Mr. Nicholas Dragga

Dreaming Big To Focus

Posted by Mr. Nicholas Dragga, Dec 18, 2013 0 comments


Mr. Nicholas Dragga

Nicholas Dragga Nicholas Dragga

Our production manager had an iron-clad rule, “Do NOT let the artistic director see other Nutcrackers within three weeks of our own.” Don’t get me wrong, we all LOVE the creative process, but when you’ve been working on a production for six months with 150 performers, 30 crew, and hundreds of calls, making drastic changes the last week gets difficult.

Our artistic director, in all her excitement would sometimes say, “I have some great ideas! So, let’s go a whole other direction with those costumes.” Those were the 12 costumes that took 30 hours each to make…

Can anyone relate?

Again, we love the creative process, because as we all know it is through the process that great discoveries happen. We certainly do not want to minimize or squelch the excitement of our artistic director, but want to create an environment that rewards and fosters daring, creative thinking. We firmly believe that if you don’t fail every now and then, you’re not doing it right. Failure is noble. But, poor execution, laziness, or lacking of planning is not.

Creativity is not an excuse for chaos. Creativity is a discipline.

Epiphanies are a myth, or as Chuck Close said, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us show up and get to work.”

So what do you do? How do you keep the excitement and freedom necessary for creativity – or simply work with artistic director, who is in fact the boss – but still be practical and give your production team the time and structure to thrive…or survive?

We get more creative. We dream bigger. We dream big, huge - almost impossibly big…to focus the artistic directors.

Only when our production design meetings got to extremes of what we as an organization could do, did it force our artistic team to really, truly think through everything… or rely on the production team to make it happen. Of course this dreaming was a process, and was for a production over a year out (yay for planning). Further, we had a VERY crucial conversation saying, “This dream is huge, and will take everything we have, so we’ve got to get it right. Let’s really plan this, and any changes will be recorded and made for next time.”

When we were dreaming that big, the artistic director loved it, thrived, and focused in on a plan. We were letting the artistic team go crazy, but forced them to prove to us how it would happen.

So, you ask, “well two weeks from the production, did everything change again?” I can honestly say, because we were going so big in our dream, to the point we were maybe a little worried if it would work, things did not change.

We realized that all the changes were happening due to a lack of satisfaction with the artistic product. We know that full satisfaction will never occur, but we had unintentionally created an environment where we were playing it safe, or being dull. So our artistic director was trying to make it better one small change at a time. So, we pulled the Band-Aid right off, and obliterated that dynamic.

We dreamed impossibly big, which forced us to prove it could happen, which forced us to have a great, focused plan. Plus, two weeks before one production, we’re dreaming of the next one…

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