Creative Spark

Last night I was privy to a very interesting debate about the notion of recognizing the creative spark within oneself. One Mr. Hall adamantly asserted that the creative people in the world, without exception, recognize their creative spark. They may not know what form their creativity will take or how to enact it, but, from a young age, the innate creativity begins to take shape and manifest in whatever means are at a child's fingertips.

Over 12 hours later, my take on this assertion no longer resembles disagreement, but this idea did get me thinking about my own life and the life I hope to create for my family someday.

A bit of background: both of my biological parents are artists in their own right. My mother a fine artist, though never professionally or academically trained, has created quite a few beautiful paintings and drawings in her lifetime. My father is a graphic artist and quite the cartoonist. And my step-mother is a graphic designer whose aesthetic and color choices always feel, well, right. Furthermore, my parents (father and step-mother) kept the house filled with music and literature. They were by no means connoisseur nor did they populate my childhood with only the classics, but I was constantly surrounded by some form of creativity or another. I was also put in movement/theatre classes, was given the opportunity to play the violin, and had drawing utensils at my fingertips. In every way my creativity was nurtured and encouraged and I was aware of my interest in exploring the world through a creative lens.

However, when I began to talk about becoming a theatre artist as my career, I was encouraged to find a more lucrative tact. I did not go away to college intending to become a theatre major but instead the always employable certified teacher. When I realized, during my first semester at Grinnell in my Introduction to Stagecraft course, that my passion for theatre was more than just a high school hobby, I dreaded telling my parents. And even after I did, I still deflected comments that as a female engineer there would be a lot more financial opportunities than going into fickle show business.

This is not to say that my parents do not support my decision to be a theatre designer. But I have always felt conflicted about my creativity. Though my father and step-mother have turned their artistic sensibilities into their careers, their complaints about being burned out and constantly vulnerable to subjective criticism (and their encouragement for me to go and make good money) has made me unsure of how, if at all, to nurture my creative spark. It has called into question if this desire to create is more than just an indulgence or hobby.

As I've gotten older I have come to realize that, indulgence or otherwise, it is an important element of my soul. And therein lies the essence of what it is to recognize your creative spark, as Mr. Hall spoke of last night. Sure, you can sense that you like to draw or write or tell stories or whatever, and you can feel this way from a very young age when expression is about everything from color to sound to movement and everything in between. But to come to realize how your creativity is linked to your essence, how much of your motivation and drive in life is, indeed, sparked by creating, that is something that comes later and under very difference circumstances than just being exposed to art and the like. And for some, it doesn't happen until they're 70 and the urge to paint becomes a desire that cannot be ignored. Or it comes when you're 21, walking in a desolate snow-scape and you have the urge to run your hands along a tree branch in order to telegraph to the world how beautiful you find your surroundings.

Year 3... And Go!

Okay, dear readers, I have been incredibly lax in updating this blog for a variety of reasons, too numerous to get into and all sounding like a poor excuse for being lazy. But I've got about 20 minutes before I need to start work in the scene shop today and so I'm here, with not much of a plan but the need to keep the promise to myself to write every week.

As the title suggests, year three of my graduate school career is underway. This is the last year in my MFA and I'm incredibly excited. It has been a bit of a stressful few days, getting the six first year MFA designers situated (and hearing about the crazy class schedule debacle) but the dust is starting to settle and I think it's going to be a great year.

Oklahoma! is off to a fast-paced start (we hit tech in 4.5 weeks!) and The Waiting Room is getting going as well. But not just the shows, I have, miraculously, only ended up with one structured class and an independent study of my own devising. It's like a year made-to-order. And you know what that means...

In 9 months, the real world awaits. Yesterday, at a gathering of returning and new graduate students, the question of what comes next, of course, came up. I feel like I answer this question at least once a day. But the bottom line is that the answer remains the same (and, predictably, vague): I'm going where the job is. The idea of going to New York never appealed to me and there are only to cities I would move to just to move and figure something out (Chicago and Seattle), but in this economy and with my temperament, I'm not one to just hope that I land on my feet by heading to some burgeoning theatre community. So right now, I don't have an answer, but I am looking forward to the adventure that not knowing provides. And, really, I don't expect I'll have much an answer until sometime next spring. Life has a funny way of working out but it often takes a while before things become clear. So until then, I'm going to go paint some more clouds and start working on No Exit, just because.

A Dedication

Once, when I was about 7 years old, I attended a Special Olympics event in Chico, CA. I was there because of my sister Kristin, a sister not many of you have ever heard me talk about. Kristin, 5 years my junior, was born with Down's Syndrome. And like all people who have an extra 21st chromosome, she is a happy, fun little girl. The sad fact is that I haven't seen Kristin in over 15 years as she lives with her father somewhere in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Yet, every time I pass a person with Down's, my heart breaks a little for this sister who I hardly know.

At the pool here in Carrboro, watching the athletes register for their events for a Special Olympics day that my other sister, Morrow, is volunteering for, I was overwhelmed. I had intended to help the volunteer staff at the event in any way that I could, but was unneeded, and rather than sit in the muggy heat for 3 hours with a sense of dread and unease, I opted to come home instead. And now I sit here and I feel at a loss to the purpose of what I do.

When I was younger I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to change the lives of students. I envisioned myself standing before a classroom while rapt students looked up at me, absorbing information and asking questions of their world. While I realize that was a wholly unrealistic ideal of teaching, the fact of the matter was that I imagined I would be serving my community directly through teaching.

Instead, I fill my time by trying to create spectacle and entertainment for a small sliver of a community. Today I must resume work on Oklahoma!, a show that I would argue is pure drivel because it shows us nothing new in our world today. It does not make you think, it does not challenge your opinions, it just entertains and amuses you. And it was picked for the UNCG season specifically because it would be a money-maker, drawing in the "blue-hairs" and families that long for the Golden Age of Broadway to return. (Granted, I feel that the director for this piece is trying [and succeeding] in making this production relevant and challenging. But the bottom line is that Rogers and Hammerstein themselves admitted that they conceived the musical to hearken back to a brighter, happier time as America was facing the brutal reality of WWII.)

It is disheartening that in almost a decade spent in this profession of theatre that I find myself struggling to find meaning and purpose in an art form that has been the cradle of dissent and change in past times. One of my most important heroes is Hallie Flanagan who helped create the short-lived Federal Theatre Project. Her belief that theatre (and art) could be driven by the masses as well as be thought-provoking and dangerous ("Theatre, when it is good, is always dangerous," she said), is one of the things that has driven me further in my endeavor to work in this field. But the sad fact is that not many people are doing dangerous stuff anymore. True, there are companies that are working outside of the capitalistic, commercial frame-work, but they truly are the "not-for-profit" sector. Furthermore, they are often preaching to the choir because like-minded individuals are generally the people who make up their audiences.

So, what does this all mean? What, if anything, can I change in order to feel like I'm doing more than catering to the jaded and numb audiences? I'm not sure. Many people talk about the death of theatre in terms of the decline of audience numbers and the rise in the mean age of said declining(/dying) audience members. I feel like the death of theatre is in it becoming deadly. If, in an educational theatre, where the students are allowed to try something without the threat of eminent doom if they fail, the season selection committee can't push the envelope a little with their big-budget musical, what hope is there for theatre that can't afford to fail? I don't have the answer, but I do hope that as a theatre artist that I don't forget that I want to do what Hallie says: create the type of good theatre that is dangerous. Meanwhile, as I work on shows that feel useless and un-challenging like Oklahoma! I will dedicate my work to Kristin, whose simple, innocent outlook on life is enough for me to know there is a time and place for entertainment for entertainment's sake. I will design in the vein of the Golden Age of Broadway, pull out the stops in spectacle, and create an iconic surrey-with-the-fringe-on-top because I know that if Kristin where in the audience her joy and excitement would be all that matters in the world.