The most creative act you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself
is the quote I picked, by Deepak Chopra. It is the cumulative fifteenth day of Kerry Nicholls Dance’s Performance Mentorship Programme at HereEast and the sixteen of us are told to stand by one of the ten laminated quotes lying on the floor; one that we feel best represents where we are, and with which we want to move forward. During the three weeks that we spent so intimately together, brilliant minds and leaders were brought in to provoke us to find truth and authenticity within ourselves; informing our practices in performance. I'm now left rattling with inspiration, curiosity, and- I am utterly puzzled about the idea of truth. Yes, truth. What, is truth? What is it to be true? I wrote about my idea of chameleonism in my last post, and now I'm wondering about truth in the chameleon. Do we, with our ever-shifting identities based on chosen illusions, have a truth? What is this essence that stays seemingly constant, when we are literally aging and changing by the second?
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes
said Mark Twain. The idea of a truth seems to imply that there is a factual sameness residing in each individual, oscillating on some kind of repetitive existence. The dictionary describes something true to be something in accordance with fact or reality. Well, facts are unmoving, static, and forever-being - which humans are not; and reality is based on individual perception. So I wonder, is it that our truths are evolving by the second? That while there might be some pure form of truth found in every present moment, that like an atom, it is always shifting ever so slightly; often rhyming with the past, but never replicating. Perhaps, the act of finding one's "truth" is an evolutionary process that has no end. That to know oneself is simply to be present with oneself. I think that while we all have an essence to ourselves that looks a lot like the same one we had as toddlers, there is something to be said about the choices we make in creating ourselves - and about creating our own truths. The act of sifting and delayering ourselves; ridding our insecurities and unwanted learned behaviours is a process that is unveiling, but is also of real-time creation. We are uncovering something that is already there, but also making decisions about what we want to move forward with.
Whether or not you have a honed skillset in the arts, I think that any human being could be considered an artist. An artist, to me (at this specifically truthful moment), is someone who creates; who believes that there are infinite facets and possibilities about any one thing, and considers it with a continual curiosity. We know it isn't about how high you can kick your leg, what kind of strings you can pluck, or how many brushstrokes you know. It is about digging, deciding, shifting, questioning, and framing; all from the within. The most creative act that you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself. I'm not talking about the creation, the end product, itself (we can talk about that when I'm in my grave). I'm talking about process and about everyday being, imagining, and decision-making. If we're made up of habits and practices, right now I choose to practice the creative act of being.
Kerry Nicholls, the brilliant woman she is, left us with this quote from Buckminster Fuller's I Seem to be a Verb as she leads us into the next three months of one-on-one mentoring with her-