate. We haggle and reason and strike bargains.  And eventually it all turns into aspirations and ambitions.  Strategic planning comes as the result of shared specialised knowledge and above all concerted action is the result of negotiations.   All that manifested in and achieved by a rich metaphor laden language of debate, argument and exchange of ideas.  For a playwright, this awareness is a treasure trove that can be plundered in the creation and following of credible, sympathetic characters.

Theatre itself is an anarchic, outlaw, dirty faced and, in its truest sense, vulgar art-form.  It belongs to no one artist because it is not the work of one person. 

It is the coming together of actors, designers, makers of all descriptions, clever technicians, and above all, an audience.  Theatre is unique in its need for this great collaboration and for its essential ephemerality.  

Here is what composer Roderick Skeaping says about the collaborative effort that goes into music making within his group Le Collectif International des Improvisateurs:

Within this performance genre it is considered courteous to show acknowledgement of the ideas of other performers – at the very least to listen to them, not that one is obliged to take an interest. If they do interest you, it can lead to better outcomes if you support the idea to magnify its impact and make it more meaningful and powerful. Ownership or authorship is not an issue here – it’s what everyone does with the idea that generates an exciting occurrence or not. If you are trying to inject an idea of your own into a texture that doesn’t already contain it, don’t be surprised or upset to have it rejected.

  A group of individuals working together on a project can achieve something greater than the sum of the individual contributions.  But that depends utterly on equality and mutual respect within that process.  I love the cut and thrust of the rehearsal room and the lurching towards an understanding of the meaning or working of the play. I respect the skills of the actors and director but, as a writer, I expect them to respect my work accordingly.  I claim the right to maintain the artistic integrity of the piece, I have spent at least six months creating these characters and their interactions, and I have mapped out the emotional journey that I want the audience to take. I have chosen exactly the order and structure of the story and the interactions that will demonstrate.  For me, the crucial debate is between the playwright and his or her audience. That of the rehearsal room is a stage in this process.

Audiences need a strong authorial voice to provide direction, shape, purpose and, above all, tone.  Without them they have deserted theatre to find that sort of narrative in film, television or in computer games.

The audience and the actors and other members of the playmaking team play a game together.  They collaborate on suspension of disbelief, imagination and use of conventions to produce a social interaction that is understandable and satisfying to all in the room.