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The Green Room / Re: Who are we, anyway...?
« on: May 25, 2011, 12:28 pm »
I think you are confusing creativity with simply reacting. To me, creativity always comes from knowledge and experience, just as the freedom to create brilliance often comes from having boundaries. SMs are successful in solving crises because we have proactively trained ourselves for any eventuality, whether it's a blown fuse or the sound system crashing or covering an actor's track due to sudden illness / injury, but in a real life situation, it takes inventiveness. We have to be able to roll with whatever happens and make it work. When my sound system went down during a show, I talked my crew through finding things to stand in for the life and death sounds, relaying info to the cast, relaying solutions to the board op and the TD, letting folks know which cues were or were not going to happen - that is creativity. It came from my experience and training which generated a creative solution. Similarly, my knowledge- and experience-based creativity in nontechnical skills has convinced actors to go on stage with people they hate or in situations that terrified them needlessly (like being in front of an audience), solved costume or set shift issues, trained understudies or gave notes to performers whose acting language didn't match the directors, etc etc etc. Our job requires both halves of the brain, both sides of the table, both creative and technical.
I think SMs are the most creative people on the planet. We know how to make things work on a dime, we see 100 uses for an object that no one else has considered, we stay calm in crisis and, like MacGyver, defuse the bomb with a paper clip. Just as the definition of luck is preparation meeting opportunity, creativity is knowledge and experience meeting challenges. And, if we are doing out jobs well, like Fred Astaire it looks easy, as if we aren't doing anything. So yes, I think we use our creativity all the time.
I think SMs are the most creative people on the planet. We know how to make things work on a dime, we see 100 uses for an object that no one else has considered, we stay calm in crisis and, like MacGyver, defuse the bomb with a paper clip. Just as the definition of luck is preparation meeting opportunity, creativity is knowledge and experience meeting challenges. And, if we are doing out jobs well, like Fred Astaire it looks easy, as if we aren't doing anything. So yes, I think we use our creativity all the time.