Panel explores enigma of creative process

The question might have evaded the two musicians, two writers and a visual artist had they not been sitting side by side comparing mediums. Instead, the strangers came together to dispel an enigma -- the enigma of the creative process.\nSeveral of the out-of-town artists came in part because they were artistically connected to events during ArtsWeek -- an umbrella term for the group of arts events that began Feb. 10 and will end Feb. 20. \nThe theme of their talk is the theme of ArtsWeek.\n"We thought every event has a creative process behind it," said Michael Wilkerson, coordinator of ArtsWeek. "So it seemed natural to have a panel on the creative process."\nThe panel cut across the disciplines of music, writing and visual art, and the members sat at a long table with three microphones perched in the John Waldron Arts Center. About 25 people turned out to hear them speak.\nColin Teevan, translator of "Bacchai," which finished its run in the Wells-Metz Theatre last Saturday, said Greek plays lend themselves well to constant reinterpretation. He said the decision to clothe the Bacchai characters in anime-style dress had nothing to do with him, it was a directorial decision. In the original 2002 London performance, the characters wore burqas. \n"Usually to me, there's a key starting point," Teevan said about the creative process. "I see it as connection ... you see two apparently (disconnected) things and you see the connection."\nTeevan has also rewritten "The Illiad" to be the story of the coach of the Irish team quitting in the wake of the World Cup. \n"I don't like issue-based theater," he said. "I think the (role) of theater is to present an argument. I think it's a (dialogue) between the performers and the audience to make those connections clear."\nMarsha Estell, playwright of "HEAT," which is playing at the Bloomington Playwrights Project through Feb. 26, said the idea for "HEAT" came to her on the hottest day of that year in her Chicago apartment. \n"It started years before, just watching older women and watching the way they made the world go round," she said.\nShe said "HEAT" is a play about healing, and the connection women have with each other, especially those in the same family. She said it was a simple story, with a lot of levels.\n"This was the easiest play I've ever written," she said. "Because it just unfolded before me ... It was like magic."\nSusie Ibarra, percussionist of the Susie Ibarra Ensemble, composes jazz and has been collaborating with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa since 1998, who was not present at the talk.\nShe said often Komunyakaa would fax her the poems, and then she would compose to them.\nAll the artists put emphasis on the community aspect of creating art. Many of the artists said they had strong support networks in their fields.\nMargaret Dolinsky, an IU faculty member and visual artist, now works closely with computer programmers to create visual reality art. She described her work as very colorful, a cross between modern and primitive.\n"Support as a word has really changed a lot for me," Dolinsky said. "Before it was from other artists, (now) it means cold hard money."\nTeevan said the theater culture in the United States is much more cold and lonely than in Great Britain, where he is from. He said the concept of artists supporting each other there is almost an institution.\n"It's very hard to discover talent in a purely commercial world," he said. "That starts the marketing and you work backwards to the play." \nMost of the artists talked about the places they found inspiration. For Susan Swaney, a conductor and arranger in Bloomington, it was having conversations over coffee. For Estell, it was riding the train in Chicago. She said she takes down snatches of conversations, and descriptions of the people around her.\nTeevan said the creative process should flow naturally.\n"If it's working, don't question it ..." he said. "But I think structure is very much in the craft (of writing plays) ... We have a very innate sense of story development."\nHe also said humans possess this sense of story development as children, and that as adults they must work to return to that state.\nDolinsky said she called this process "flow," after a book of that same name by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.\n"We all know how to get out of flow, but we don't know how to get into it," she said. \nToward the end of the panel, the discussion turned toward the issue of whether creativity can be taught. \n"We struggle over how to teach someone to be creative," Estell said. "But I think we can teach people to just get out of the way of the piece."\nTeevan said a person can teach another the craft but not the creativity behind the craft. Swaney said openness was necessary.\n"Be open to the other dots that are not part of the line," she said. "(Don't) have the blinders on."\nAfter the talk, people hovered over the refreshment table and spoke one-on-one with the panelists.\n"I really appreciated how honest and transparent and human these people are," said IU graduate Kyla Kethcart, who now teaches drawing and painting at DePauw University. "Because I think creativity is very mysterious (to some people). It's not mysterious."\n-- Contact Arts Editor Joelle Petrus at jpetrus@indiana.edu.