thoughts from session 12 – liz mills

Drama / Voice:

• Self taught – ended up teaching a bit of everything
• Theatre is a space of the imagination
  • Suspend your disbelief … enter a world that is imaginative
  • 1st prize = create the theatre work is that you want to arrive at the thing that you can’t imagine
  • Push for thing that you can’t yet know.

• Can you teach creativity? Yes

Principles:

1. Grow and teach a particular kind of responsiveness – YES, and openness
   • YES response, removing the blocks (suspend judgment)
   • Leads you beyond the dull bit
   • BLOCK = trying to be too cleaver … go with the idea that is present.
   • Keep going until the ‘right’ side of the brain and the fun side comes out.
   • Go through the period of familiar and … as you start to ‘run out of ideas’ that’s when the creativity begins.
   • Discipline and push into the creative space
   • Accept the idea and then to try it out is the thing that works.

1. Generate a whole lot of ideas to discard.
   • Never start with the story, rather start with the generation of ideas
   • Choice and “converge” ideas
   • The moment you make a choice you open a door and allow another set of possibilities to become available

1. Curtain always goes up (there is a deadline)
   • Director know what is lost, but the audience doesn’t
   • There is always crisis
   • Push of phases and realization of the task increases creativity

1. Trust ‘image’ as much as ‘word’
   • Think in a huge amount of images and not necessarily through language.
     • Language sometimes inhibits the creativity because words can’t always describe the ‘action’

1. Appropriate space – listen a lot to others about what they have to say about their work.
   • Take phrase exiting in another place … and try to apply it to my space.
   • Can create images not in linear images …
   • Gives me a different understanding about the space that I am working in.

• Need to find the balance between ‘personal’ and ‘private’ … need to work from a ‘personal’ space.
• Make sure that you are ‘performing’ to yourself and you are able to do it for yourself.
• Important to have disciplines practice in order to master your craft.
• Passion for ‘theatre’ is irrational and beautiful.