Creativity makes us human, but it needs midwifing

Photo: Rudra the archetypal Deity of creativity by Geoffrey Dunn

We like to say that we are all creative. And that creativity is everywhere. We can be a creative business entrepreneur or a politician. It has nothing to do with specific expressions but simply denotes a different way of doing things. Sometimes the word innovation substitutes for creativity. Innovation is a wonderfully resonant word for the consumer culture in which we live. Products, processes, and services are innovated, and we live in a cosmos of products, processes and services.

Creative expressions which are concerned with manifestations of an idiosyncratic, subjective, and imaginative consciousness have all but become invisible in the value systems of our times. These manifestations, which are largely artform practices such as dance, music, visual arts, sculpture, and the like, have become things that anybody can undertake.

Many years ago, I was at a dance seminar in France. It was the time when “conceptual dance” was at its height. Conceptual dance aimed to subvert the dance cosmos by proposing that dance does not require training and that its symbolic language and choreographic composition must be watered down into everyday movements. It was spearheaded by non-dancers including medical professionals. The movement has produced a challenging and worthwhile reflection on dance itself.

I sensed a kernel of discomfort and suspicion of dancing bodies that resulted in a rejection of dance as a specific domain of knowledge and inquiry. Indeed, at the seminar, dance and choreographic training was invalidated. It was ironic that medical professionals, who require many years of training to qualify in their professions, felt that they could simply claim to be dancers, and that training to qualify as a dancer was not worthwhile.

These stances are not just in the dance domain. The proposition that creative or artistic expressions are knowledge domains which are about themselves is today considered obscure and even elitist. Under a mis-directed democratization of creativity, the very nature of creative constellations has been flattened. The strike in Hollywood where creatives are fighting for the valuing of their talents is an example of pushback against the disappearance of the valuing of creative intelligence.

Everywhere we look, the creatives are not the people who hold the reins of decision-making, money, and other resources, and of the structures of the production and dissemination of their work. We may know of a few highly paid actors and creatives, and it may appear that artists are in charge. In a recent interview Susan Sarandon spoke about the conditions under which most creatives in Hollywood work where they cannot even afford health insurance.

In my view this situation is largely due to a throwaway labeling of the arts as “entertainment”. Entertainment is not a necessity; we saw this in the last three years where it was deemed non-essential. Yet is it not the arts that makes us human?

In the Netflix documentary “The Cave of Bones”, scientists stumble upon a cave that dates to about 300,000 years ago with evidence of what they call “non-human” species. The evidence points to the existence of a ritual imagination, implying spiritual sensibility. This confounds them because this kind of imagination has long been a definition of being “human”.

The source of the artistic imagination is in ritual consciousness. The language of art is not simply representing reality but to manifest the “interstices”, those dimensions that must be unearthed between our defined and templated narratives. When art has been seconded to the project of entertainment this radical role is forgotten. Art has become a holiday from the banal grind of reality, so that we can return to the grind after a brief respite.

This is why we can say that all of us are creative. This is why we subsume art into therapy, advertising, public policy, and academia. To be a doctor one must study for many years and be diligently qualified. We are all “naturally” dancers, singers, writers, and visual artists.

This is not to say that the creative imagination is not an essential human consciousness. As I said previously, it is what makes us human. Traditional cultures recognised the vital importance of nurturing and manifesting this consciousness as a central tool of inquiry and connection with Reality and Nature. However, this was not a naïve enterprise. Such a consciousness must be midwifed into expression and guided into its fullest intelligence. This was the role of ritual “leaders” such as shamans, temple dancers and other stewards of ritual expression.

When we are told that AI is going to be the “shamanic” leader of the creative imagination, it must fill us with unease. The contempt that is evident in the treatment of the creatives in Hollywood is the same contempt that mines collective imagination and holds that up as creativity. The meaning of creativity as unique, original, idiosyncratic, radical, and hitherto unknown, is all but absent in this offering of creativity.

More fundamentally, there is an intimate relationship between creativity and Body. It is not just a mental and accumulative talent. The reason why the species discovered in the cave was considered non-human is that they had significantly smaller brains than us humans. At the same time, they appear to have practiced rituals, especially around death and burial.

In my experience the archetypal and ritual imagination exists in inverse relationship to the energy of mental (brain-led) consciousness. The less we bring the mental lenses into the cave of artistic inquiry, the more the revelation of the ritual and archetypal imagination. We do not discard the mind in archetypal inquiry, rather the mind finds it proper place in a multi-dimensional invocation.

I have worked with many creatives in Body-led inquiries which have transformed the very nature and source of their creative expression whether it is visual arts, writing or sculpture. It is not random that archetypal wisdom is the imagining of Body across the cosmos as astrology, or more literally as Body as Earth in the cave systems that mirror the interior of the Body. The ritual spaces of caves invite the birth-death experiences of Body including tunnels that are like birth canals and spaces that are like wombs. When Hollywood studios speak of using “avatars” of actors instead of their material presence, the depth of the loss of Body as a site of intelligence and Reality is profound.

The Body is not accidental or optional. And nowhere is this more central than in creativity and its future. Returning Body as the source of creative expression is to reclaim the ritual and archetypal imagination that may indeed reveal we have a deeper and longer past than we thought. It may also reveal that our humanity is not located in the capabilities we have hitherto assumed, but in a consciousness that we share with other lifeforms and that is intimate in the caves of our archetypal Bodies.