Musing on Devising

Devising is hard.

Really hard.

Just when you think you have figured out the nature of the beast that you are creating, it changes its face again. Something shifts and your footing becomes unsteady for a moment. But we must reassure ourselves that we will find ourselves in a stronger position after we grapple this new but familiar creature, even if we are not fully convinced that it is true.

It is an act of bravery then - or of extreme arrogance - to forge ahead anyway. In spite of our fears. Or, perhaps, because of them.

Bravery and vulnerability are so important to the process of making a new piece of work; we have to put ourselves and our creative ideas out into the world with no clear idea of how that world will receive them. In staging a classic work, Shakespeare for example, the story is always there to fall back, already written, potentially already clear in the mind of an audience. But there is no such safety net with devised work. Sometimes every decision is agonised over, all its possible consequences are turned over and weighed up for fear that it will be the wrong choice. There is so much pressure to create the ‘perfect’ show.

But maybe we should just trust our guts a little bit more.

We have to ask ourselves, I think, whether it matters if we fall when the structure we fall from was built entirely from the ground up, with our own toil and sweat and probably tears. Isn’t the making of the thing enough?