#130: Spark And Fire: Some Lessons From The Best
The Spark and Fire podcast profiles some of the world’s great creatives. Host, June Cohen, is also a creative pioneer. She is the CEO and co-founder of the award-winning media company, Wait What. I look forward to the day that someone interviews her about her achievements. They’re many.
Earlier in the year, I set an objective. I would listen to all sixteen Spark and Fire episodes and write a long-form piece about creativity and innovation.
As life goes, it is now the 18th of September and I’ve listened to 6 of the podcasts. In other words, 72% of our way through the year and I’ve listened to 38% of the series. Yep, I am behind.
At the start of the week, I’d only listened to 3 of the podcasts. Listening to 13 felt overwhelming. I decided to follow my own research and take a starter step.
I chose 3 more podcasts, on the basis that each of them had been ranked as a ‘top 5 individual podcast’ by the ‘best of the Internet’ Webby Awards – the episodes with musician Rubén Blades, filmmaker Rian Johnson, and choreographer Bill T. Jones and his artistic director Janet Wong.
Blades has won 9 Grammy and 5 Latin Grammy awards. Johnson is the writer/director of Knives Out and the director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Jones co-founded the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and has won two Tony awards for his work on Broadway. I feel inspired (and intimated) just writing that paragraph.
You might be in finance or manufacturing wondering “What can I learn from them?”
Well, every day, consciously or not, we’re moulding our businesses, our teams, and our lives. So, who better to learn from than those who foreground creation in their work? We all do it. They just do it with more intention.
/strategy
Lesson one is to embrace the power of preparation and be present to new possibilities.
As you’ll see below, Jones’ company was invited to do a production in the heart of the pandemic. It was going to be challenging.
Jones reflected that social distancing requirements meant that “There were rules. The rules of the space. Who could go where” but ultimately that “those rules are also choreographic.”
They had to hold both the structure of the choreography, and the safety requirements of social distancing, and encourage individual dancers to make decisions in the moment.
There was the preparation, and the magic would come from each dancer’s intention to connect with another despite the separation on stage. That energy couldn’t be scripted, it needed to be found and amplified. Only so much could be stipulated. They needed to be present to the possibilities of the moment.
Likewise, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out had its most iconic moment emerge on set. It wasn’t scripted.
Johnson echoes Wong and Jones, “Part of your work is to stay creatively present so that you can be inspired by things you see on set in a way where you can find happy accidents…”
He explains, “It’s being able to strike that balance of being open to finding things on set while at the same time, keeping your hands firmly on the wheel. It’s fine to let go into different tangents and conversations and figure out different stuff, so that can lead to magic as long as you’re making sure that it’s serving the master of what the scene’s basic purpose is.”
We often want all the answers before we act. Even worse we ignore possibilities that emerge because they don’t fit the plan or we’re not paying attention, so we miss it. Other times we just want to be intuitive, to go with the flow. We end up wasting energy, going around in circles. Jones and Johnson show us that we need both. Be prepared and be present to possibilities.
This leads to lesson two, the power of action. Covid closed Jones’ dance company. When Blades recorded what was to become one of salsa’s most successful albums, the record company gathered four top New York radio DJs to tell him that it wouldn’t work.
Covid forced Jones’ dance company into isolation. He, and Wong, grappled with how to keep connected to their dancers.
How does one dance in an isolated, socially distanced world?
Especially in New York, where many of their dancers were couch-surfing in shoebox apartments.
Despite this, Wong and Jones believed something needed to be done. They went into the company’s archives and found old ‘phrases’ – movements that Jones had done when he was actively dancing – and then gave the dancers time to learn them, and then set up Zoom coaching sessions to perfect them.
Wong reflected that “In the very beginning, it felt like it was busywork. We just want to keep the dancers engaged. We don’t really know what we’re doing.”
But it was something that they could do, something that had some intention to it. It was a way of keeping engaged.
And then, by the third session, Jones started to intuit the possibility of a performance, that they could pull all the phrases together to create a new work. A work about dance in a time of isolation. And, a work that was simultaneously a link to history – they were his movement – and a revitalization – they were being performed by new bodies in a new time.
Then, the Armory reached out. They wanted Jones to produce a work appropriate to the time within the constraints of the moment. It turned out that keeping busy with the ‘busywork’ had prepared them for this opportunity. They were ready. They did it. It was a success.
The Blades breakout hit, Pedro Navajo, the one the DJs rejected, was seven and a half minutes long. The album it anchored eventually sold more than 25 million copies.
Speaking about the song Blades affirms the Jones’ company experience, “life is full of surprises, and at the end of the day, no one knows exactly how life is going to turn out to be. Some people feel that nothing should be tried for the first time, ever. Don’t pay attention to that. Don’t defeat yourself off the bat by not trying. You have to try; you can surprise yourself by being hopeful. Because life surprises you every day so why not for the good?”
Jones, Wong, and Blades created great works by continuing to take intentional action even though it was uncertain what the outcome was. By acting you create possibilities.
/self
Blades’ and Johnson’s approaches to creativity are a study in contrasts.
Blades likes to let it unfold. He says “… I write the idea down. I let them breathe. I don’t chase them. I go back to them at some point. You think you’re stumped, and it’s just, you’re chasing the deer. The more you chase it, the further away it’ll go. Let the deer stop on its own, and then you’ll find it. Just don’t chase it… And then, when I go back to it, usually, I surprise myself with how clearly now I can see what was not apparent to me when I made the note… Your subconscious has already done all the work. One day, I sat down, and I wrote the whole song. I have the original of what I wrote. There’s only one scratch. I had the song in my head.”
Johnson describes the exact opposite. He exclaims “God, it would be nice if you just tucked it away in the back of your head and it just slowly grew and then you had it fully formed at some point. Not the way it works…It wasn’t until I actually sat down and started to work out, ‘Okay, so how do I actually beat this thing out into a story, into characters?’ Unfortunately, that’s no less work after you’ve been thinking about the basic idea for 10 years.”
He tells Cohen when he is writing, he goes to the same cabin and listens to the same album all day. Very specific. Blades says that he’s written songs on the top of take-out menus. Not so specific.
We all have ways that we work best. You are who you are. Figure out how you work best and do that.
/soul
Jones has the last word today.
“Artists have an embattled relationship with the world, a world that is constantly telling them what they should and should not do. Art is often a form of rebellion. Many great works of art happen because of those forces of psychology that threaten to cut off our voice, and art is a muscular assertion that I am here, and I do speak.”
That is true for all of us. The world constantly tells us who we should and should not be, what we should and should not do. I wish you a week of living like an artist. Find ways to live your life that asserts “I am here, and I do speak”.
Karl
PS: If you want more inspiration, I have written about Spark and Fire’s interviews with George Kemp, the scriptwriter of the Pixar movie Soul, here, with best-selling author Yaa Gyasi here, and with award-winning architect Thomas Heatherwick here.