life is more than a dress rehearsal

Creation is one of the most absurd situations in which we human beings find ourselves.  Embodying a form, an idea, a concept in material reality is difficult.  And not always because of limitation, but rather of possibilities.

Some friends and I are making a few short films together for a local drama class.  It is thrilling to apply our skills to storytelling—and overwhelming to interact with our limitations.  I am becoming more and more glad for them each day, however, because these limitations spur our ingenuity onwards and upwards.  But I feel like I am lost in a Chutes and Ladders game: multiple routes and unpredictable dislocations.  Chutes and Ladders is the bomb dot com, but when you’re living it for real, it is quite a different experience altogether.

Should we rent equipment?  Ask the parents to pay for costumes?  Borrow cameras?  Rehearse indoors or out?  Re-write the screenplays to fit the children’s capacity for memorization? or push through to the final product unswerving?

The list could go on.

But the point of it all is to actually make a work of art.  A work of art that requires input and energy from everyone involved—even and especially the audience.  So in the end, we keep moving forward and forward, and one day if we reach the edge of a cliff, maybe the forward motion of our art will suddenly teach us to fly.

Can the artistic impulse teach us to fly?