Creativity

I’m working my way through a great list of video talks, recommended by Lyn Gardner from The Guardian at the moment.  I really enjoyed this one by Elizabeth Gilbert, which is about different ways of thinking about the process of writing/creating/generally having ideas. You should take a look at the whole talk if you have a few minutes, I was particularly grabbed by the bit about Ancient Greek and Roman ideas on creativity and genius.

The Romans didn’t subscribe to the modern idea that a person who has clever ideas IS a genius, they believed that they HAD a genius.  A genius was an external, magical being who popped round and lent people ideas on a good day or might have been absent or lent rubbish ideas on a bad day. I like the thought of these crazy little sprites, they suggest a distance between people and their ideas which feels familiar to me.  They remind me a little of how I feel when we’re making a new play, when the best ideas just suddenly appear, while the worst ones are over-thought and feel like they’ve been forced out of our brains.

To explain how I think about Gomito’s process of creativity let me introduce you to my favourite object from the British Museum (bear with me on this…)

Isn’t she a beauty? She’s from the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I don’t really want to go into the history of her or what she is meant to represent, what I love about her is the way that she’s been made. Or rather than MADE I should really say FOUND.

There are no joins or joints to her, this lovely lady is made of one piece of wood.  Now I don’t know how much experience you have of making small wooden people, but let me tell you, this is not the easiest way to work. Look at the tiny spaces under her arms, what a fiddle to carve, it would be so much simpler to make the limbs separately and attach them at the end. It would also reduce the chance of messing up the whole thing with one slip of a tool. And of course making her in parts you could get a production line going. Draw out a blue print and you could have one person making a load of legs, another making a load of arms, another on torsos and someone boshing them all together at the end. Jobs a goodun, let’s sell one million in the British Museum gift shop.

This, of course, was not what the original artist thought to do, and not just because this figure pre-dates the British Museum gift shop. There would have been no blueprint drawing, no sitting down and thinking ‘What ideas do I have for a statue? What would I like to make? What should it look like? How big should its eyes be?’ With no preconceptions about what was being made, this artist just went looking for a promising tree. A tree which already had this figure within it, waiting for someone skilled to dig it out.

He chiselled and carved and polished and buffed and worried ‘should I dig deeper? Have I already gone too far? Is this right? Is it finished?’ And under his hands this lady appeared. She’s so beautiful I have no doubt that he got it right, he didn’t go too far and chop her nose off, he didn’t leave any unnecessary extra wood that looks out of place, he found her just as she was always meant to be.

I love this way of viewing artworks, or ideas, or plays in our case; that they are not CREATED but DISCOVERED. They are not manufactured and pieced together; rather they are dug out, polished and revealed. That they don’t belong to or come from anyone rather that they all already exist, we just need to choose to look for them and try not to mess them up with our clumsy human hands.

Of course I don’t literally believe that a tree contains a statue or that our next play is buried underground or something, I’m sure there’s a deeply interesting, very scientific explanation of creativity involving psychology and sociology and political climates and bla bla bla…oh who am I kidding…I DO BELIEVE IT I FLIPPING DO.  I WANT THE MAGIC OF CREATIVITY TO BE EXPLAINED BY MAGICAL STORIES, IT MAKES AS MUCH SENSE AS ANYTHING ELSE. So yes, our new play is buried underground, in a field in Suffolk, and I’m very excited, because we’ve already started digging it up and I can see its head poking out. It’s called ‘Roost’ and from what I can see so far it’s a funny one. In the next few months we’ll be gathering a skilled excavation team and carefully scratching round its edges, trying not to break bits off and buffing it up to a shine. I’ll let you know how it’s going and in September in Cambridge and Greenwich we’ll invite you to come and see if we’ve found it and revealed it exactly as it is meant to be.