Filed under: art, Creative Process, theatre, Visual Art | Tags: art, Artist, garbage, research and development, storage unit, theatre, trash
My storage unit was filled with show shit. That is, it was full of props, set pieces, costumes, puppets, mask molds, rehearsal materials, marketing stuff and lots of random creative remains. I hadn’t seen these things in a long while so when it began to emerge, I said, “Well, a lot of this is going in the garbage!”
Meanwhile, it’s complicated. I saved a lot of this stuff out of a sincere hope that I’d find a way to produce the shows again. I have those giant gold frames, the hat boxes and the portable racks for a show that we toured for a little while and hoped we’d tour again. I kept the materials from our creative process on The Door Was Open in case we got the opportunity to explore further. We haven’t. And those six hula hoops probably aren’t entirely necessary to keep around. Nor is the big bag of wallpaper scraps. But I kept them because I hope they WOULD be called into service again. That wallpaper was a miracle in our Research and Development process! Could I really just get rid of it? I haven’t made any theatre (in person) in years. What a lot of leftovers from my theatrical practice! What a terrible theatrical pack rack I seemed to be! I was feeling very rueful about it, truth be told.
But my dad, who was helping me move all this stuff, had a different perspective. To him, it looked like a theatrical life well lived. He told me he was proud of me for making all those shows that that stuff came from. He said it reminded him of the spaces of some theatre folk he knows (and respects). I was feeling like my artistic work had turned into trash and he talked me down off that ledge. It’s really something to watch your feelings go from trash to pride so quickly.
I was talking with a friend about this experience later and she could relate to that feeling around thinking of one’s art as trash. She talked about her body of work adding up to some crap in a closet that her kid would have to deal with someday. She tells me she often thinks about just hauling it all out to the garbage. That thought horrifies me, though! I treasure her work. I could not bear it if she threw it away and I hate that it ends up in a closet because people should get to see it!
But we all struggle with this, I suppose. This feeling that a life dedicated to creation means generating a lot of trash. Sometimes it is literal trash. In my case, I should definitely put that bag of wallpaper scraps in the recycling. That much, I think I can surrender safely. But sometimes having a body of work can just FEEL like trash. It can feel like we’re hanging on to old garbage because it’s not the thing we’re working on at the moment – but it’s not trash. Having a bunch of evidence of previous creations is actually very cool. It’s easy to forget how meaningful these things were and are, still. Don’t throw away your work. Someone will treasure it. It is not trash.
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