The Things I Love About "Making"
my personal "preference settings" for creative living
I’ve been involved in lots of theatre-making over many decades. The biggest piece of theatre in terms of scale involved more than 130 performers from the Northern Suburbs of Adelaide in a promenade production [“Bingo Boogie Cabaret Charade”] that inhabited four stories of a custard factory. The performers often outnumbered the audience!
The smallest pieces I’ve made, have involved 1 to 2 performers presenting to small audiences in intimate settings.
Both the biggest and the smallest works took the same level of creative and temporal effort from me as a lead-maker, director, deviser and conceptualist. Two to three years usually to conceive and manifest each of these works.
Big or small, these theatre pieces are always the outcome of thoroughly explored, deeply thought-through, meticulously rendered and lovingly shared creative journeys.
I must say it is the small and intimate works that bring me most joy and satisfaction.
20 PREFERENCES IN A CREATIVE LIFE
I love small and delicate things more that big loud cumbersome things.
I value “not knowing” or “unknowing” more than “knowing”.
I relish learning new skills through a need to use them.
I like to discover the extraordinary that comes from the ordinary.
I prefer NOT to know where I’m going when I start out.
I enjoy the adventure of retrospective meaning-making.
I like to follow my nose down rabbit holes without knowing what I might find
I enjoy giving my time to slow, meticulous processes of making.
I like to play in sandpits of possibility to see what survives.
I’m excited to play with people who are open, passionate, humble, joyful and stricken by the same creative urges that I have.
I enjoy limiting the palette and digging deep.
I strive to make works through partnerships and collaborations that cherish reciprocity and value sharing.
I adore generous engagement that’s relatively free of ego and resentment.
I like small teams where complicity rules and passion reigns.
I’m always delighted to discover quirky and unexpected outcomes.
I’m inspired by the wonder of human consciousness.
I mainly choose to invite the work to direct me rather than me direct the work.
I’m attracted to those things that offer oblique and oddball insights.
I’m not motivated by making money or creating “commercial” product for the sake of attracting audiences.
I always hope to be involved in making beautiful work.
Yes, there are: loves, likes, hopes, delights, attractions, motivations, adorations, values and inspirations; all sorts of drives and feelings expressed in that list - and they all hanker for expression - to be acted upon and lived out.
I am a person who NEEDS to have a CREATIVE PROJECT on the go. If I don’t, my life feels empty and directionless. That’s just me. It’s who I am.
I NEED A PROJECT!
SEVENWELL.ORG ~ “In the Process of Making” has fulfilled me in all sorts of ways for a long time [5 years] and it will continue to do so for quite some time to come.
To be honest it’s become a kind of opus for me - an odd-ball odyssey that has allowed me to give expression to all the things I love about living a creative life.
I’m grateful for its existence.
On Monday - 7/7/2025 - Episode ONE is launched!! Yay!!!
You can listen to it on your favourite podcast platform OR at sevenwell.org
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ONE HUNDRED GENUINE LISTENERS
If I can find 100 genuine listeners to take the podcast journey with us (Jon & I) over the next 14 monthly episodes (30 minutes a month) I will be totally chuffed and forever grateful!
It’s not for everyone BUT IF IT IS FOR YOU then there’s plenty to take from it.
The Audio-Clip below is a SEVENWELL SNIPPET from Episode ONE of our “In the Process of Making” PODCAST
TRANSCRIPT of SEVENWELL SNIPPET: Artistic Compulsion
Artists are people who are just not happy unless they are investigating and unravelling something of interest.
These are people who find a way to manifest the experience of their investigations in some form or other, whether it be a performance, a painting, a song or whatever.
I’ve come to accept that I’m one of these people – I am hooked on play. I love to dream up stuff. I adore being drawn into creative activity by curiosity and the pleasure of collaboration. “I love it!” It’s my lifeblood. I have to have a creative project on the go if I'm to be happy.
It gives me purpose and it gives me direction. I think of it as a star on the horizon that I can point my paper boat towards. And to be frank, without it, I get kind of antsy. Sick even. At worst depressed.
I feel this drive in myself and I witness it in others… this powerful inner motivation to make … to create…. to give expression to … it’s been there forever … even as a kid in our backyard presenting plays in the chicken shed.
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