Creative Collaboration from Cirque du Soleil
Written by Katherine Rountree
Photo by Katherine Rountree
Last night, a packed Arnold Hall of students and professors welcomed Welby Altidor, the creative director at Cirque du Soleil. In addition to working with many of their shows, Altidor is the director of creation for Michael Jackson ONE playing at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.
Altidor spoke with students on how he and his team creatively collaborate and started off the lecture with the description of 2015 being the year of light by the United Nations. For Altidor, this brought up the question of, “What does it mean to live in darkness?” He said that artists, designers and individuals are beyond the point where we can create and foster this “creative genius” on our own and that creative collaboration is how to share your light.
Though Altidor is the first to admit “collaboration is a struggle,” it is necessary for us as creative people to overcome that. The remainder of the presentation focused on how Altidor does that in his work at Cirque du Soleil and Michael Jackson ONE. Some suggestions are things we have heard before such as facilitating communication and trying to work outside the box. However, the interesting perspectives of Cirque also helped Altidor to create new ideas on his collaboration.
One example of this came from the development of Michael Jackson ONE and paying homage to Michael without copying him. After receiving feedback from Cirque du Soleil executives over the performance, he realized they had lost some of its inspiration and had to go back to reinvent it. Altidor also suggested meeting your “dumb question quota” for the day as often things that would have not been said because they were considered bad ideas transformed with collaboration into some of the best.
Following Altidor’s talk, he opened up the floor for questions from students. He took that time to talk more about how to break into and work in his industry as well as some of the creative processes and ideas behind his shows. Altidor left students with a mission to try and incorporate some of those ideas into their daily life as “we have an infinite power to influence.”
