Whether you are experiencing a mental block, or you generally just feel like your work is going nowhere, this post will provide you with some resourceful, effective rituals that can be applied to your daily life in order to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your creative practice.
Visualisation
Visualisation is a powerful tool that can imprint nonphysical experience into our subconscious mind as if it was a physical experience that has already happened. Most dancers and choreographers train an awful lot so this is a strong advantage when it comes to resting your body and keeping your mind active. When you visualise the outcome of something you are trying to achieve, somewhere along the way, when you get back into the studio, a movement or an ideas that you have actively visualised will slip itself into your work thus adding to your creative practice. It links to that quote “If you can see it in your mind, you can achieve it in reality”.
Understand What You Want To Achieve
Write down what it is you want to achieve through your work when you first get the idea to create it, even if it is just an idea that you are not ready to act on. What is the message you are trying to convey? What is it that you’re trying to explore? Maybe you create dance that provokes and audience to think about their own lives or maybe you want to make people laugh, whatever it is you have to understand why. When you are clear about your why, your audience can be clear about it too and therefore when you get stuck you can refer back to said writing.
Know When to Stop
Most writers, artists, musicians; pretty much anyone in the creative industry will tell you that if you are stuck you need to give it a rest before you can go any further. The same goes for choreographers. If you are creating a new dance for any particular reason and are overwhelmed with ideas, or underwhelmed for that matter, and are suffering as a result of the process it is a sign that you need to focus your energy elsewhere for a little bit. I like to do something that it completely unrelated to my goal, such as weight lifting or cooking.
Think About Others
I don’t necessarily want to promote creating your work for the benefit of other people, but it has been proven that when you visualise how your audience will respond to your work you are more likely to put in the creative energy necessary to achieve a more effective outcome. Even if this is a personal project you are totally free to get excited about watching your work back through the use of video and or showing it to friends and family. Likewise it you are creating a dance work for a competition, a showcase or any other event, you can imagine how the audience will respond to your work. Who is the audience and why would they like it?
Oftentimes people will tell you that you are to focus your energy 100% to the task at hand and that is some very good advice. However, you can also have strategies in place for when the completion of the task seems out of reach. What do you do to enhance your creativity?
Rowena x
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