Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 8 Number 1, April 2007
___________________________________________________________________
Bannerman, Christopher; Sofaer, Joshua and Watt, Jane (eds.): Navigating the Unknown: The Creative Process in Contemporary Performing Arts, London, Middlesex University Press, 2006. 272 pages. ISBN: 1 904750 55 9. £25.
Reviewed by
The University of Winnipeg
There’s a brilliant essay by Mark Vernon in this book called “Plato and the Creative Life.” In it Vernon, a writer and journalist, illumines a potential parallel between Plato’s call to a life with others in the cause of love of wisdom and a life committed to artistic creativity. “When Plato said ‘I am a philosopher,’” Vernon states, “he meant it in the same sense as the artist today says ‘I am an artist.’ It is a passion that is a vocation, informing the daily habits and general orientation of a life.” (P.153). However, clarifies Vernon, an artistic life lived in this way, “cannot be conducted alone. It is not some autonomous search for integrity, nor the right verbiage, as if what counted was the ever more abstract articulation of a Gnostic or esoteric discourse. The struggle forward is to live it with others.” (P. 153). At the heart of this way of life lies the paradox that “the very acceptance of the limited means of the human condition makes for endless creativity.” (P.152). In other words, we, like Plato, must accept that we shall never reach wisdom, but our love for it demands that we continually pursue it. It is this quest that produces, for the artist, not only artworks, but a way of life that is “disciplined as well as resourceful […] aimed at self-transformation as well as self-expression […] a collaborative venture with passionate friends […] aim[s] to innovate not imitate […] takes courage that behind every attempt is the knowledge that human beings are limited and conscious of those limits. At the end of the day, it is a life of love – a love that takes you out of yourself.” (P.157). These ideas must tug at many a creative soul. Unfortunately, this eight-page essay, for me, holds significantly more insight than the rest of the book.
The book is a product of The Centre for Research into the Performing Arts (ResCen), an important and noble project conducted at Middlesex University. The book consists of transcribed discussions between performing artists selected as research associates for ResCen, Ghislane Boddington, Shobana Jayasingh, Richard Layzell, Rosemary Lee, Graeme Miller and Errollyn Wallen, essays, and reflections on process by the artists, the editors and others. These contributions are organized under three headings: In/Tuition, Navigating and Making Manifest. In addition to what is published in this book, ResCen has made available a number of transcripts from its seminars on its website at www.rescen.net. One of these transcripts especially caught my attention. It is entitled “Motivation: The Artist and the Psychoanalyst,” from a seminar with Hanna Segal. In this seminar Dr Segal asserts, “All art symbolises something. This is a specialty of the artist. You don’t make bricks. You make symbols. Without symbolism there is no art.” The line of investigation that could proceed from this observation from a woman who’s reflected on aesthetics and creativity for decades seems curiously absent from the book. The same goes for her statement, “it seems to me that art is always fighting and breaking imitation outside and inside. Somebody said that all art is about previous art.” And, again, so with her claim that, “Every artist of any importance creates a world of his own.”
As a teacher of Acting this may be simple bias, but it seems odd to me that a book with the subtitle “The Creative Process in Contemporary Performing Arts” contains no discussion of the kind of performer most people in the western world are likely to encounter on a daily basis, or certainly could if they wanted to. There are no actors involved in this project or a consideration of how actors create based on material written and directed by others. Actors and other performers who engage with other artists’ work are mentioned in the seminar with Hanna Segal, so its not that ResCen is unaware. I simply don’t understand why this category of performer is missing from the project and that, of course, is not the fault of the Centre.
The most useful book I’ve ever come across regarding the artistic process is Lawrence Halprin’s The RSVP Cycles (1969), in which Halprin sets up a generalized creative methodology. With regards to a description of the conditions of getting into creative flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Creativity and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1996) is very hard to beat. Navigating the Unknown makes no such contribution to methodology or to understanding. Its subtitle that promises the book will talk about the creative process is, for me, not fulfilled. To address the creative process would require a different approach, it seems to me. Either an anthropological approach that attempted to account for the ways humans have made use of their ability of imaginatively displacing themselves in space and time – and specifically how the research associates at ResCen do that when they create work. Or a spiritual approach in which Spirit’s creativity would be investigated both cosmologically and personally – and for that researchers and participants would have to be steeped in wisdom traditions. What I believe I have encountered is a group of people generally discussing their processes and though I find ResCen’s approach, “to consider the artists as knowledge-holders, experts in their field, and therefore to afford equal weight to the voice of the artist in the research dialogue” both laudable and right, I found reading the discussions mostly uninteresting, just as I would overhearing or participating in such talk in a pub, someone’s home or in a studio. Discussions like these, in my experience, only take off whenever there’s a concrete artistic problem to solve or a goal to reach. Having stated these reservations I must reiterate that encountering Mark Vernon’s essay and the transcript of the seminar with Hanna Segal filled me with a particular joy.