I am sitting in a room.
Thus ends the Alvin Lucier reference. I am 24 hours into a creative residency at Fondation Royaumont, and I am reflecting on the gift of time.
I have been lucky in my career to participate several times in other people’s residencies, and now for the second time to have a residency ‘of my own’. A residency feels slightly different from going on a short course or development programme: a residency is free time to think and create, often without supervision and without the expectation to deliver specific outcomes. A residency is a gift of time and space from an organisation to gather with other creative personalities - or to gather all of your own creative personalities - and to sit together for a few days seeking the space beyond structured, goal-oriented conversation. It takes a few hours to get lost in true, meandering, sometimes confusing, conversation. And for me, it is mentally more exhausting than any other work I do to let my brain exist in this free-form way.
To let my brain create.
I am a trained singer. Singers are not trained to create. Singers are not trained to have creative agency. We are trained to interpret the creations of others, and not to view this as an inherently creative act in itself. In fact, two years ago, I would have told you quite confidently that I was not creative.
And then, two years ago, someone asked me what my artistic urgency was. I looked back at them blankly: what does that mean?
But I then urgently needed to answer the question. Why do we not ask this question of performers? Why do we perform if not for a great urgency - whether that is to communicate, or to exist alongside our colleagues - to connect in some form? So the extra gift of a residency for me is to catch up on lost time - to learn to create and explore - to give myself permission to think beyond the confines of score study and practice. To study how my ‘more creative’ colleagues think and work (and sometimes to observe how the time when they are not working is the most creative of all) and to absorb this into my own practice.
So here I am, mentally exhausted after a day of challenging my brain to work in a way it is not used to. And yet, for the first time in more than six months, I have the desire and energy to sit down at my laptop and write. To - in a way - create, and to try to articulate my thoughts not through interpreting the words and music of others, but through my own words.