This christmas I’ve been asked back to my former theatrical home to create some sound designs for the festive season. It will be my first time back since leaving my senior technical position in order to focus more on my growing videography business, and also the first time I will be working on a show not as a technician but as a “creative”, and this got me thinking about the nature of creativity and how we perceive it.
Creativity is often defined in quite narrow terms – this is in fact far from the first time I have created a sound design for this particular theatre, but then I was a technician creating a few sound effects, not truly considered a creative… yet the actual process of creating the show is more or less the same, just with less of my time having to be spent on other more technical jobs. But even as a technician my role was often to think outside of the box and find new and better ways of doing things, and I would argue that in doing so I was being equally creative, just in an entirely different way.
As a society we’re determined to pigeonhole people. If you’re someone who excels at art and performance then you’re a creative person. If you’re an exceptional scientist, mathematician or a champion of english literature then you are clearly an academic. But science without creating new ideas is just producing an answer without a question. English without creative flair is just a dictionary. Mathematics is only a tool designed to prove or disprove a hypothesis, and without a creative approach that hypothesis would never be made in the first place.
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Image Source: www.lizdejager.co.uk
I firmly believe that everyone has the power to be creative, but even for those of us who work in the more traditionally defined ‘creative fields’ creativity is scarcely a given and credit even more of a rarity, particularly by the creator themselves. When creativity becomes an expectation rather than a gift it becomes easier for us to dismiss it – create something new and you may be hailed a genius, but once is never enough – we demand that each new piece break the boundaries and blow the mind and if that standard isn’t reached we’re always ready and occasionally too eager to lend a critical eye and a dismissive voice. Sometimes it’s not even about one artist pushing their own standards further, it’s about others catching up:- the moment we realise that a creative is not actually a magician and that it’s possible to emulate their work we believe our own creations equal to theirs. But duplication is not creativity. Imitation is more or less a matter of practice, being the original was, until that particular creative mind came along, inconceivable.
But therein lies the problem. In a world where we simply can’t help but encounter other creative’s work on a daily basis it’s difficult not to be so heavily influenced that we lose sight of our own originality. Those credited with a creative mind tend also to have a self-deprecating one and that makes staying true to the way you see the world more difficult when your contemporaries are producing something so different and to so much acclaim. But creativity is not about trends or fashions, it’s about following your own ideas even if at first you don’t get the response you were looking for. Along the way you might receive criticism and it might not always be easy to hear, but creativity and hard work go hand in hand and if you stay true to yourself and continue to follow your heart you’ll get there in the end.
p.s. We all have our less creative days and sometimes our creations just maintain the standard rather than pushing the boundaries… quit beating yourself up about it ok?!
