Nalleblue’s Weblog

All people are creative. Creativity can and should be cultivated. Unfortunatly not all are given the chance.
Communication in itself is a creative process. It is an immediate living give and take between the individuals communicating.
Artists train creativity and communication. In my clown training I call these playing and listening.
I believe that artists are most creative when they have the possibility and understanding of how to influence their whole creative process. This is totally different from the current point of view that artists are tools for interpretating a director or choreographers artistic vision.

Tradition has divided the artistic process of creating performance art into two parts, the dancer or actor(1) who interprets the artistic vision of the director or choreographer(2). The trained artist for this I call Artist/Interpreter.

Performance art schools teach the traditional Artist/Interpreter viewpoint. This is of course to prepare the future artists to be able to work in theaters, dance ensembles, opera houses or almost all forms of elitist performance institutions.
A down side being of course that if the artists are not hired by anybody they cannot create.

The tradition I am trained in is called Artist/Creator which can be traced to all forms of  popular performance arts forms. Magicians, circus artists and clowns have always controlled their entire creative process. The way I teach the artist/creator method is by dividing the creative process into two parts. The first part is the artist based dream and creative process done in the studio or theater space. Here the artist is free to experiment, dream and search creativly for ideas and material. For the second part of the process the artist much change hats and put on the directing hat. Artistic freedom is important but performance art in its essens is about the communication between the actor and the audiance. So in the second part of the process the audiance point of view must rule. Who are the audiance? Does the material effect them? How? Was that my purpuse? How can I clean and strengthen the audiances experience?
There is a misconsumption that there is a conflict between what the artist wants and what the audiance wants. That giving the audiance what they want is to sell out… I believe that the entire performance situation is manipulatory. The artist is asking the audiance to be part of a communication game. So it is the artists responsabilty to have answered the questions of why the audiance should be there and also to take responsability that the game is played well. There are no bad audiances.
Artist/creator processes can still use directors as the outside eye, coach and playfriend who help the artist envision there dream. So far I have never encountered a performing arts school that teaches this process. In todays performance institutions the directors job is done on the day of the premiere. They then move on to the next project.
In the artist/creator method that is when the directors work begins.

My feeling is that the ruling concept of artist/interpreter is understood as the only way of thinking, by default, by most performance art schools, even schools dedicated to traditional artist/creator art forms like circus. This is unfortunate as I find that people who feel secure in there own creative processes are by far the most interesting to play with, even if to interpret my ideas.