Constraint and Creativity

So much going on - so little time to blog it. The creative process for this first version of Dis-Orientations is intense, fascinating and chaotic. The student actors are responding with incredible energy: and a depth of knowledge of the human condition that people often lose as they get older. Maybe the young are more honest.

Much of the process is in response to them as personalities and performers - they are the only tools available! Sometimes this is wonderfully liberating, when we discover particular talents or slants on an idea. Sometimes I feel that the real challenge is to find enough for all thirteen people to do - it's a bigger group than I've worked with in this way before, except in outreach work. But this too fires the creativity. Scenes and characters, even whole story-lines, are emerging which I would never have thought of if I hadn't needed to make these roles. And a lot of these are very telling. So often the constraints within which you work are what actually fires the creativity.

Four copies of Suspect arrive from Alphabet City in Toronto: a beautifully-produced, diverse and provocative book about the horrors of the post 9/11 world, with my essay on directing The Handmaid's Tale out there during the US Presidential election in 2004. Nice to see it snuggling in with Ariel Dorfman, Naomi Klein and Slovoj Zizek.