What is creative practice?
I am proposing the term “creative practice” to bring together two areas that I believe are intimately linked: The art of practice and the practice of art.
For me, the difference between art and practice is not essentially about the role of the spectator. Both art and practice have private aspects and public aspects, intertwined and codependent. Perhaps we could say that both art and practice are born in private and consummated in public, even though the nature of these births and consummations are quite diverse.
Instead, the difference between art and practice is speed. Specifically, the rate at which techniques are changed. This is why I place art and practice along a spectrum ranging from the very fast to the very slow.
A quick way to think about this is that yoga changes more quickly than people tend to admit, while theatre changes less quickly than people tend to admit. At first glance, the yogic asanas seem to be very old and unchanging – “traditional” – while the blocking of a theatre piece may have been invented very recently, over a couple of weeks. But this is already in need of complication. Some yogic positions are much more recent than is generally assumed – and some forms of yogic practice (such as Bikram yoga) are extremely modern. On the other hand, the blocking of a theatre piece is developed in relation to a long history of staging – not to mention the fact that the words spoken by the actors (and the techniques used by them) may be decades or centuries old.
What appears creative is also a very old practice; what appears ancient is also a modern invention. Even practices that try not to be creative and that claim to be based on exclusively scientific principles always involve some degree of aesthetic elaboration. And even artists who try to create from scratch work in relation to a rich history of knowledge and technique.
I don’t want to collapse the difference between art and practice. I merely want to change it from a binary into a spectrum. Some artists strive to create slow work in a fast-paced world, while some practitioners try explicitly to bring their practices “up to date.” Rather than trying to make a division between art and practice, I propose to speak about creative practices working at a range of speeds. One can take a theatrical process, for example, and slow it down, grounding it in embodied practice. Or one can take a long-studied practice and speed it up, turning it into a compositional art.
For the past several years I have been looking for language that is adequate to my own experience of creative practice as a student, teacher, performer, and – most recently – scholar. Some of this language is already appearing here, without having been defined. I hope it does not sound too confusing, and in the coming months I hope to elaborate much more fully on the poetics and semiotics of the words I am choosing to use.
I come to this need for new language from a variety of places. I studied dance with Cheryl Cutler and Pedro Alejandro at Wesleyan University and later spent two years in Poland tracing the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski’s work. As a child I performed in musicals and studied goju-ryu karate with David Shim at the Creative Arts at Park camp outside Boston. Currently I lead a small performance research group called Urban Research Theater and am a doctoral student in theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. All of this and more leads me to ask these questions.
There is much that I want to understand and to do through this forum. My first goal is to start a discussion around the idea of creative practice and to attract as many people as I can. My first invitations to join the conversation will be heavily weighted towards experimental theatre, with some contacts also in dance and song. Later, I hope to grow the “practitioner” contingent by reaching out to yoga and martial arts teachers.
Ultimately, I want this forum to be a place for activism and sharing resources as much as theory and personal reflection. There are many very basic logistic questions posed by what I am calling creative practice. For starters, the funding models and infrastructure for art are completely different than those for practice – at least in the United States. The business model for artists relies on ticket sales and foundation grants, while that for practitioners is based on teaching. The university is a place where these differences can sometimes be bridged, as can theatre ensembles that support themselves partly through teaching (such as SITI company). Movement Research’s University Project is a new and exciting initiative in this field.
Please join me in making spaces for creative practice in the twenty-first century.
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