The Creativity Room

The more I think, the more I read, the more I teach, the more this idea of authenticity comes to the fore. I touched on it in my posts on “meaningfulness”. It is the most important ingredient, the most important practice, for making art that speaks to and moves its audience and for receiving personal fulfillment from the creative work you do.

Authenticity is described as being faithful to internal rather than external ideas and motivations. It is similar to what Deepak Chopra talks of as being “self-referential”. It means referring to your own inner knowing and your own judgment instead of being ruled by the judgments and ideas of others or of society (which are often perceived rather than directly experienced). The philosophy of authenticity is quite an interesting subject.

This seems simple enough – of course, authenticity will make our work original, fresh and personal – but how do we do it? Over decades of education and socialisation we form the habit of pretense in order to please, amuse and succeed. We categorise our own behaviours and habits and decide never to reveal certain aspects of ourselves.

One of the best tricks to finding this authentic material that lies deep inside us is to not think. I mean to not use that part of the mind that wants to control and that is in charge of the judgments and pretense, that part that has decided not to reveal your deepest truth to anyone.

Every good book on creativity or art concurs in this matter. Learn to bypass the controlling mind. There are many ways to practice this: meditation is one, physical exhaustion is another (which I’ve encountered as a technique in physical theatre), and I suppose sleep deprivation might serve a similar purpose, and drug-taking too. A spell of time alone, in nature or in a deeply spiritual place that speaks to your soul may engender a great sense of peace and trust that allows the controlling mind to recede into the background.

The quickest, easiest method and the one that I employ the most is something more like the surrealist technique of automatic writing. It involves moving as fast through a creative process as you can, never giving yourself time to think and always accepting the first idea that comes out without any time to reconsider, hesitate or censor yourself.

Also vital to expressing your authentic truth is trust. All our control, censorship and pleasing behaviour is, of course, a self-protection mechanism, designed to make us more successful in life. Allowing other truths to emerge and (heaven forbid!) revealing them to a large audience, takes trust. And trust, although innate, also takes practice. It is through experience, I think, that you can build on the trust you already have. Every time you create an authentic piece of work and feel good about speaking your truth, your trust will grow. The paradox is that in order to be able do it, first you have to do it. It’s a chicken and egg situation. But soulful and spiritual practice can also aid hugely. I recommend reading Thomas Moore, especially “The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life.”

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!