reflection #1 - hills (FA)

During Jennifer Kingsley's lecture, I observed the way she keeps a lot of room in her creative process for externalization; knowing the environment she works best in, the ways she arranges thoughts… For her, creativity is an experience. I focus on the experience too. But the experiences that we go through are very different. Like Merce Cunningham, I'm "very comfortable with chaos, and play with it in all [my] work" (Tharp, Twyla ; The Creative Habit, pg 1). Inspiration comes to me chaotically, generally out of chaos, and the creative act occurs with a necessity to solidify that chaos. 

So it isn't a case of trying to be creative in order to "increase [my] behavioral boundaries by being more flexible, fluent, elaborate, and original in their perceiving, feeling, intellecting, and responding" (Klein, Ronald D. ; An Inquiry into the Factors Related to Creativity, pg. 10). I simply get an impulse, and write a song. This idea of finding what it takes for me to be creative and isolating those things such as Klein does between Creative Behavior, Creative Environment, Creative Personality, and Creative Process; it terrifies me. It is just a classification to prelude the process. And for my own mind to work, the prelude is unnecessary, and sometimes harmful. What is there for me to give order to if there’s no chaos? 

“Hills” was written in a corner of a crowded room, where I could barely hear my own voice. For me to describe how it all came together is truly impossible. I think that with the first impulse I get to write, whether it's a story, a song, or a poem, I am really just getting news that there's something in me, already complete and polished and ready to be shown. What I have to do is find it. That is the extent of my process.