The most recent lectures in “The Creative Process” course have explored the creative fields of performance and literature. Dr. Emma Willis (Lecturer in Drama) and Dr. Paula Morris (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing) are both creative practitioners, so spoke from experience of the creative processes within their respective disciplines.
In the first lecture after the mid-term break, Dr. Willis addressed the topic of Creativity and Performance. Dr. Willis pointed out that the creative product of performance is unique among the arts, because the act of creative production and the act of reception occur simultaneously – that is, the product is not fixed: the product is also a process because it is happening in real space and real time in front of the audience. Because of this, as one playwright observed, throughout history theatres have been “places of endless possibility”.
Using examples from her own experience as a co-director of the dance theatre production body / fight / time (2011), Dr. Willis went on to explain some of the ways of working in creating performance art, including exploratory, collaborative and multidisciplinary creative processes. Finally, Dr. Willis showed clips from Wim Wenders’ 2012 documentary film Pina: A Film for Pina Bausch, to illustrate how “performance is inherently a multi-disciplinary art form”, with a creative process that encourages cross-pollination between practices (such as dance and drama).
In the most recent Creative Process lecture, Dr. Paula Morris offered her perspective on the process of creative writing. She boldly stated that “ideas are the enemy”, proposing that fiction is seldom the result of a purely intellectual approach. The creative process of writing fiction, she suggested, has more in common with play than with critical theory. Writers need to allow themselves to try and fail, taking creative risks.
Dr. Morris suggested that creative writing comes not from the head but from the gut: work originates in what Robert Olen Butler terms the “white hot core of the unconscious”, a place where a lifetime of experiences, emotions and perceptions whirl “like socks in a tumble dryer”. Dr. Morris proposes that most writers are thieves: their process involves collecting content from snippets of conversation, sensory stimuli (such as visual art, music, or nature), other people’s writing, and the stories of friends, family and acquaintances. Tumbled about, fragments will surface unexpectedly and combine in surprising ways. In Dr. Morris’s words, “you never know which sock will stick to the window”; that element of discovery is at the heart of creative writing.
In coming tutorials, students will do a series of writing exercises to open them up to the creative possibilities of the page – and see which socks stick to the window.
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