The Creativity Room

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!