Faculty and staff associated with the Center for Creative Studies at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, engaged in ethnographic research on a charrette conducted by the UMKC Theater Department in the Spring of 2004.  The purpose of the research was to determine the social, spatial, and embodied patterns associated with creative activity.  The ultimate goal was to provide the sort of insight into “the culture of creativity” that could be used to organize future research.  The term charrette (“on the cart”) is a pedagogical tool with a deep and continuous history.  The genesis of the term can be traced to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the center of architectural education and training in nineteenth-century Paris, and its use of competitions as a means of fostering creativity.  Today the term describes various types of design sessions in which a team concentrates on a particular problem or project and poses novel solutions or creative responses.  Using a facilitator or master to guide participants, the charrette is useful for providing opportunities to define objectives, analyze a problem and create alternative solutions, while creating a space in which divergent thoughts can come to creative consensus. 

The director brought in to serve as “the Master” or mentor for the students was Tony Award winner, Ricardo Kahn, of the Crossroads Theater Company in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  The charrette began on February 23, ran through February 26, and resumed for four more days with the conclusion of Spring Break.  Twenty Masters students in the Scene, Costume, Lighting, and Sound Design program participated in the seven-day event. The play chosen by the faculty for the 2004 charrette was The Darker Face of the Earth  by Rita Dove; a complex play that juxtaposes the struggle between destiny and individual freedom in the context of an American slave-owning plantation on to the classic tragedy of Sophocles’ Oedipus tale.  The play offers a disturbing mix of antebellum history, syncretic ritual and religion, rebellion, and incest. 

The intent of this study was to develop a working definition of the creative process and isolate a set of analytical constructs that could serve as the foundation for future research. The creative process, according to Kahn, requires the building of a diving board of sorts (structure)—this is a collaborative stage involving information gathering and the learning of rules, and then it requires the individual to dive off the board (anti-structure) “in hopes of having a soft place to land.”  This is the place of risk “where one hopes that one’s instincts can be trusted.” According to Kahn: “We don’t create the boundaries.  Part of the prep work is observation.  When you observe  you see the rules, you observe the boundaries.  That doesn’t mean they are your boundaries.  There are rules—Adam and  Eve came into this world with rules.  Whether to take that apple or not” (Kahn interview 2/24/04). Kahn substantiates the point that creativity is ultimately both a collective and a cultural process:  “Interpretation is key in life and as long as interpretation is key, creativity on one side or another becomes

necessary.  The fact is that art and artistic talent, I believe, comes from a source higher than yourself” (Kahn interview 2/24/04).

Through our observations, we determined that creativity is culturally bound and resides in the space between embodied boundaries.  Inherently unstable, this space contains tension and conflict, danger and chaos.  Creativity requires a capacity to move between boundaries, to challenge, at an embodied level, the stability of categories that can come to feel limiting and confining.  Because embodiment is itself a contingent process, because the production of meaning is latent and immanent, creativity cannot be forced and it cannot be mapped.

Shannon Jackson, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Sociology/Anthropology, UMKC College of Arts and Sciences and Margaret Brommelsiek, Ph.D. Director, UMKC Center for Creative Studies