Beyond the Familiar: Are We Creating or Recreating?

By ruth MALAGU

There is something interesting about being given the freedom to create.

You are given a blank space and told “What can you do with this?”

No fixed answer. No prescribed direction. Just the opportunity to imagine something, build it and make people see what you saw in your head - but what happens when we are given that freedom and still choose what we already know?

Recently, a discussion around a performance in my department made me think about this. The students were given the creative freedom to explore different themes and ideas. One of the suggestions was marriage and my first thought was not “Marriage is a bad theme.” 

Obviously it's a very beautiful theme to play with.

My question was simply  “How many times are we going to tell the same stories before we challenge ourselves to tell something different?”

Marriage has been explored repeatedly in theatre for as long as the generation that started it knows, so have themes surrounding bad governance, corruption, conflict and other familiar social issues. These themes are important and there is certainly still room to interpret them creatively but creativity should not only mean taking an old idea and finding a new way to present it.

Sometimes, creativity means having the courage to leave the familiar behind.

What if instead of asking “How can we make this familiar theme more creative?” we asked, “What have we never tried before?”

That was where my mind went to ideas like emotions that people struggle to express, unknown worlds beyond human understanding, fashion as a reflection of history and identity, futuristic societies, parallel worlds and other concepts that could allow costume, movement, dance and storytelling to work together in completely different ways.

Not because these ideas are automatically better but rather because they are unfamiliar and unfamiliar territory forces us to think.

It forces the costume designer to imagine something that doesn't already have a template. It forces the choreographer to create movement for a world that may not exist. It forces the writer to build a story from the ground up. It forces the performer to ask “How do I make the audience understand something they have never seen before?”

That for me, is where some of the most exciting forms of creativity can happen.

Theatre students are constantly being told to think creatively yet sometimes our greatest limitation is not a lack of creativity. It is our reluctance to leave what is familiar and this is bigger than one class, one performance or one department.

Every generation of students leaves something behind for the next generation. Sometimes it is a production. Sometimes it is a technique. Sometimes it is an idea.

So what if we became the generation that dared to introduce something different?

Not because everything that came before us was wrong but because everything that came before us does not have to be where we stop.

Imagine a future theatre student saying “They were the set that tried something nobody had really done before.”

That kind of legacy is different.

It is one thing to take an established idea and execute it beautifully. 

There is skill in that and it should be recognised.

But there is another kind of achievement in creating something that becomes a reference point for the people who come after you.

Something that tells the next set:

You are allowed to experiment.

You are allowed to fail at something new.

You are allowed to create outside the familiar.

And perhaps that is what creative freedom should really mean.

Not simply having the freedom to choose from several ideas but having the courage to ask whether the ideas we keep choosing are still challenging us because eventually we have to stop asking only:

“How can we make this better?”

And start asking:

“What can we create that has never been here before?”