#creativity workout

PLAB members in a reflective moment

The cooler weather NYC has suddenly begun offering its beleaguered citizens encourages a kind of introspection. We gather more layers on our bodies, drink hot tea and reflect on the summer excursions now long finished. We look ahead and hunker down to tasks at hand. When we matriculate through twelve, sixteen, or more, years of formal schooling, it is difficult to turn off the part of our brains that orients towards dividing the year into semesters. September always brings about the advent of a kind of Fall semester of sorts, conjuring images of registration, focus, new books and shoes, and a renewed purpose.

What does this mean for the PLAB, with only three sessions remaining in our inaugural year? A reinvigorated focus on fun and an entrée into reflection about what this year has brought us, individually and collectively, and how we can better cultivate play and its aspects in 2017.

And, that we gotta have as much fun as we can while we can.

Last week’s PLAB meeting embraced all of these ideas. It was described by one participant as a “creativity workout,” and this summary is humblingly accurate.

The day began with our usual physical warm-up and song, a foray into reflection and gratitude for all that we have experienced with each other since we began this experiment in January. 

After the break, we stepped into a composition exercise that asked for detailed attention to how meaning is conveyed to an audience without sacrificing the players’ ingenuity regarding how meaning is conveyed. The participants were divided into groups and each given the simple text of a nursery rhyme. Their initial task was to divide the narrative into five tableaus, or frames (taken from the Jacques LeCoq exercise Five Frames), and present them in a sequence to the audience. The audience then tells the story back to the performers, often grossly and excitingly off topic. For example, what one group thought was so clearly a forest of trees or a town of houses, became for the audience a journey through a modern art museum. Or, a welcoming trio of mischievous children became a Matisse circle dance or a band of gypsy-prostitutes. As the tableaus are still, without movement, text or sound, we respond specifically to the bodies in space before us. It’s a great lesson in specificity of placement and gestural nuance.

This exchange prompts the first round of revision, as the players have an opportunity to clarify their choices. We then follow a pattern of presenting and sharing, gradually introducing additional elements in subsequent rounds of revision, including moving transitions, text, soundscape, repeated gesture, etc. These elements ideally elevate the existing storytelling and liberate the players to find more innovative ways to share the story they are telling. Eventually their efforts become an ideally balanced blend of a desire to tell the original story with integrity and an ability to tell the story with integrity regarding the players’ preferences and pleasures, paired with a strong sense of audience awareness.

We marveled at how the simple use of bodies of consecutive size indicated stairs; of bent arms as cupboard doors; of how a hand with fingers apart indicated “monster” while a hand with fingers cupped together indicated “dog.” We delighted in the pleasure on the performers’ faces when they collectively told us the pantomimed tray contained a PIE.

The larger questions underneath this exercise explore how a creativity workout might inform an artistic practice already in place outside our gatherings. How does working like this change how we see performance? How we make performance? How we perform?