Creating Together: Gray Colloquium Highlights Collaboration Across the Arts
April 13, 2026
St. Mark’s School concluded its year of Gray Colloquia with a dynamic panel exploring a theme central to all creative work: collaboration. Bringing together artists from theater, music, and philosophy, the event invited students and faculty to consider how cooperation shapes the artistic process across disciplines.
The panel featured three distinguished guests with diverse perspectives. Peter Coy, a member of the Class of 1965, returned to St. Mark’s as a playwright, director, actor, and expert in clowning and commedia dell’arte. With more than 60 plays directed and 40 written, Coy emphasized the inherently collective nature of theater, noting that “nothing in theater happens alone, it’s always built in relationship with others.”
Joining him was Grace Darko, a jazz musician from the Class of 2018. Drawing on her Bronx upbringing and Ghanaian and Togolese heritage, Darko described music as both a form of storytelling and a form of memory. “Music is a kind of mnemonic,” she explained, “it holds stories, histories, and emotions that we carry together.” For Darko, collaboration extends beyond performance; it becomes a shared act of cultural expression.
The third panelist, Christopher Phillips, brought a philosophical lens to the conversation. As the founder of Socrates Café, Phillips has dedicated his career to fostering dialogue among people from all walks of life. He underscored the value of collective inquiry, explaining that “philosophy isn’t about having the answer, it’s about thinking together.”
The discussion opened with a question that invited both imagination and reflection: if given the chance, which artist—living or dead—would each panelist choose to collaborate with? Coy pointed to groundbreaking playwrights such as Frank Wedekind, Georg Büchner, and William Shakespeare, highlighting his admiration for artists who challenged conventions and expanded the boundaries of their craft.
Throughout the conversation, a common thread emerged: collaboration is not confined to a single moment or medium. It extends across time, as artists engage with the works of those who came before them, and across disciplines, as different forms of expression intersect and inform one another. As Phillips noted during the discussion, “real dialogue changes how we think, it’s a shared process, not an individual one.”
In addition to the panel, Phillips hosted a Socrates Café session, inviting participants into an interactive philosophical dialogue, while Coy led a dinner discussion focused on theater and the art of clowning, and Grace Darko returned to the stage the following day, April 12, as the guest performer at the Cutler Jazz Festival. These experiences extended the colloquium beyond the stage, offering students opportunities to actively engage with the ideas presented.
As the final Gray Colloquium of the year, the event served as both a culmination and a celebration of artistic connection, reminding the St. Mark’s community that creativity thrives not in isolation, but in the collective.