Show a child a Russian doll “Babushka” and watch their delight as they open up one by one getting smaller and smaller. Each doll is more specific, more concentrated as the outer shell gives way to the inner details, and you can’t reach that detail without passing through the shell first. They’re also very cute.
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There is a particular kind of anxiety that doesn’t announce itself as fear. It arrives as a vague sense that everyone else has sorted something out and you haven’t. I’ve seen it when the subject of using AI comes up in discussions with colleagues like researchers, educators, actors. These are all people with decades of
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There are two conversations happening about artificial intelligence and creative work, and I find both of them exhausting. The first is the anxiety spiral: AI is going to replace writers, researchers, educators, artists. The work we’ve spent careers developing is being automated out of existence. The second is the dismissive shrug: it’s just autocomplete, serious
Continue reading ...In Part 1 of this blog-post series I emphasised the importance of the foundational planning phase. If you haven’t already read it, take a look before you get stuck into this part of the post. As a freelancer my work is project-based so having a system that is as powerful as Tana to interlink and
Continue reading ...It’s that time of the year; calendars and diaries are on their last pages and new ones are being offered in some shops for those who like to track the passing of time with paper prompts on the wall. There’s a sense of Auld Lang Syne, of things ending, of the old year dying and
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Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. (Ovid) There is no plan. (Daniel Pink: The Adventures of Johnny Bunko) Ounce by ounce, putting it togetherSmall amounts, adding up to make a work of artFirst of all you need a
Continue reading ...Some months ago, I watched David Berthold interview the great director Peter Sellars. Among other things, Sellars noted the possible upsides of the pandemic. “There’s an upside?” I wondered. But Sellars said something which I’ve kept front and centre in my thinking for the past almost 6 months: “The virus is our teacher.” Those five
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This is being written over 10 years after several theatre friends based in the UK and the USA Matt Boothman, Travis Bedard, ‘Old Bear’ and yours truly had been chatting for about a week on a site called Utterli – a kind of mini-podcasting application at the time. We’d turned our attention to the theatre’s use
Continue reading ...I heard a great interview this morning on ABC612 Brisbane with Sam Strong, the ‘newish’ (since last November) Artistic Director of Queensland Theatre Company. Among other things, Sam sketched out some of his ideas to make QTC a national theatre leader. Anyway, it was exciting and refreshing to hear Sam hint at his plans and talk up his
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One of the more satisfying creative projects I devised when training actors was an extended exercise which I called Flying Solo. This was designed to give student actors the opportunity to devise, author and perform a one-person showcase for their talents. The experience of creating a piece of theatre from the ground up has a few advantages for those
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