about creativity

Here’s what I think. Creativity is not a thing or a quality, not a process or an activity. You cannot possess it or harness it. It is a flow, a fleeting moment, a gift. The closest we can say is that creativity is a celebration of what is. I wrote recently:

“There is always a tension between the creative act and its purpose. Perhaps the artist has no purpose other than to create, or to provide us with an experience of the mysterious; to question our relationship and our place in the universe.”

Creativity is about creating from zero. It is about unconcealing something that has previously been unseen and making it accessible. In this sense it is about risk, imagination and uncertainty. It is an attempt to cut through all the levels that modern human beings in our alienated western society add on to simplicity and essence. All real creative endeavor sets out to reach the most fundamental and the widest human experience without diluting anything. Creative expression at its most effective, most transformational, is maximum impact with minimum means. It leaves the most to the imagination.

John Heilpern, author of The Conference Of The Birds, The Story of Peter Brook in Africa, quotes the actress Glenda Jackson speaking about the creative act, discovering the breakthrough moment  and working with director Peter Brook in rehearsal:

“… so you begin again. And eventually he says ‘no’. And it goes on like this until you call for the oxygen tent. But perhaps you do discover something. And he says, ‘Yes, that’s a bit more like it’. You say ‘a bit more like what’. To which he smiles in his benign way and replies, ‘I don’t know, show me’…”

Then somehow the actor reaches a part of themselves, a place inside themselves, and performs something they had never thought of before. It is an act of spontaneity, totally in the present, not drawing on anything already known or done before. It comes only by grace and by imagination. You cannot force it, you cannot command it, you cannot demand it, you can only let go, surrender and trust that it will find you.

Heilpern uses this exquisite phrase:

“Envy those who can break with the past; they will be fearless.”

This is the art of the peacemaker; like the theatre director or the orchestra conductor, to be the creative space, the catalyst for others to author a new story that breaks with the past, into existence.

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