The Creativity Room

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.

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!

One thing that I could not do without, one thing that is indispensable to my art and my life, is time alone. A walk in the hills with my dog, a quarter hour sitting on the beach, even half an hour in my bed before I turn off the light – this is what recharges my batteries and supports my clarity, energy and playfulness.

This seems like such an obvious thing to write about, yet it is so easy for me to forget, or to go for too long before I realise “wow do I need some time out!”.

Many years ago, I went away for a weekend by myself … a great thing to do, I thought, and in reality so much more challenging than the fun, creative time I had been expecting. I came right face to face with my own fear of not liking myself.

Now it is quite the opposite – it is when I am far away from all the things and people that seem to constitute my identity that I feel happiest and most able to love myself.

On the way back down the hill I am often filled with clear inspiration of what it is I want to be spending my time on, whether it is re-investment in the project I’m already working on, an idea for how to push something further, a clear intuition that there’s something that isn’t serving me anymore and I need to let go of, or a whole new idea for a fantastic new project.

I can’t recommend it too highly. We are all different in our needs for time out. So figure out how much you need and go get it!

We live in an age where the whole world’s creative efforts are available to us in high quality bites on the internet. Do you ever get that sinking feeling that everything you might ever dream up has probably already been dreamt up by one of the other 6.75 billion inhabitants of this planet?

At the same time, ‘original’ ideas are probably the most applauded and sought-after components of both artistic and non-artistic products.

These facts lead us into a mistaken quest for ‘originality’. Usually we feel successful in this quest if we manage to create something that feels ‘original’ in the same way the last ‘original’ thing we came across felt to us. Perhaps we have made something truly weird, or something shocking, or something that merges two genres or concepts in a way that we have come across before. Maybe what we’ve made is pretty obscure, and its meaning – and meaningfulness – is hidden behind a kind of conceptual-cool mirage.

But true originality doesn’t involve trying hard. It isn’t the result of a series of stabs in the dark. Rather, true originality, the kind that leads to artistic products that leave a deep and personal impression on your audience, comes from your own origins.

What I mean by this is that to make original work, what is needed is not an accumulation of experience of other ‘original’ ideas or a searching outside of ourselves for something truly new and fresh. It is actually an emptying out of all the accumulated layers of ideas, images and opinions from ‘out there,’ and comes from our own immediate truth.

No two people have the same mind, the same experiences, the same historical and social context. No two people have the same personality, beliefs, values, desires and fascinations. To be original, you just have to be who you are. That is the simple truth. Your life’s work is to create the first thing you think of, the thing that is staring you in the face, the thing that is you-and-only-you, the thing that is so obvious to you that it seems like it must be the least original idea there ever was. That is the truly original, meaningful and effective thing that you can create.

So if you ever find yourself worrying about originality, do whatever feels least original, the biggest cliche, even if it means straight-out copying of something you have seen. I once set out to copy Cindy Sherman and ended up having a ball of a time making photos and film that were definitely all about me.

I recently attended the Melbourne Arts Festival. Out of six dance and theatre performances, all from internationally acclaimed companies, one really stood out. Yet even this piece, which was relevant, contemporary, original and asked devastating questions about the extinction of the human race, didn’t really sink beneath skin level. I started to feel that we are stuck in a time of “problem focus,” where activism, media and a lot of the people out there who want to “make a difference” still think that pointing to the problem is the best way to make change happen. Yet we are all so scared now about all the problems we have created. I am starting to head away from creating art and wanting instead to create events, in a workshop kind of format, where people are no longer passively sitting and consuming the art. Instead they are creating together, feeling empowered and focusing on solutions, community and communication. What is the purpose of art then? Perhaps we should be satisfied with the Nietzschean idea of the Apollonian art – art that reconnects us with beauty in its highest sense, the healing potential of beauty, and allows us to connect with our higher selves, the selves that may be physically mired in the dirt of our problems but have our sights set on the bright light of the sun.