Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'm not going to do this,
but if I were to take a running leap off of the stage into the air
and make myself kind of horizontal and stretch out the body weight
and had warned a certain swath of you to get ready, get organized, catch me,
I trust that you would.
Not because I'm confident in all of your dance-education backgrounds,
but because we're all creative in an emergency.
And creative thinking, after all, is just a form of problem-solving,
in which case I would have been their problem.
But what about when it's not an emergency,
where does that quick flash of brilliant thinking
and doubtless problem-solving go?
So I've been wondering,
Why is the pursuit of creativity -
a sort of generalized notion of creativity,
outside of any problem-solving or artistic context -
so hot right now?
Trending so robustly,
so many seekers, blogs, workshops,
weekends in the woods,
wishful mission statements.
It's in the top ten list of qualities employers are looking for.
Is our fervent, feverish pursuit of all things creative
a sign that we're lacking in it?
Or that we've got it, and we just want some more?
We're all born naturally creative,
but I'm sure that we're aware that our natural inclination
to make things without fear, shame or embarrassment
can be squelched.
Nowadays, it seems like we need a surprising amount of social permission
just to get together in a group
and make something out of yarn.
Have we divested ourselves of our capacity for divergent thinking
except in the most permissive of spaces like retreats and maker labs?
And as wonderful as these spaces can be,
I'm seeing people flock to anything sporting the creativity label
with a kind of desire and, perhaps, out of a void as well.
It seems to me that some people think that schools are killing creativity,
that they're the oppressive structure working against us.
But my experience is that any individual, in or out of a school,
without an understanding of the creative or artistic process
can, with one remark,
shut down in another that creative spark, almost totally.
I once observed a second-grade teacher
telling a boy that he needed to redo his drawing of a tree
because he had made it with all sorts of colors,
and after the assignment, she said,
"Trees are supposed to be green with a brown trunk.
Go back and do it right."
He walked slowly to his desk,
devastated.
Incongruent feedback,
feedback that doesn't align
with the original openendedness of the assignment
does something harsh to us.
It short-circuits our reasoning and our imaginations,
makes us so want to avoid it in the future
that from that point onward,
we start orienting ourselves towards what we think the teacher wants
rather than what we have to say.
And that's significant
because pretty soon we lose touch with what we would have to say,
and then that creative, expressive muscle atrophies,
and then we become a person who has nothing to say.
I work with a lot of undergraduates who find themselves in this space,
struggling to make meaning out of reality as it's presented to them.
Conformity,
if it's the result of us fearing to be ourselves or express ourselves,
conformity is fueled by incongruent feedback from uncreative people.
California is supposed to be this most creative state,
filled with nonconformists,
people who are not afraid of being themselves.
But is that true?
10% of our economy is based on the creative sector -
art, sculpture, design, fashion, TV, entertainment, architecture, etc.
The other 90%, the so-called "noncreative sector,"
also prides itself, rightly so, on being very creative.
So I always wondered,
Why for so long was California
49th in our nation for arts-education funding per capita?
Because the arts are big business.
You may not know that the arts and culture segment
added 764 billion dollars to the economy in 2015,
including a 21 billion dollar international trade surplus.
California was responsible for much of that "Made in the USA" productivity -
arts and culture -
but we had to bring in a lot of talent from other states to get that work done,
states with higher arts-education budgets.
Why did we need to do that?
We've got population,
we've got amazing diversity.
People from all over the world already call California home
and bring all these different perspectives together.
Aren't we creative enough already?
Well, you may think we've recovered somewhat from 2008,
but I don't think we ever recovered from 1978
when proposition 13 passed
and became an amendment to the California Constitution.
This proposition limited the tax rates on real estate.
Long story short -
it pulled out the rug from underneath public-school funding and resourcing,
and we've never recovered.
Recovery has been spotty and not equitable.
One of the first subjects to be cut were the arts.
Two generations of Californians have been raised, for the most part,
without any arts education in their public schools
unless they were part of that small piece of the arts-getting pie.
Your chances of getting a robust education in music and visual art in this state
are small.
Your chances of getting an education in media arts, theater or dance,
minuscule.
This from the most creative state in the nation?
I believe that we could fuel the entire creative sector of California,
which is 10% of the world's fifth largest economy,
on California labor alone
if everyone in California
had access to developing their arts literacy from K to 12,
just like we do all the other subjects, gradually, sequentially, before college.
And these creativity questions that they ask at some industries,
"creativity questions" to hire you for creativity,
they're mostly dealing with such a narrow band of creative cognition -
usually some sort of divergent-thinking exercise
like how many things can you think of based on one stimulus,
like how many things can you do with a brick.
And these kinds of questions
don't test whether you can predict or identify or generate
beautiful, intriguing or useful solutions
in a dynamic environment,
on a time crunch,
with limited resources,
working with other humans -
but isn't that what you'd like to know if you're hiring for creativity?
And since an arts education teaches all those things,
wouldn't the presence of an arts education in someone's background
be a better predictor of success in creative complexity
than how many things they can do with a brick?
Well, come to think of it,
I'm not sure that the traditional, hierarchical corporation
wants a divergently-thinking workforce.
Think about it.
I think that for many people in business,
the relationship between business and creativity
is purely economic and a little uncomfortable.
Sure, we'll take creativity, on demand -
when the bottom line demands it.
But otherwise, let's keep it in check,
shall we?
Prunes and apricots.
Valley of Heart's Delight -
Santa Clara County before it was Silicon Valley.
Just decades ago,
our entire economy
relied on the monetization of canned and dried fruit.
Nowadays, I think some businesses want to put creativity on a slab of wood,
bake it in the sun
so they can bag it, put it away, store it for later
and pull it out in little pieces when they want it,
like so much ideational trail mix.
But the creative process resists such processing,
and the artistic paradigm is not downloadable.
Ask any artist,
from the conservatory-trained to the self-taught in their kitchen,
they will say the same thing:
there is no shortcut for developing that resilient creativity
that is not context dependent
and goes anywhere with you.
Anyone who's taught knows it takes a long time
to shift someone from conformist, fear-based thinking -
like that second-grade boy will be when he's 20 and in my class,
with conformist, fear-based thinking perfected -
to who he used to be,
a courageous, creative divergent thinker.
It can take years.
But when you start to see that shift,
when someone starts to re-own their divergent thinking
and can stand by their findings, their results, their designs, their art
and say, "This is what I've made,"
without feeling the need to ask, "Is that what you wanted, Professor?"
When they can just say, "This is what I've made."
Oh - it's tremendously powerful.
And rebellious.
Because when you are strong enough to say that,
you don't care what anyone thinks.
You're outside of the stranglehold
of the social norms of approval and disapproval.
You are, as they say, free.
And that is so strangely threatening.
And attractive.
It's a mystery really, the process, the discipline -
that's what gives us that hard-earned freedom.
And the divergent thinking?
That's what lets us express our inner soul.
So I thought it might be nice tonight to gather around the hearth
of one such experiment in divergent thinking,
and I wanted to share a dance with you,
on the screen.
It's a piece I made up in the studio.
I've never shown it to an audience.
It's living somewhere on YouTube - you know, three random likes.
But this piece, we're going to read it together.
I'm not going to tell you what it's about or what I was thinking when I made it.
We're going to try to pick up on the core emotional experience we see.
I'll call out a couple of words,
and if you'll just find the word that most resonates with you,
choose it and call it back to me so I can hear it,
that would be wonderful.
So, overall, sad or happy?
Yes, it's okay if we have different answers.
(Laughter)
Free or stuck?
Right, right.
Relaxed or tense?
Pressing anger or a lament?
Light and airy or heavy and weighted?
Interiority or exteriority?
Udra question.
So you see, our mirror neurons are firing.
Our kinesthetic intelligence is awakened.
You were basically able to tell that this dance, overall,
it's kind of on the sad side,
it's heavy, there's some tension.
Maybe she's stuck - it could be a lament.
And that's because of the kinesthetic process.
I'm not the only one dancing here.
We're all dancing when we watch dance.
You actually do the dance in your mind when you watch a dance,
so art isn't up here and away from you;
it's happening inside of you when you experience it.
There's some initial research
showing that our heartbeats actually coalesce around performance.
When I first wanted to go into the studio,
I was compelled to explore this theme
that I've noticed through people I admire in history
who've chosen to remain silent during pain or persecution.
I wanted to do a dance about silent suffering,
but I didn't want to mimic people suffering -
that would make a terrible dance.
And so I chose a lot of movement and discarded a lot,
and finally I came up with this sort of like giant run that goes nowhere
and sort of stuck like a pendulum or a giant sob of the body.
Then I realized that the relationship between pain and time
is that time never passes fast enough when you are in pain.
So there would have to be sustained qualities.
And between those two ideas,
it kind of unlocked the whole rest of the thing.
And this is my divergent thinking; this is what I made.
And divergent thinking gives us something to rally around.
It gives us something to push against, something to challenge us,
to like, to not like, to have a conversation about,
and to inspire us.
And it may forever change our lives.
But the point of this is
I didn't use some abstract substance called creativity to make this.
Effective communication in any medium is always underpinned by technique,
and technique is just the tools we need to get the job done.
And every dance requires a different kind of technique,
a different amount of balance, a different kind of strength,
different kind of coordination for each style.
This style I'm doing also requires the ability to take what's interior
and exteriorarize it.
And to have an anatomical understanding of emotional resonance
and then just practical stage presence,
which takes a long time to develop.
So I practiced, rehearsed, repeated,
repeated, rehearsed, redid it -
this is probably the 20th version.
And this is the one that got videotaped to show to you tonight.
But I didn't know I would ever show it to anyone.
And really, I love this notion of failing and failing better -
Samuel Beckett -
an artist gets to fail and fail better.
So this is my least-failed version
or, aka, definitive version of the dance.
It was obvious from early on that I was going to go into dance.
Music and I just had things to do together.
There were no two ways about it.
My parents could afford two lessons a week.
I studied with my first dance teacher
for 18 years.
I wore out the living room carpet.
My parents gave my sisters and me something that was very valuable
and kind of rare in the transaction between parents and their adult children,
which was the idea of the freedom to not conform,
the freedom to find your way,
to fail, to flail, to flounder
and carve a path for yourself that might be unique.
What the arts have given me is something very real,
something very profound,
something very concrete and something very transformative,
and I feel like that shouldn't just be for the rare lucky ones
with parents willing to sacrifice or schools that have all the arts already.
So I have a plan that I'd like to share with you.
It will involve the entire community investing.
And the first thing we need to do
is just familiarize ourselves with the researched benefits of the arts.
Did you know the arts help lower anxiety, depression, loneliness
and even crime rates?
They help improve our social-emotional health
and physical health and well-being.
They help us process trauma,
develop our identities,
remember our culture,
create community -
people involved in the arts are more civically engaged.
Wonderful benefits.
Also we need to have a little talk with our HR manager
about those hiring protocols.
Maybe swap out those flawed "creativity" questions
and start inquiring about the arts-education background
of our applicants who want jobs in the creative sector.
And we need to then even the playing field
so that everyone in California in every school
gets all of the arts taught by credentialed teachers.
We can work on this.
We can fund the arts, we can give to the arts,
we can make sure artists are paid for their work.
We can get to organizations that are big,
and we can give to organizations that are small,
from those that have the galas to those that are run out of a garage,
like the place I studied for 18 years.
And after we've invested in these ways,
we can step back and look at our investments
and see how things are growing.
And what we'll find is that we have a maximally diverse workforce
with all the creative sophistication we need,
and that creative resiliency unlocked
will fundamentally change how business looks, feels and runs.
And that will fundamentally change how the world looks, feels and runs.
And when there are more artists around - let me tell you something about us.
We can fail and flail in rehearsal, but we are craftspeople,
and we are never satisfied with shoddy work.
And we love people.
We are not afraid of people.
And we also understand about something bigger than ourselves,
and lastly, we have these long-term attention spans,
which you might be longing for.
So I think it's just a question of investment.
Everyone's looking for creativity, they're blogging about it,
writing books about it,
going to workshops in the Redwoods about it,
hiring for it,
the economy runs on it.
And it just fuels our lives and makes them so much more fulfilling.
So why aren't all businesses investing in arts education?
I dare you to learn a new dance next month -
because you can.
I dare you to pick up a script, get some friends and read it -
step into someone else's shoes.
I dare you to pick up a musical instrument and make 50 sounds from it -
the good, the bad, the ugly, the strange - don't judge.
And I dare you to see a tree,
not as a circle on a rectangle
but as the semblance of lines, forms, textures, colors,
shapes, highlights and shadows that it is.
And I dare all of us to step back at the end of our career,
in all the different fields we're working in,
and gesture to the world around us and be able to say,
"This is what we made and did
in the performance called our lives.
It was the most truthful and beautiful and non-failing thing we could do.
And we're proud to show it and pass it on."
Whatever we do, let's make it artful.
(Applause)