Working in Movement

Creativity. It brings up visions of flakey artists, musicians, poets, what have you, with the accent on flakey. Creativity is for flakes while the rest of us accomplish the serious, necessary work of living. Right?

Maybe not. It turns out that creativity is rooted in very serious situation-survival, at least according to the late Paul Torrance. Torrance was a respected academic who researched serious creativity for many years. The interesting thing is how he got interested in it in the first place. Here's a brief explanation from one of his students:

Marilyn Fryer argued that creativity isn't just an optional extra or 'icing on the cake'; it's central to human existence. She described how Paul Torrance's early work focused on survival. He was particularly keen to find out how those who survive in life-threatening situations differ from those who don't. He found that it was the capacity to be creative which characterised the survivors. This set him on a lifelong career, pioneering creative education and development.

From this perspective creativity sounds an awful lot like learning. Learning in the sense that it involves developing options and choices when it counts, doing things more than one way. The technical term is divergent thinking; discovering multiple solutions. Anyone who has done much cubicle time in the corporate world has experienced the unrelenting demand for convergent thinking; coming up with the one right answer or way of doing something. The brainwaves blog has an interesting post of this subject today, including some information on one study taking a genetic approach to creativity.

Though not from the field of creativity per se, Feldenkrais and other somatic pioneers realized this need for a divergent approach, as well as the barriers to developing such an approach. In a sense, the Feldenkrais Method strongly encourages and develops creativity in those drawn to it. But instead of a thinking approach, it's based in movement. That's pretty creative, no?