The Creativity Room

I held the first session for Creative Transformation Process at The Muse, a large space in an old convent which is now a music centre. This was cool because drums, bells and all sorts of instruments were on offer to play with. We were 6 people in total, 5 women and 1 man. This session was 2 hours long, allowing for a good introduction to the whole process. Hereafter, I plan 1.5 hour sessions.

We started by drawing with two hands at once. Then did some physical work, moving parts of the body in isolation, followed by lying down for a journey of observation and awareness through the body. Then everyone kept their eyes closed and drew their body, as it felt to them, without looking.

After this, we had 45 minutes of free play. I was honestly not prepared to have so much fun (I suppose because I had been focused on facilitating). It was so freeing to have no rules. For me, this was particularly interesting in terms of interaction and collaboration. I am so used to being aware of other people’s offers and the need to function as a group. It was extremely freeing to choose not to join in with someone else’s activity. I could just make fun on my own, in a corner, or interact in a surprising or very subtle way with another person, with a deeper awareness of how we all effect one another. This allowed me way more spontaneity than usual, because I wasn’t using my mind to control and judge my interactions.

Some of the questions that came up for the group, before or after the play, were:

How is this different from an encounter group?

Is play always fun?

Is this about risk-taking?

What effect does a session of free play have on your life after and outside the play space?

I have no knowledge or experience of encounter groups, but one of the participants had been to one, and said that there is a different goal with encounter groups – a psychotherapeutic goal – and that the facilitator will stop the process in order to focus on one participant’s needs.

I brought up the question about whether play is alway fun, and I guess it is related to the idea of therapy a bit too. Children’s play often results in tears, tantrums, conflict. As adults, we are very respectful and careful of one another, but its still possible that during play we are confronted by conflict, disappointment, anger etc. At one stage during the play I suddenly thought about my partner’s children and how they would soon grow out of their playfulness, and this made me sad.

(that’s me, my little sister and my cousin in the photo)

I think risk-taking is definitely part of the play, and each participant chooses the level of challenge they want to give themselves. This is a nice aspect to the free play. Because there is no specific exercise set by the facilitator, each person can try out whatever they want at their own pace.

I have been very aware of the change that comes over me when I enter into a rehearsal room or workshop. Through years of experience, I have become open, curious and eager for experience in this context. But not necessarily outside of it! The whole premise of CTP rests on the idea that what we do in play sessions has an effect on how you live your life, your whole life, down to the most mundane parts of it.

So I’ve been wanting to catalogue any changes I notice outside the sessions. The first thing I noticed is that on leaving the session, I put the wrist-band I had been wearing on my left instead of my right hand, where I always wear it. This was unconscious and surprising.

It has been a very busy week since then, but I did notice another change yesterday. I am away from home and I was walking around in downtown Wellington. The day before I had had a wonderful day by myself reading, writing, buying postcards for the kids and wandering around downtown. Yesterday I wanted something different. I felt flat and resentful and boring. For the first time in my life I think, I articulated this as wanting to play, wanting to engage in something creative and fun or else see/hear/experience something inspiring and stimulating.

I considered going to 3D Alice in Wonderland. I started planning improvisations for public spaces to attract audience to the show I’m doing here. I went to look at fabric to start planning a wall hanging for my bedroom. I didn’t really manage to dispel the flat feeling, but it felt like a beginning or a turning point – just to realise that what I wanted was to approach my situation with a greater sense of freedom, spontaneity and play.

Ok so this is a pretty big topic. Fear is creativity’s biggest enemy and fear comes in a million different forms and disguises, a lot of them very cunning and creative even. We each have our own bag of fears big and small.

I’ve just finished a short and very successful season of a show I’ve been working on as director for over a year. A lot of very interesting stuff has happened along the way, but the thing that is sticking out in my mind right now is that period, for about two days before opening night, when fear, in the form of near-panic, often rears its head. This is one of the times that it can be hardest to say  to the fear “yes, yes, I can see you there, but I don’t need you right now, so please go away.”

All the inspiration, all the hard work, all the wonderful creative ideas and all the structuring, polishing, bringing together of all the different elements, suddenly, when that panic sets in, begin to look like mistakes. For me, usually my main fear is that I have been too optimistic in my naive belief that anyone will think what I’ve made is cool, clever, relevant or moving.

And what can I say about this time of near-panic? All you can do is exercise blind faith. Whatever you have made is a unique reflection of you (this is a scary thing to think of too – all those people coming and looking so closely at this revelation of you-ness), your original idea was inspired and you have worked doggedly to express that idea as beautifully and clearly as you can.

The fear may have immobilised your brain, but by this stage in the process you probably don’t need it as much as you might think. Your legs keep on taking you down the path. Just keep walking, run a little when necessary, get to the finish line and see the faces of the crowd as they experience your creation. Phew. If you can stay open to their experience and what they choose to say to you about it, then you have completed your mission. Take a week or two off and then write down all those comments and have a think over your intention (what did you intend your audience to experience?), what was fun about the process and what you can learn now.

I have to say that I love the number 3. I love the idea of the “third thing,” something that came, I think, from a conversation I had over ten years ago, about the work of John Cage. The third thing is the magical idea or image that comes to the viewers/listeners/receivers of art when they are offered a metaphor. Two things are placed together in some kind of relationship to one another. Out of the rubbing up of the two, previously unrelated, things, the mind/imagination makes some kind of sense. Usually the sense, the image or idea that comes from the sparks created by the two things is something way greater, more complex and inexplicable than the two things by themselves seem to offer.

Cage was working with random juxtaposition of elements in live performance. Every night the audience would pick pieces of paper out of a hat and determine what order the pieces of the performance would be done and which bits of music would go with what action etc. This way the “third thing” was something that the artist had little control over. Each night, the audience would see new metaphors created for them and have their own experiece of magical, electric new meaning.

I liked the idea of the “third thing” so much that I had this picture of Tenniel’s from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland tattooed on my left shoulder. Throughout Lewis Carroll’s provocative children’s book, very surprising items are juxtaposed with brilliant effects. I’ve always felt that Carroll used the ridiculous and absurd images and ideas in his stories to open children’s minds to the unexpected truths of the world, rather than allowing them to believe the school-day message that “1 + 1 = 2″ and it will always be so and that is how the world operates.

I love the liberation that is inherent in the very act of creating and receiving metaphor. Two things are known. The third thing is the unknown, the field of infinite possibility, the hitherto uncharted brilliance of your own mind, the scope of human imagination.

After leaving my part time job at the library, I’ve been feeling like my discipline and commitment are at an all-time low. I was in the habit of bringing lots and lots of beautiful and interesting books home and flicking through them. Some I didn’t even open after I got home. Hardly any got read right through.

Not finishing books, not wanting to go to classes every week, loosing enthusiasm for projects, I’ve been labeling myself a dilettante.

So I was very pleased last night to finish reading a book. And not only that, it was in a genre I have never read before – a graphic novel. Wow. I’d seen so many graphic novels that teenagers read (and tried to read them a few times) and some amazing ones in the adult non fiction too. I think I was very lucky that I ended up reading this particular one, even though it is number 5 in a series.

It is David Mack’s “Kabuki: Metamorphosis,” a richly layered, beautifully made graphic novel with a wonderful combination of comic-book action and philosophical (think quantum physics, spirituality, stephen hawking and taoism) musing.

In terms of creativity and expression of ideas, this book (or probably any in the series) is well worth a look. I was impressed how Mack expresses character, plot and concept within an aesthetically diverse and beautiful form.

A new paradigm is occurring in global consciousness. The reality of environmental threat, economic instability, peak oil and unfair international trade and labour conditions is creating a movement of communities towards self-sufficiency. Transition towns, permaculture, community gardens, timebanks and other initiatives are replacing (or existing alongside) the top-down structure of society that most of us grew up with.

At the same time, it is being largely recognised that the legacy of the industrial revolution – a world full of good workers, highly skilled at following orders – is no longer serving the needs of contemporary society, let alone the needs of the individual and the family. Creativity, intuitive and individuality are valued more and more highly in an increasingly wide variety of contexts, both corporate and social, and are vital areas of skill and awareness for the survival of humans and the environment they live in.

The star system is no longer a useful model for social awareness, political change and ‘relevant’ theatre and arts. No matter what content an artwork contains, the static audience viewing the “master’s” work are not being given the opportunity to experience their own power to enact change, to create and communicate.

We live in a millennial age – everywhere we turn we are provided with images of a future in which the weather has gone awry, resources are scarce, animals and plants are struggling to survive in dehabitated environments and the human population has outgrown its own ability to feed, clothe and nurture itself.

This is not a time for adding further images and stories to this glut of pessimistic information. This is a time to speak of what is possible and moreover to create experiences for people of what is possible for them.

While gardeners, builders, economists and all manner of people turn their crafts towards creative problem solving and community building, the arts have an important part to play. Just as the arts have always served to support both social cohesion and the direction of social growth/change, now the arts begin to find a way to support this time of transition towards self-sufficiency and community strength. A large part of this is re-educating people in the processes of creativity and group interaction.

Creative Transformation Process chooses not to create performances in which some actors demonstrate to some passive spectators the situation as it is now, or as it was in the past. Instead, CTP gives all players the opportunity to be the artist of their own story and their own life. In play together, we come together as a group, a community, in whatever shape we find together. We find out what we have to offer and how we can accept and receive from others. We learn to trust ourselves and others, to know our limits, when and how to ask for help, and also how to grow past those limits at the pace that is comfortable for us.

CTP offers both relief from the seriousness of life and an empowering experience of your own creativity. Creativity is an aspect of yourself that is engaged in such a variety of everyday activities, underpinning so much of what you do. CTP invites you to develop your creativity, creative ways of communicating and interacting with others, and the ability to play like a child. From this follows the joy and freedom of a playful and spontaneous approach to life, vibrant interactions with other people and the transcendence of fear of failure, boredom and despondency, guilt for ‘wasting time’ and so on.

CTP may engage with other bodies of work that have similar goals – The Theatre of the Oppressed work of Augusto Boal and Playback Theatre are two examples. CTP will also develop its own form of happenings, free play. These follow guided exercises that encourage participants to trust their own creativity, to give over individual responsibility and become part of the whole/group, and come into the present, experiencing their body, voice and imagination more strongly than their analytical mind.

I’ve had a friend from Melbourne staying, a friend I stayed with back in October last year when I went over for the Arts Festival. We’ve been continuing a conversation we started back then about developing a playful creative process which fosters liberation, self-awareness and joy in all aspects of life.

We call it the Creative Transformation Process. Here’s what I’ve written about it so far, with a weekly group session in mind:

The essence of CTP is liberation and presence. This is achieved through creative play. Our focus is on the gradual transcendence of fear, inhibition, judgment and self-criticism. Lucette facilitates a guided process including exercises that nurture trust, presence and playfulness.

CTP engages the writer, the singer, the actor, the painter, the dancer and the playful child in us all. It is not a method of accumulating skills, knowledge or ability in these artistic fields. Rather it is a way of nurturing and cultivating your sense of your own freedom, your unique creativity and your engagement with your role as the artist and creator of your own life.

Despite all the fun, relaxation and celebration, I often find this time of year a bit difficult. All the possibilities of my life push themselves to the surface of my consciousness to be reassessed. Is what I’m doing the best use of my time, experience and interests? Am I contributing to the world in meaningful and satisfying ways? Am I a good friend, lover, sister, parent? I often come back from time away with a big graph in my journal, a timeline or chart of some sort, trying to sort through all the things I want to do, be and have, and figure out what to spend my resources (time, energy, money) on.

Then so often life just reasserts itself and my natural interests and habits fall back into place.

Here is an exercise I’ve used a few times with surprising results. It is a kind of map:

- allow yourself plenty of time and space. be conscious in your decision about where to do this and be sure you won’t be interrupted or feel rushed

- take a piece of paper, pens/pencils/crayons/paints or whatever medium you feel excited by at the time

- you are going to draw two maps. they could be totally broad (covering all aspects of your life and yourself) or on a specific topic (friendship, creative work, career, values etc)

- sit quietly in front of your paper and pens etc. take a few deep breaths and consider the topic you have chosen. consider everything that has happened up to this point, the major events and experiences you have had, your successes and failures, your learning, your process.

- you can start to draw and write whenever something becomes clear. your map can follow any kind of spatial plan – it might turn out to be a pie graph, a picture of a tree, a winding path or a timeline. illustrate and colour it, place emphasis and emotional content within the informative parts. create a page that gives you a holistic view of your process up to this point, how it has been for you in body, mind, soul and interaction with others.

- now repeat the same process for the future. how do you imagine this area of your life to proceed from here? what can you do? what do you need from others? how far are you willing to go? is there an end point? how will you know when you get there? what are the excitements in store for you and where are the parts that seem like hard work?  what resources (inner and outer) will you need to take this journey?

Take a look at these maps after a few days. And again in six months, a year, two years etc. The ones I have created have been remarkably informative and really allowed me to see, at a glance, how far I’ve come and what changes I’ve made in my life. More than a journal or a photograph, they have captured an aspect of me in a particular time and reflected that back to me. This distance means I can have perspective on what is important and where I have been and am going and what it all means.

And when I talk about what is important, I don’t just mean how to be amazing and get heaps of cool stuff done in the next year. Probably the most important thing for me this year is to keep learning how to let the river flow, how to slow down and see everything in its completeness. Be alert for the truth of your needs and purpose and what will serve you most in achieving your purpose.

I’ve just started reading Joseph Campbell’s “Myths to Live By.” I was really excited to read the following:

“[N]ot only has it always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been – and still are, in fact – the supports of their civilizations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality and creative powers. With the loss of them there follows uncertainty, disequilibrium, since life, as both Nietzsche and Ibsen knew, requires life-supporting illusions.”

I am a great believer in fictions, myths, make-believe and the power of thought. It is awesome to hear Campbell’s introduction about the importance of myth. Thomas Moore, an author I am very fond of, is also a great fan of myth.

Believing in fictions is vital to so many aspects of our lives – not only our creativity, but also our health, our love, our playfulness and enjoyment of friendship, family and parenthood. I have been so inspired by the examples of people’s healing through belief and imagination – like the woman who was having major surgery and practiced creative visualisations for the days beforehand with unprecedented results: she lost less than a third of the blood usually lost during such surgery. There may be no scientific fact to back it up, but it is becoming more widely accepted that the mind and imagination can have amazing results on the body.

If this can happen in the realm of health and healing (and disease prevention), you can only imagine what happens to us every day through our creative thought and belief in fictions. I think it is absolutely possible to know fact from fiction, to be clear about what is proven, what is true and at the same time to entertain productive beliefs in fictions and to let ourselves be moved by the make-believe.

Practicing this can have so many interesting results in your life: viewing and responding to art, films and books with a deeper, fuller investment and interest; cultivating a soulful relationship with nature spirits and deeper engagement with the places you live, work and play; an open and empathetic listening to others’ stories and experiences; a creative processing of one’s own life experiences; the creation of a stimulating, rich and meaningful environment in which to live your life and so on.

There’s a fine balance to be struck during the artistic process between intention and detachment. Margaret Cameron, who I quoted in my pervious post, said “You must practice with loyalty and disinterest”.

The idea of intention, and loyalty to that intention, is what I was exploring in my last post – finding your voice, your song, your instrument and your tune and having the trust to work with that and share it with others.

The idea of disinterest or detachment helps you to shape your content, to edit it and present it, create something out of it that contains but is infinitely more than your sad little sob story about how hard your life has been / your awesome celebration of how cool you are (etc). As you can imagine, this detachment is vital if you don’t want your work to feel indulgent and embarrassingly confessional to your audience.

Deepak Chopra has an excellent section about detachment in “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success,” a short, concise book that is well worth a read.

So what does this mean in practice, this dance of loyalty and disinterest? I would like to illustrate it with a story from my own experience:

In 2002 I co-directed a theatre project with Eva-Maria Gauss in Leipzig, Germany and Christchurch, New Zealand. We were exploring social dimensions of time, quite a philosophical topic that resulted in two fairly philosophical works, both entitled “Dream/Wachsein”.

After that, we decided to take a version of this piece down to the Dunedin Fringe Festival. Eva had returned to Germany and another actor we worked with was unavailable, so with about ten days to devise the piece, I set about with two other actors and created “Birthday“.

We had a lot of research behind us, but no time to generate a lot of material and be careful or systematic about how we created the show. The 35 minute piece we ended up with was quite poetic, with very little text and a simple storyline about child-adult relations and aging.

At some point it suddenly occurred to me that, absolutely subconsciously, with no intention or awareness, I had made a piece of theatre exploring the recent death of my mother, my close relationship with my sister and our relationship with our mother before her death! I was stunned.

Somehow, if you can allow yourself to look the other way, stay open and create partly by following your thoughts and ideas and partly by following your intuition and feelings, what is most important to you will be revealed. You don’t even need to try!

This brings us back to the quote from John Daido Loori in the previous post. Once you have trust and are open to the creative process, your art will just happen and you will need to spend no effort, no thought on whether or not it is important, meaningful, relevant, funny, effective, interesting etc. etc. etc. Delicious!

Have you ever been audience to an art work that was well intentioned, well executed and interesting but for some reason you found yourself looking at the rest of the audience more than the piece itself, guiltily waiting for the chance to get away?

Maybe you’ve also met people that seem to be talking about something really interesting and important but you find it hard to listen to them?

Sometimes it can be hard to put your finger on, but some art just doesn’t ring true. All the ingredients are there for a great work, but there’s a strange hollowness, a sense of irrelevance or perhaps tedium at the work’s core.

Most artists want to make work that is meaningful. Most people want to live meaningful lives and contribute to other people’s lives in meaningful ways. We know meaning when we see/hear/feel it, but not always how to generate it.

The paradox of meaningfulness is that, a bit like really good, funny comedy, you can’t really set out to be meaningful.

“Hmm, what’s a really meaningful topic I could make a meaningful art work about? How about the plight of a homeless, schizophrenic homosexual suffering from AIDs in the midst of a never-ending civil war somewhere in the third world? …”

There are two basic things wrong with this sort of well-intentioned, earnest plan to create something meaningful:

1. No matter how much research you do, the work, unless it is a documentary and uses the words, images and experiences of the people involved, will never ring true. You are not homeless, oppressed, sick, or whatever it is you think is interesting.

2. The work will most likely suffer from a dreary kind of seriousness and carefulness that comes from a strong respect for the subject matter and the people involved but isn’t at all interesting to an audience. When a black homosexual man suffering oppression because of mental illness makes a film about his own life, you can be sure there will be a lot of irreverent humour, political incorrectness and sweet humanity in the story that is very hard to fake up if you are an outsider trying your darndest to respect someone different from yourself. Even if you are just dealing broadly with a theme, if it isn’t YOUR theme, you’re likely to get a bit lost in seriousness.

Just like your originality, your meaningfulness can only come out of your own experiences, your life, your soul.

We are here to dance to our own music.

Sounds easy enough …

Still, there are some common difficulties in executing this dance: To begin with, as we grow up we learn not to reveal our deepest selves to too many people. We learn not to tell embarrassing stories about our failures. The gift of art is that it gives us metaphor and aesethetics. These two things act as a kind of bridge to support the revelation of ourselves, not entirely naked; clothed in imagination and colour.

Another difficulty we often encounter is that we think we (especially the white, western, urban we) have nothing interesting to talk about. We no longer live in a culture that wants to hear its own stories. We have become accustomed to films that deal with extreme situations – world wars, the holocaust, crime and triumph over extreme adversity. Why would anyone want to hear about the way my mother used to make jam when I was 7 years old?

On top of this, how do I even know what my song is so that I can dance to it?? All the schooling, training and learning we do teaches us to do things a certain way, and to be interested in certain themes, material and stories. To be a true artist, you have to be prepared, time and time again, to embark on a journey into unknown territory, pretty much alone. You have to be on a constant search for self-knowledge and to take the risk of expressing what you find to others.

The key to all this is trust. John Daido Loori, in “The Zen of Creativity” says

If I was asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it’s trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow your hair. It grows.

One of my teachers, Margaret Cameron, said it like this “Your work is what is right in your face.”

One thing is for sure: what you find and share on your journey through your self, your life and your art is going to be damn interesting and meaningful to those around you, harbouring secrets in their own souls and struggling to hear and dance to their own music!