Assessment/Reflection

Having wrapped up two shows, finished the final draft of the dissertation, and successfully defended, I've finally had the time to assess my recent work and reflect a bit on the process of making theatre and conducting theatre scholarship.

Art (and art scholarship) is work. It is hard work. But it also a creative process. And the very frustrating reality of work + creativity is that the creative aspect is much more unreliable than the work aspect. That is, the muse only strikes occasionally, and the reality is that to get a show staged or a dissertation written, the worker has to get up every day and rehearse, or write, to put in the labor. And in a long and drawn out process like SDD and the dissertation, that labor greatly outweighs the inspirational moments. The key to handling this fact is learning how to best use that labor, to use it to bolster the creative, rather than a) letting it completely overrun the joy of artistic creation or b) leaving those moments of vision isolated within a muddy field.

To very honestly assess SDD, what we were very good at was the creative expansion of our vision. Where the labor should have been applied, however, was in editing out ideas that didn't work. Instead, we worked exceedingly hard to cram too many ideas in, to make mediocre ideas fit our concept, to attempt to realize amazing ideas on a nothing budget. 90% of our energy was wasted on work that was, quite frankly, not going to work.

With Room 17C, I was able to scale down the ideas to a very workable size. By focusing on movement as a site of meaning, I came closer to the precision I felt was lacking with SDD. And yet I realize that I was a few steps shy of the creative vision I needed for that piece.

Thank goodness, then, for the dissertation. What encourages me most about the dissertation is that I have continued excitement and enthusiasm for my research sites. I haven't said it all, in fact I have barely started to speak on these ideas.