Connected and Unstoppable: Portraits in Collaboration

If you’re interested in the secret of success for Bennington alumni and faculty, look no further than collaboration. Alumni and faculty, especially in the performing arts, are often integral to each other’s work. In fact, a remarkable thirty percent of alumni respondents to a recent survey had collaborated with another Bennington alum in their careers. We spoke with a few collaborative teams to uncover the diverse ways they have worked together and what their collaborations have meant to them. 

Ready for Anything

When filmmaker Jason Eksuzian ’00 of Los Angeles saw the availability of a production grant to make a 5-minute film about cliques and echo chambers, it was an opportunity to bring a long-held daydream to life.

“I had this weird idea of a world that was inhabited by people with houseplants for heads. That’s just been rattling around in [my head], which maybe says more about me than I’d like,” Eksuzian said with a laugh.

The grant was a part of an annual mental health awareness campaign from Voices with Impact, which is funded through Art with Impact with help from the National Endowment for the Arts and others. The film is called Plant People. “It is very much a story about loneliness,” he said. It premiered at the Voices With Impact Film Festival in San Francisco on June 6.

Eksuzian’s most frequent collaborator is his wife and partner Kincaid Walker, who produced the piece and played the lead role. When it came to making the plant heads and creating the sounds for the film, Eksuzian turned to trusted Bennington College collaborators faculty member Sue Rees and musician Alex Vittum ’00 of Seattle.

Eksuzian likes working with Bennington people because he feels he already has a head start. He said, “If I went up to many other collaborators and explained the concept—a story about a woman who works in a grocery store, and the rest of the people who live in that world have houseplants for heads— most people would be like, ‘Um, can you just run that back? What are you talking about?’” Bennington people, Eksuzian said, “are like, ‘Great. How can I help?’”

Eksuzian and Vittum knew each other well as students, when Eksuzian was often in the audience of Vittum’s music performances. Eksuzian reached out to Vittum after discovering one of his recent albums. “When I first started listening to the compositions Alex had, it felt like it was written exactly for this [project],” said Eksuzian. Eksuzian asked for some small adjustments to bring the music in line with the images and sound design for the plants themselves. Vittum said, “The cornerstone of the collaboration is that conversation about trying to come up with a conceptual solution that is elegant, meaningful, authentic… and I feel like that was really what Jason and I were trying to do: get to the real details of sonifying these moments.”

Next were the plant heads. “The plant heads are crucial. If those aren’t convincing or they look weird, the whole thing’s dead,” said Eksuzian. “I was such an admirer of Sue’s work when I was at Bennington and a student of hers. She’s got the brilliant mind to create functional and beautiful things. I knew she could do it.” Rees said, “I’m always curious about collaborating with people because it pushes you out of your comfort zone, and it also leads you in different ways or directions or parts of what you know. Plus, sometimes, it’s a really great challenge.”

“Bennington offers such a focused education,” said Eksuzian. “Even though we’re all very different and diverse, there is this Bennington mindset and a way of locking in. We understand each other.”

Bringing Work Out

Dancer and dance faculty member Levi Gonzalez and collaborator Kayvon Pourazar, who is a faculty member at Movement Research and has served as visiting faculty at Bennington, have been working on a project called Further (working title). “I’ve always been curious about fairy tales as a weird transgressive narrative where people transform and step outside of their fixed identity or sense of self.”

Like much of his other work, Further combines Gonzalez’s interests in queerness, place, improvisation, and direct conversation with the audience. “I am very invested in thinking about the audience’s multisensory experience and making them aware that they have a body and that they are using their body to receive the work.”

Gonzalez’s piece relies on collaboration with former Bennington music faculty member Senem Pirler and Bennington alumni, who have been involved in bringing it to audiences. He received a residency, Another Audience at Black Hole Hollow Farm in South Arlington, Vermont, which is owned by Nicole Daunic ’03, who studied dance at Bennington, had taught at Bennington, and will be a guest faculty member in dance with Mina Nishimura in Spring 2025. “The idea of the residency at Black Hole Hollow is to let the natural landscape inform the work that we’re making,” said Gonzalez. “At Black Hole Hollow, we allowed some of the sounds from the outside world to weave into the practice, and we got to an interesting place with the layers of sound and the complexity of the improvisational practice.” He and collaborators presented the piece as a work in progress in June.

The premier of the finished piece at another Bennington-related venue, The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, New York, is set for November. The Chocolate Factory was founded by artist Brian Rogers ’95 and Sheila Lewandowski ’97, who remain the artistic director and executive director, respectively, and who presented Gonzalez’s work for the first time in 2014, before he became a Bennington faculty member. “I love working with Levi,” said Rogers. “I think he’s one of the most interesting and relevant experimental dance makers working today.”

The Chocolate Factory is unique, Gonzalez said, because of the level of support they offer artists. “Brian’s an artist, and that makes it particularly great,” said Gonzalez. “They give so much. Artists get three weeks in a space, a three-camera shoot, insurance, hourly pay for collaborators. None of that is normal.”

“I bring my own wants and wishes and needs as an artist to the conversation around how to support the work of other artists,” said Rogers. “The largest life lesson I got from attending Bennington was the sense of possibility: that one could make a life in the arts and in a quirky and independent way. I’m not sure it would ever have occurred to me to start a nonprofit performing arts organization had it not been for the Bennington experience.”

The Connection Continues

Conversations between renowned costume designer and Rutgers professor Valerie Marcus Ramshur ’89 and internationally exhibited gender-queer fiber artist and activist Michael Sylvan Robinson ’89 are filled with memories. They met when they were both students in the theater discipline at Bennington. Among their first collaborations was a production of The House of Bernarda Alba that Robinson directed while at Bennington.

Later, in the nineties, when they both lived in New York, Ramshur helped Robinson prepare for drag shows. “Valerie was my number one cheerleader and supporter. We would work together on these nine-foot wigs and theatrical drag outfits together,” they said. “She would send me out the door after having had a great afternoon combining our creative talents.”

In the summer of 2021, Robinson reached out in a panic. They had just 8 weeks to fulfill a commission for famed theater producer Jordan Roth’s Met Gala outfit, and they needed a team of discrete and highly skilled people they could work with in their COVID-era, pre-vaccination studio. Ramshur delivered. Years later, Robinson still collaborates with the people Ramshur sent their way.

“Collaboration can take many forms, and that’s one of the things Bennington instilled in us,” Ramshur observed. She notes the competitive nature of the arts and emphasizes that collaboration is a term often used and just as often misunderstood. “What is required is a community agreement. Clarification is needed about the nature of the collaboration. It’s not about ego but about exploration, communication, and trust.” Ramshur added, “When I look at Sylvan’s work, it speaks to me in a profound way.”

“Friends since our first years at Bennington together, I’ve seen Valerie as a lifelong-learner,” Robinson said. “She redefined her work in the world from dancer to actor, actor to costume designer and professor. With each new chapter, she’s brought a tenacity and willingness to develop her creative practice and incorporate the lessons of the past in new directions.”

Both Ramshur and Robinson have returned to Bennington in recent years. Ramshur has visited as a guest speaker, while Robinson has come back as a visiting faculty member, hosting Field Work Term students for the past two years. “I was incredibly impressed by the students I worked with last year,” said Robinson. “They shared that everything I loved about my time at Bennington remains true for them and that Bennington has positively influenced their approach to generational challenges.” They continued, “Every year, I am determined to do my part to ensure that Bennington continues to thrive in the future. I know that our generation of alumni sometimes has strong opinions, and we do too. But that has not gotten in the way of us being able to commit to this idea that Bennington is just as important—if not more so—now as it was for us in the past.”