Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] We were
all born creative. Creativity is inside us. Being creative can actually change the way you
experience life. You can see possibilities
instead of problems. You can feel this
immense joy and pleasure that comes from
the process of creating. Yes, as a result, you can also appear more
competitive in the job market. In this class, we
are using our heart, body and mind to go
through a journey of really exploring
our creative selves. You are taking part in arts based projects that
will help you build your creative
confidence and later be able to claim a future
that excites you. My name is Kelly, and I have completed my masters
studies in creative arts. I was very lucky
to have amazing, very inspiring professors who
helped me understand that unleashing your creative self
can help you see the world, the way you connect
with others or even work from a whole new
different perspective. Now, I can't wait to start
this journey with you. Are you ready? Let's go. [MUSIC]
2. Creating Possibilities: [MUSIC] Something great about thinking creatively
is that you can turn everyday objects
into imaginary ones. It's the idea of moving
from what something is to imagine what it could be. This is called
possibility thinking. As an aircraft famous
creative theorist underlines, "It's the ability to think of possible different
shapes or forms, a situation or
something could take." This is what we all
used to do as children. We created our toys
from things we would find at home or at the park, using items in different ways, letting our
imagination run wild. If I show a kid a stick, they will rarely say
that it is only a stick. They might see it
as a magic wand, a treasure finder, a sword, a musical instrument. This is what we do now too, in away when, for example, we open the fridge
and we think of different combinations
of ingredients in order to make something
to eat or when we style our clothing items in different and unexpected ways. It is true, however, that as we grow older and we
want to fit in the society, we might start
thinking of what is acceptable and what is not. We start distancing ourselves
from this playful take on life, and we, in a way,
shrink our creativity. We will elaborate more on
this in the following videos because once you let this inner creative
instinct free to play, then you can think of more possibilities in
your personal life, in your career, and generally, the way you
experience the world. To awaken this creative
instinct a little bit, we're going to play a game. I want you to think of a brick. I will give you one
minute to think of how many different
things this could be. You can pause the video, get ready to write
everything down. Your time starts now. [MUSIC] Once you start practice
creative thinking, it will be easier to generate new ideas and to think of unexpected solutions
to problems. It is amazing to be
inspired by your own way of thinking and to make yourself an added
source of inspiration. In the following video, we will see how we
can put all these in practice through a messy
and fun art project. [MUSIC]
3. Embracing Mistakes:Messy Painting Project: [MUSIC] We have been raised in a society that
connects mistakes with failure. I've always been a good student, scoring high grades, being praised by my teachers
about my excellence. Growing up, I started thinking, what if I make a mistake? What if I don't do that
well at this test? Will it change who I am? What I worth? This slowly grew their
fear of perfection to me and I don't think this
only happened at my skill. I think as students, we all have learned
to avoid mistakes. This didn't stop to
our student life, it continues to adult life
where people feel the need to show how happy they
are and some really are, and that's absolutely great. But we can't be only happy. I feel that as a society
we have a discomfort, yes, we are going through
difficult times or that our lives aren't perfect
because they actually aren't. It seems like we have
been focusing more on the final product like
did you get an A? Did you get the job? Did you achieve this? Did you achieve that? We have forgotten focusing
on the process of making, on the process of creating. Art for example, isn't always what you see
as a final result. It's also about the
passion you put into it, the feelings it can
create to others. The sense is the take part
in the process of creation, how your soul was
involved into it. Focusing on what you can touch, see, hear, smell, or taste while creating or generally focusing
on your senses in your daily life can help you become more connected
with your inner self. You become more aware of what is happening around
you and you feel more connected with your surrounding environment
and your center. Creating while
being connected to your senses can help you feel immersed in
what you're doing, feeling passionate
and excited about it, forgetting about the fear of perfection and what
is right or wrong. I feel that it is very important that you
embody this too. So we're going to have some serious fun and
it's going to get messy. You will need a piece of paper, tempera paint, finger
paint, watercolor, or any kind of paint
that lets you paint with your fingers because this
is what we're going to do, we're going to paint
with our fingers. If you feel comfortable enough, you can also close your eyes. It might help filling more
immersed in the whole process. I want you to remember that the end result is of
no importance here. The goal is not
to make something that looks perfect or beautiful, the goal is to let your mind free to create what you
feel like creating, involving the senses
in the whole process. Place some paint on your paper, and when you finish, get ready to go
through the paper, touching the paint with
your fingers and hands. Forget about the end result and focus on the sense of touch. You could also hear
the sound the paint makes traveling
through the paper. How can you involve the
whole body in the process? How does the pain feel? Has it got a specific texture? A texture that you would
like to explore maybe. Once you finish, I
want you to consider, how did it feel not caring about the end result,
liberating, scary maybe? I would love to see
your experiences, so please feel free to share
your own creative processes. I believe that this will help all the community here
and it will be very interesting to exchange
ideas also about how this process
felt for everyone. I want you to remind this to yourself every time you
worry about being perfect. Then we'll lose some
of the fun trying to fit in the boxes of
what is correct, or beautiful, or acceptable. [MUSIC]
4. Exploring The Unknown: Embodiment Practice: We were talking about
confidence and the idea of taking risks with my
therapist the other day, and something that
she told me and made me think for a while, was that confidence as a term is quite general and superficial. We were talking about how we start truly embracing ourselves when we stop believing that
in order to value ourselves, we have to maintain a
steadily perfect image of us. It is when we dare to change, explore new parts of ourselves, that might be imperfect too, and we learn to construct our identity from the
beginning with them, but we truly learn
to love ourselves and develop what we
call confidence. It is the same with creativity. We cultivate our creativity when we accept that during
the creative process, there will be mistakes and instead of being afraid
of making a mistake, we choose to take risks and explore what can
emerge out of it. For our lives, we have
all dealt with change, moving to a new city, finding a new job, breaking up and having
to restart our lives, and unexpected
pandemic apparently, changes happen all the time. The thing is, how
do we view change? How can we welcome changes and the element of the unknown
that they bring into them? Learning how to take
risks can help. As children who would be
a really risky and wild, who would go on adventures,
finding new paths, new games or walking barefoot,
building tree houses. Growing up, we start
forgetting how to be playful. We start moving
ourselves away from the innate wildness
that is in us. Research, on the other hand, shows that play is in
the core of creativity. Play cultivates imagination
and helps us move to imaginary worlds full
of endless possibilities. When we are able to see multiple and different
possibilities, we can take risks more easily. We can think of the
different options we have if something
new that we try doesn't work out and instead of focusing only on the
possible failure, we can also think of the
different alternatives that we have in our hands if things
don't go as planned. Learning to take risks can
help us try new things, see things from a
fresh perspective. Get out of our comfort zone. Leaving new experiences,
learn from our lives, and later embrace
what might emerge. To get familiar with
a sense of walking into the unknown and
of taking risks. We're going through
a body practice. Understanding the world
through our bodies to our path from
our minds is highly essential and it
can help us have a richer idea of what is happening in the world
and of why we feel. Researchers who have focused on body studies underline that the body can be seen as the central way of
thinking and learning. Instead of thinking
only with our minds, we should train
ourselves to embrace the thinking that happens
in our bodies too. Our bodies and our
hearts can hide a lot of messages that might
not be easily seen, only taking into consideration the thinking that
happens in our minds. What we'll need for this body
practice is a large space, somewhere in your house
or even outdoors, if you feel comfortable
going outside. [MUSIC] First, let's prepare our body for these
body practice. Stretch your neck, arms up, and stretch your body. Arms down and sideways. Slowly, start moving
closer to the ground, and imagine that you are
slowly becoming a wolf. A wolf exploring
its environment. Looking in different
directions aware of predators, but still trying
to find new paths, making safe but brave steps. Continue this process
as long as it takes. When you have explored all
the different directions, get ready to howl
your fears out. Being able to embrace change, accept it, learn from it, empower yourself through
it can make you feel more confident about your goals in life and what
you can achieve. I'd like to end this lesson
with an excerpt from a book I am currently reading
and I am in love with that, which is called Women
Who Run With Wolves. It says, go out in
the woods, go out. If you don't go
out in the woods, nothing will ever happen and
your life will never begin. [MUSIC]
5. Connected To Your Present: Nature Dance: [MUSIC] Being able to live in the present
moment and attend to the messages that
are sent to us by our inner world and the environment can help
us enhance our creativity. Actually, being immersed in
the present moment can help you see creativity in a
new and expanded way, which apart from helping us
think far more creatively, it can also help us live our daily life in a more
empathetic and shared way. For this discussion here, I will draw on post -humanism. For those of you who might not have heard this term before, post-humanism
de-centers the human and sees other than humans, such as animals or even
objects as equally important. Based on that Carry Chapel, who also happened
to be my professor in my master studies and I'm
really grateful for that. She introduced a new term for creativity in an
effort to include other than humans as equal participants in
the creative process. She presented the term of
post- humanizing creativity. Moving from a more
human-centered perception of creativity that it was already existing to a more
post-human one. That means that not only humans, but also nature or
everyday objects, for example, can also
play the role of creative participants in
the creative process. To give you an example, when a dancer is
dancing outdoors, he or she is not the only creative participant
in the creative process. The ground they are dancing on, the trees around them. The clothes they are wearing
can also play this role. Or for example, when you draw, cook or ride, you're not the
only one who is creating. The materials you're using, the objects around you
can also co-create with you what will be the final result of
your creative process? The reason I am so amazed by this perspective
of creativity is because it lets you
see the world in a more communal
and symbiotic way. De-centering our ego
while creating can let our imagination of
creativity flourish. Thinking of objects and other
non-human subjectivities as possible participants
in the creative process can lead us think of new, more possible ways to create and see the world
as a possible place that everything that
is part of it can actually participate in
the creative process. We might wonder, for example, how can a dancer create a wave nature rather
than simply art nature? In this concept of creativity, apart from expanding the
creative possibilities, as we can view more
subjectivities as possible participants in
the creative process. It also makes us realize
that we are only strands of this web of the world
and that we need to work with others in
order to survive and live. We have to respect them
and take care of them. We don't own the environment. We are only parts of it
living together with others. We should take this into
consideration while creating. Because we're creating to make this world a more
aesthetically beautiful, ethical, and united space. For this lesson, I would
like you to go outdoors and observe a natural item that
catches your attention. It can be a leaf, a pine cone, the
trunk of a tree. I want you to use your
senses [MUSIC] and observe everything
about it carefully. How does it feel to touch it, can it make any sound? How does it smell? What is interesting
about its shape? After you have finished observing the item
you have collected, I want you to think
of a movement this item invited to
create with your body. You can maybe use
different levels, go up and down. You can use different dynamics, make a strong movement
or a lighter one. Or you might want to create
a shape with your body. This is what I picked from my work and looking at
the different directions, the pine needles
were pointing to. I felt as a child wanting
to explore different paths, ready for a new adventure. This is what I tried to do with my body pointing with my arms at the different direction cited above what I was
about to explore. Once you have finished
your creative process, I would very much like you to share your
experience with us. Don't hesitate to ride
or show us a video maybe from the movement you have created with this
natural object. This can be an opportunity
for us to think of how humans and other than humans can form a
dialogue and create together something
that is beautiful and how actually this
can encourage us to see the world in a more
communal and symbiotic way. [MUSIC].
6. Towards a Creative Future: [MUSIC] [inaudible] present
from this shared and symbiotic lens
as described in the previous lesson means that our future cannot
be pre-determined. The dialogues that
can emerge with our environment are endless, but connections
that can be created out of this are numerous, and what we can get out
of it is unpredictable. You can never know what
can be your source of inspiration and what you're
going to create out of it. What we know now is uncertain and it is always
subject to change. Science, for example, has proven it over the years as what was considered
as certain before, changed and new questions
are always being generated and tested
through experiments. Allowing the future to emerge, rather than designing it, lets more new ideas and
concepts to be born. Sometimes by designing
everything perfectly and being very devoted to achieve our goals, following
certain steps, we narrow down the
possibilities or the ideas that could
come to one's mind, or the possibly highly
creative dialogues that could emerge during
the creative process. I'd like to invite you to
pause for a minute and think. What if I don't design my future goals in a
very specific way? What if I practice listening to the
messages that are sent to me by the environment
in a different way? What if I become more
open to what can emerge and create
something new out of it? To align your
thinking to happen, we have to learn how
to listen differently. That is to include
non-human participants in the discussion and thus
in the creative process. Post-human researchers
claim that if we learn how to
listen differently, we will be able to see the world and thus the creative
process too, in a more expanded
and shared way. We have to step back our ego and see what the
environment has to tell us. We can not design our
future perfectly, but what we can do is to
learn how to listen in this more shared
and connected way and thus make space for a more creative and
expanded future to emerge. This knowledge and
understanding shouldn't and isn't only
happening in our minds. It is also happening
in our bodies too. Everything we live, experience, or feel, is painted in
our bodies in some way, and as we analyzed in
the previous lesson, there is a lot of thinking and understanding that is
happening in the bodies too. In this, it will be
really helpful to free our bodies from moving only in specific and expected
ways and let them make playful and more
unexpected movements too. I know that it is not
practical to move in unexpected and playful ways at the supermarkets or at your
workplace, for example, but when you are home alone or with people you
feel comfortable with, you can practice
moving your body in ways that didn't feel
familiar before. [MUSIC]
7. Final Thoughts: A reminder before you leave,
often creative people, people with innovative ideas, or people with unique style, are treated as weird, crazy, not in touch with what is
happening in the real world, but let me tell you something. Great ideas are not born by
fixed and ordinary thinking, creative changes
don't come out of living and thinking in
a very specific way. Walk into a museum, and observe the different
paintings and artworks. How many people have already
thought that what they see has no meaning
or no value to them. How many well-known artists
have been discouraged to put their art out there in the world because people could
not relate to it. Not all people will
understand you, and that means that you're
doing something really well. Believe in what you're creating, work for it, be passionate about it, make love to it, know its strengths, and what you like about it, and I am sure that in the end, you will get what you want. It was great being on
this journey together, good luck in your next creative
journeys, bye for now.
Kelly Stavridaki, Arts facilitator and Educator
