Creativity Workshop:
The Creativity Workshop focuses on developing creative skills in people from all professions: education, business, the arts, sciences, and social services. We offer summer workshops in California, New York City, Florence in Italy, Crete in Greece and Barcelona in Spain. We teach people ways to develop their creativity and use it in life, work, and creative expression. We do this through a unique series of exercises in creative writing, drawing, memoir and storytelling. Many of the teachers and students taking the workshop receive financial help from their schools and can also get 3 university credits and CEUs.
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We teach from the point of view that people are by nature creative and that creativity is unique in each individual. To access and develop creativity, our workshops use exercises in: sense perception, free form writing & drawing, associative thinking, map-making, constructive daydreaming & sensitivity to our environment.
Creativity Workshop:
The workshop teaches a series of tools which teachers can implement to help students learn to develop their creative, artistic and writing skills. To this end, the workshop concentrates its exercises on the following areas:
1. Getting over fear of creativity in general and artists and writers block, in specific and gaining self-confidence in one's ideas.
These tools include exercises which help students get over 'blocks' which make them afraid to express themselves, say the wrong things, paint a bad picture, take a stupid photograph, write a foggy paragraph. The workshop works against self-censorship in the early stages of creation so that critical analytical skills can come into play later and more forcefully.
The Creativity Workshop, to this end, uses techniques of automatic drawing and writing, as well as visualization and meditation exercises.
2. Team Work
The creativity workshop believes that in sharing work in intimate groups between themselves, students (at times without their teacher) can learn to develop and feel secure in their artistic and writing endeavors. We work with developing interchangeable groups of two and three where students 'whisper' and share their work in progress together and make a pledge to keep it between themselves. In this way, the beginnings of creative work and self-expression can be explored and shared without fear of judgment. This attitude is vital for embryonic ideas to grow. This work is based on the secret worlds that small children develop to escape into their imaginations and away from the world of adults. Once this world is secure, it is much easier to take the raw material generated by students and talk about the technical and analytical modes of developing it.
The Creativity Workshop involves several modules in which teamwork, secret worlds, group brain storming and creative free association are explored.
Creativity Workshop (cont.):
Every creative and analytical project has a process or 'way'. To this end, the Creativity Workshop teaches teachers how to make room length journey maps or scrolls with their students of the process and progress of their work. The maps, which are a visual and written representation of the on going work in the classroom, helps the student see where they are in their projects and where they can go with them. The end project of the Creativity Workshop is a journey map in which participant makes a giant multi media map of a project, a story, an image, or the workshop, itself and takes the other participants of the workshop upon a walking journey through the map.
4. Free form writing and automatic drawing
Teachers learn how to use these techniques with their students in order to help them find innate ideas and forms in the free association that they can then develop and edit for final projects.
5. Day books
We teach the methods of keeping a day book of sketches, ideas, emotions, quotations, etc and using the book to do fifteen minutes a day of free form automatic writing and drawing. We then teach teachers how to guide students into how to read and use these books to create student projects.
Creativity Workshop (cont.):
6. Storytelling
Storytelling, be it visual or literary, is vital to how we perceive and share our perceptions of the world. We do several exercises with telling stories with found objects and also by interviewing each other and then 'becoming' the other person. These exercises also teach listening skills, which greatly enhance the storyteller's ability to weave his/her web.
7. Changing perceptions
How we see is important to what we see. We teach a variety of exercises aimed at altering perceptions physically (through cut out shapes, kaleidoscopes, telescopes, microscopes) and emotionally (through fairy tales, memoir writing or inter-generational interviews), which assist students in broadening their sense of the world they live in.
8.Using your environment
We teach participants how to use their natural and urban surroundings to generate ideas. Exercises to be done in local cafes, libraries, cafeterias, woods and mountains show that inspiration can come from the most usual and surprising of places.
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