Nick Keenan asked – a week ago – how we (that’s you) teach synthesis. I think I teach it, obliquely, like this.
I teach the value of reflexivity and awareness: what am I doing? What choices am I making? What am I taking for granted? Part of that process is the belief that sometimes you can only discover what you are doing when in the midst of doing it – the pattern, the rhythm, the game reveals itself only in the act of play.
I teach an awareness of impulse – that risk-taking, improvisation and play are key to creative problem-solving; I encourage students to be boring and obvious in the hope of giving even small ideas the chance to breathe and develop; I tell them that waiting for the Big Idea to appear, fully-formed, is nearly always disastrous. (I also tell them to stop acting, and not to entertain me.)
I preach that the creative process involves trial and error, and try to show that I mean it in my own process. And that sometimes your errors will end up as the best parts of your work.
I teach that analytical, theoretical or critical approaches can also be used as creative strategies – for example, that Elinor Fuch’s Visit to a Small Planet is an exercise for describing the world of a play and a model for creating the world of a play.
Part of the value of this process is watching and waiting for the moment when a particular system falls down: what isn’t being accounted for? What does this practice do that the theory doesn’t anticipate or can’t describe? Where does the promise of theory overshoot the restraints of politics, economics, the body? What can we invent in its place?
I teach through studying example: we watch other people’s work and try to discover why those decisions were made then, and how that relationship between form and content came into being. I tell students to watch professional practice and think about what they’d do differently, and what they’ll steal and re-format for use in their own work.
I teach – deliberately – through exercises and games which parallel that work, but don’t try to replicate it in the classroom or workshop. I’ll revisit other people’s choices and solutions but I won’t attempt to mimic them. I assume that there’s always something else to learn, another set of tricks to borrow, unearth, translate.
I ask myself, continually, how can I use this? Where might it fit?
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