Identifying Issues

These last few days have been spent identifying issues and concerns. Some group discordance began about 4 days ago and questions such as, "What is the point of this project?" and "What does it change?" and "Why aren't we getting credit for it?" drifted my way. Which of course are legitimate questions that need to be addressed. We took one of our rehearsals to go back over the project specs that details clearly the objectives and the rights of responsibilities of everyone and the extra rights and responsibilities of Elizabeth and I have as co-directors. Keep in mind, we are receiving course credit for this, and the rest of the group is not.

I think this worked well. But I do not believe this will last. So now, I am trying to figure out how to make this truly a collaborative equal group experience without having anyone feel slighted that Elizabeth and I are co-directors and that ultimately we get credit (In the form of course credit) and they don't.

I believe the best approach so far has been to make time for each of the collaborators and talk to them one on one about the project. I'm not talking about scheduled meetings (although that might work too) but rather random chance meetings that happen in between rehearsals and can be manipulated to serve a pre-thought-out purpose.

Another difficulty has been finding time to meet with Elizabeth without the presence of other collaborators to talk about some issues that need not be the problems of everyone. This is especially difficult since so much time both in and out of rehearsal is spent with other members of the cast on both of our parts. And asking to talk to Elizabeth alone makes it sound like something bad is happening or a secret exists. And one thing I've learned is that secrets tend to destroy groups rather than hold them together. Especially, when people know or think there is a secret that they are not in on but other members of the group are in on.

Now, I'm rambling. So I'll stop. But ultimately some issues need to be addressed and I'm doing that the best I know how. And hope it will be sufficient.