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Collaboration fails, mostly. One might even argue that it must. Yet, paradoxically, there is apparent consent that it constitutes the ideal form of art labour, whereby shared visions, preferably millennial ones, are fostered by empowered participants. The term has become so overused as part of a rhetoric that divides the arts into the wholesome and pathological that it is, by now, a sort of art-theoretical equivalent of Barney-speak.

But what is everyone consenting to, actually? Does the term refer to an aesthetic imperative, to a political stance, or just to a technique? In practice, collaboration creates complications that many artists would probably avoid, if it weren't for the fact that the system of arts funding we enjoy paradoxically valorizes collaboration while quantifying art by deliverables and completion dates. This means that time is the scarcest resource, efficiency paramount, and the final product had better match the project description. True, messy, laborious collaboration, however is the most inefficient way to get things done and is apt to produce unpredictable results.

Why then the apparent desirability? In the corporate world, the assumption is that collaboration produces self-motivating minions by promoting a kind of work ethic whereby consent replaces compliance. The cultural industry is not far behind. Theatre is almost by definition hierarchical, yet many contributing artists consent to a form of bigotry whereby the grant application promises grand collaborative schemes which, in the workaday, shrivel to mean that they hand co-creative work over to be shaped by a someone else, and that the process of discovery is hacked off to fit the timeline. Art, however, is in the culling, not in the invention. When contributing artists do make the mistake of taking the idea of collaboration at face value, their complaints are regularly met with confusion, and with the observation that collaborating cannot be the same as collective decision-making. Disappointing as this may be, it is also reveals the fundamental misunderstanding which I think is responsible for theatre's peculiar insistence on collaboration in the face of its persistent failure.

The misunderstanding stems, I think, from confusion between the ideology of collectivity and the practice of collaboration. Political theatre, in particular, embraced the collective as a symbol of liberated consciousness. It attempted to find non-hierarchical working methods which reflected a political agenda that became entrenched in its performance ethos, if not practice. But collectivity, based on a Marxist notion of class struggle, aimed to change the distribution of power, not the application of it. Collaboration, on the other hand, may work in the service of coIlective creation as a process, but it is not concerned with renegotiating who has final say. To the apparent confusion of people who think of theatre in terms of apportioning power, the medium of collaboration is not compromise, but sustained, productive conflict.

Conflict, to be successful, requires rules. Without agreement to what these rules should be, nor anyone to teach them, the common assumption seems to be that they are imposed by an act of self-control, akin to polite behaviour. But collaboration, unlike the Victorian ideal which strives to hide the power struggle under a veneer of willed serenity, is more akin to Lenin's idea of constant revolution; its success is actually dependent on maintaining conflict. As a process of discovery, it leads to the creation of work that cannot be arrived at by hierarchical means, and that extinguishes the individual contributions. What we do not have is a clear idea of what we actually mean by collaboration. Does it describe an aesthetic of co-creation, is it a phrase to jolt the hirelings from their gig-mentality, or is it just part of the baffle gab necessary to get at the bottom of Sheila Copps' coffers? It seems to be all of these things sometimes, and rarely, mysteriously, much more than that.