This past Friday I went to a meeting with about 40-50 people – actors, directors,writers, composers, producers – and after hearing the actors sing a song each, we were split into teams, given a theme and told
“Go write a 10 minute musical. And it will be produced and performed the following weekend.
Oh and you have 48 hours for a first draft.”
Well my team’s show is going pretty amazingly well (there are 8 teams) and you’re all invited to it this coming Sunday and Monday evening 7 and 9pm in New York City.
Check Raw Impressions for info/tickets. It will sell out. I’m in the event RIMT#19-Guitar-based music theater – “Grifters, Drifters and Hustlers.”
And there’s something about creating as quickly as possible. A teacher/mentor of mine says “Write Like Mad!” And I was like, why? It’s only an exercise. “Well, you’ll one day be in the situation where you have a string quartet to write/orchestrate in 24 hours. Get in the habit of writing as quickly as possible.”
It’s good advice. Most commercial jobs I’ve worked on in the last 5 years have been,
“We need it yesterday! Can you give us a broadcast-quality produced demo by the end of the day? And if we like it, you’ll have time for revisions.” (perhaps another 24 hours.)
There’s a lot of talk about quick decision-making lately. The Boston Globe ran an interesting article summarizing the whole state of this recently Malcolm Gladwell (famous for “The Tipping Point”) has a current best-seller “Blink” about how we make decisions in the blink of an eye and then spend hours, days, weeks and even months rationalizing, justifying to our conscious-left brain why it’s the right decision.
I find that when you shut down the editor in your brain and just create as quickly as possible, you reach for intuitive, instinctual choices that really are at the core of your “true voice.”
As the great teacher of composition, Nadia Boulanger once said, “Never ignore the obvious.” and “Everything we know by heart enriches us and helps us find ourselves. If it should get in the way of finding ourselves, it is because we have no personality.”
Word!