LARC- Reversing the creative process

I worked with Renata Popenhagen, a Fine Arts major, Christopher Goodpasture, a Piano major and Alex Wright, a theater major. The obvious project that the four of us could have done together with me being a Film Production major would have been to make a film where Renata did production design, Alex acted, I edited and Chris composed and performed a score. We all realized, however, that we wanted to chose a project where none of us would have to compromise our true preferred art form so we could each retain our roles. Therefore we decided to do a project that reversed the creative process by focusing on the actual process, rather then on the end result. Our project was an experiment of sorts where we were not concerned with making a singular unified piece, but separate pieces of the same theme.

I retained my role as an editor/ director, acting as the facilitator of the project. First, I looked through Renata's portfolio and found a piece that she had done in acrylic on canvas that I felt had many universal themes, but was still opened to interpretation. Here is he painting below:


To me this painting looked like rays of light stabbing a black blob. Without having Renata tell me any background on the piece, I created my own meaning and came up with the words "tragedy," "orange," "dark," "betrayal," and "hope" to describe the painting.

I then met with Alex and only told her the words I came up with to describe the piece. She brought to the table different monologues from plays that she thought fit with the emotions I conveyed through these words. After looking through Hamlet, Macbeth and Cesar, I felt that Portia's scene in Caesar most represented the painting. I then directed Alex to perform the piece in a more dramatic way than she had previously performed the piece. The character of Portia has this singular monologue in the entire play before she commits suicide so Alex and I discussed that performing the monologue in a more angry and intense manner still made sense in the context of the play.

After meeting with Alex I met with Chris to help him chose a piece that went along with the words I used to describe Renata's painting. Chris immediately knew the piece he wanted to use; a Czech piece that was written at the turn of the century that sounded to Chris like tragedy and death. The piece has lots of long pauses and Chris emphasized those moments of silence to represent tragedy, betrayal and hope while he performed the piece.

Being the sort of middle man in my group was a really cool experience for me. Previously I have been told exactly what to do as an editor and I always resented the director for giving me such strict orders as I felt like I was merely a button pusher and could not put in any of my own personal creative input. I have also been a director and I always felt like a tyrant when I am the one to take away that creative control from my crew. Directing/ editing this project was a lot of fun for me because I was able to give the three artists in my group some guidance and rules in their picking of pieces and choosing how to perform their pieces, however, each artist was still able to maintain their own creative control and make decisions for themselves.

The presentation, or the grand reveal of our experiment, was a lot of fun for me because I got to see the reactions of Chris and Alex to seeing the original piece of artwork that had inspired my words that in turn inspired their projects. It was also interesting to see Renata's reaction on how I had interpreted her painting and how she felt towards the monologue performed and the piano piece performed.

Though the painting, the piano piece and the monologue are separate pieces, it was great to see the the three art forms come together to express the same theme in different ways. There was no success or failure to our project and I believe that is what made it really fun and collaborative. I really enjoyed the whole process and seeing all three aspects to our presentation in class together was a great conclusion to our efforts!