I am part of a team creating an online platform titled Developmental Theater: Fearless Creativity (DT:FC). The website will contain theatre methods and processes that help people celebrate their creativity, and teach the competency skills needed to add “Fearless.” Our fundraising/people-finding campaign launches Spring Equinox, 2024. The link at the end enters a one-page website where short videos from the team members explain more. Please take a look. Please contribute. Please pass the information along to teachers and other helping professionals.
What does Fearless Creativity have to do with Spring Equinox?
Equinox and Balance
Equinox happens twice yearly, an occasion when the Earth balances day and night. It’s all about the rotating dance of Earth and her Sun. Past blogs for Equinox explore variations on the theme of balance, and links can be found at the end of this one.
Generally, people take more notice of the dramatic occasions of the Solstices, when either day or night dominates the 24-hour cycle. This obvious clarity of season is not true for equinoxes, falling in the spring and fall. The day can be both fair and warm or wet and cold, often on the same day. Flowers may or may not be blooming, and harvests may or may not be in. Equinox naturally embraces change and its ambiguities. We live in an ambiguous time calling for a return to a balanced nature, not just the heat of a summer Solstice sun.
We are part of a planet that has and will fearlessly recreate itself. Its creativity stretches from dinosaurs to giraffes, swamp moss to redwood trees, sea urchins to whales, mushrooms to volcanos. The planet is turning in space, creating day and night, and the changing weather. We are part of the planet, not living on top of it. We are formed as creative beings, able to develop and change. We are the ones who balance yesterday, now, and tomorrow.
Balanced Creativity
Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright.”
— Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being 2023
Our innate creativity is more adaptive or more innovative, depending on the individual.
- Adaptive creativity is to take what you have and make something better.
- Innovative creativity is to invent something new.
Both are equally useful depending on circumstances, and are at their best when both present in the act of creation. The goal is not a Solstice of one kind of creativity, but a Equinox balance of both.
- A painter may innovate on a blank canvas, and adapt the paints used for this specific painting.
- A steel plow arrives (innovation) and hill farmers make rows in circles (adaptation).
- A company makes highway lucent paint. Given the challenge to double the income the innovators think of glowing parachutes at night, the adaptors think of adding stripes along the highway verges (tripling income and safety).
Innovative creativity loves a blank page. Adaptive creativity will use constraints and break the rules. Both are needed to bring an idea into reality. It’s highly possible that Adaptive is more the province of what we loosely call the left brain, and Innovation of the right brain. And/or Innovation generates in the cerebral brain and Adaptation in the limbic brain. Teams exist to balance these natural forms of creativity. Our task on those teams is to listen and understand the different creative perspectives in order to create a balanced solution, together.
An Equinox Fundraiser
The gift of creativity develops differently depending on whether the environment is encouraging or repressing. If the environment has not been encouraging, it is possible to recover one that facilitates our creative birthright.
Developmental Theatre: Fearless Creativity teaches how to encourage our creativity birthright. Our overall goal and purpose is to put innovative and adaptive creative tools into the hands of teachers and other helping professionals.
Help us enable innate creativity by providing fun, dramatic ways to gain the essential set of skills needed in our rapidly evolving world. Then we each can be part of a fearlessly creative vanguard discovering how to thrive in the developing new environments and circumstances.
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