On Gig Culture, Artistry, and the Lost Art of True Collaboration
- Yamini Kalluri
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
We live in a gigging world now. In many ways, it feels like the artistic equivalent of flings in the romantic world. It is fast, temporary, pleasurable, but shallow. Long term vision that needs patience, trust, curiosity and deep collaboration is often overlooked. Everyone wants the sparkle of the final product, but very few want to walk the long road toward it.
Think about this. So many composers who write for dance have never actually spent time in the presence of dancers or choreographers while composing. And dancers, despite being completely dependent on music, barely spend any meaningful time with musicians. Most of the time, dancers pluck out finished tracks from YouTube or Spotify and dance to them. It is fast consumption, fast results, fast gratification. It is the McDonald’s of music.
Very few dancers listen to hardcore technical music in concerts. Very few can notate or understand textures, tones and cadences. And there are many musicians who are not interested in interdisciplinary collaboration at all. They exist in their own world, often surrounded by other disciplines producing work for them. There is a kind of privilege in that. Music is one of the most consumed and easily understood art forms. Dance is one of the least understood and most underrated. Music is placed on a pedestal. Dance is constantly trying to prove its worth.
We usually wait until the end, when both the dancer and the musician have created their own product, and only then do they meet. But what if the entire process was different.
What if the musician and the dancer walked the journey together.What if they invested in a process instead of a product.What if they invested in a human relationship instead of another gig.What if they surrendered to the art itself with wonder and generosity.
Because when a dancer does not care about the musician’s desires, and when a musician refuses to loosen up and move with a dancer’s pulse, the art will be mediocre. When dancers have great technique, it is almost guaranteed that music will suffer. When the music is top notch, somehow the dance movement collapses. When dancers are validated endlessly for their technique, they stop brushing up their musical skills. When musicians build a huge ego, they become unable to imagine other interpretations of a composition or scale.
Some of the greatest choreographers in history were the ones with impeccable musical taste, along with a deep love for other artistic worlds. They were excited to collaborate with sculptors, painters, set designers, architects, poets, scientists, medical professionals and philosophers. They were open. They were curious. They were generous.
When you lead from that place, you create space for everyone. Your world becomes expansive. Your work becomes expansive. Bringing others into your project does not threaten you. It fuels you. You understand that true spotlight comes from giving, from radical generosity, and from listening.
A lot of these iconic choreographers also had musician friends who believed in them and invested in them in the most profound ways. They would accompany their classes, accompany their performances, compose and arrange with them, live on their campus, and be part of their world. This kind of radical generosity created the conditions for great art. Yes, economic situations today do not make this easy. But this is where we must find faith in our art, in our tradition, in our practice and in our skills. Faith allows us to transcend these problems and move beyond them so we can build greater solutions together.
All of us hit saturation points in these codified traditions. This saturation is not a dead end. It is a kind hint from the universe to expand your world and open doors to other forms that can feed you. When you feel like there is nothing left to learn, it simply means your world has become too small.
But this world is infinitely large.
You must look for new opportunities to learn. You must remain a student for life. This is the only way to reinvent yourself again and again and keep the form alive. The river of wonder needs to keep flowing through you.
In the end, everything comes back to curiosity. When people lose curiosity and wonder, something inside begins to dry out. The more we learn, the more freedom we gain, and the better chance we have to develop a voice that is truly our own.
This is why, to my students, whenever they get sucked into only their work and only their dancing, I tell them very seriously that their art will suffer immensely. If you love Kuchipudi, try to read Telugu poetry, watch old Telugu movies and plays, get lost in the woods, go on dates and try new things, go cry into your pillow by fully feeling your feelings. Just practicing twenty four seven without actually having a life has no point. There is AI doing that, creation without experience, creation that is just data collection.
Do not just experience. Take risks. When you take a risk, the lesson you learn from it is burned into you. It is vehemently etched into your system because there is a sacrifice involved. That sacrifice rewires you completely. When you try new things, you have no choice but to find collaborators and muses on this journey. You find people who shake you awake, who make you rethink, who make you curious again. And that is when the art starts breathing again.
Wonderfully written. Being human always comes first, and the experience that brings is what makes art possible! There's a great demand for spaces where interdisciplinary artists can come together and create freely. You're right in that we can often become siloed into our chosen craft. Even within music, there are some musicians that dedicate themselves solely to playing the music of the past. This has always seemed sad to me. Our senses overlap and compound, sight is enhanced by sound and texture, etc. It's only reasonable that the collaboration of different practices would result in the most impactful of experiences.