What do you bring?

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No well thought out prose today with a satisfactory conclusion…instead something that I’ve been pondering since Thursday…well much longer than that but I focused in on it on Thursday…and it’s centred on the question of what do people bring…and by people I mean everyone…what do people bring as individuals to a creative process?

There’s a whole Sarah thing that’s become embedded…about the youth theatre being a safe space…a space where other things, concerns are left at the door…that best and worst is a chance to focus on real life at the start of the session so that it can be dropped for the rest of your time at youth theatre. In theory, as an ambition, that still stands and in part I still stand by it…but in reality, as is often the case, it’s much more complicated than this. The reasons for the complexity are plentiful and some more obvious than the others…but the one I want to focus on is the dichotomy between what we are being a richness we can bring to creativity and the fact that aspects of our selves are what holds us back from being brave, focused and open enough to truly engage with a creative process.

Our story, the one we have experienced up until this time, is one of the greatest strengths we have as an artist and the things we invent are unavoidably intertwined with it on some level…however equally, our stories are the ties that bind us to our fears and insecurities…that stop us being the person and creative practitioner we have the potential to be…

As I said no neat conclusion this week but some final thoughts at this point, in a career long journey I’m taking to understand all of this better…perhaps a better question would be what do we want to bring to a creative process and how do we best meet those ambitions? Which pieces of our story and ourselves are useful to us and which do we choose to cast aside? It’s a process requiring a significant weight of reflection, reflexivity and honesty…but worth having I would say…

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