Be a Curator
When creativity feels daunting, try curation instead.
Sometimes life gets away from you and, despite my best intentions, this past season didn’t leave much room for writing. As part of my website overhaul, I’m migrating old blog posts to Substack and recommitting to putting my thoughts on paper.
Curating past favorites is a way to get out of stagnation and back into the sharing flow. So here I am practicing what I preach by curating and repurposing - this time with my own work as the source material.
I hope you enjoy revisiting my musings from the past. There will be some new posts intermixed soon - promise!
First published January 18, 2021
Has anyone ever suggested that you “create your own work?”
If you’re like many performers, advice to “create your own work” often prompts resistance.
Singers and actors are interpretive artists. The job is to give life to the words and melodies that somebody else has written and to manifest the director’s vision. The gig is to interpret what already exists on the page, not to create something from scratch.
On The Long and the Short of It podcast, Seth Godin suggests that artists write. Writing your own material is the only way to maintain full creative control over your work.
He is correct, but writing new material requires a completely different skill set than the training of most performing artists. Thus, there is a disconnect.
As an interpretive artist, I’ve put my own spin on the phrase “create your own work,” which allows me to embrace it. For me, creation often appears as something quite different that filling a blank page with original ideas.
Art is more than a binary of creativity and interpretation. There is a third option on the spectrum, a sweet spot on the Venn diagram where creativity and interpretation overlap.
For me, “create your own work” has always manifested itself, not as filling a blank page, but rather as pulling together an assortment of pre-written pages in order to create something new. In other words, I curate.
When you go to an exhibit at a museum, the curator does not make the display items from scratch. The curator’s role is to select already existing objects and to arrange them together in collaboration, conversation and communion.
Each exhibit offers a theme, a main idea, and a deeply researched point of view. Everything shared supports and exemplifies an overarching message.
My background in classical recitals, historical research and journalism interviews naturally inclines me toward curation. My creative impulse is to tie disparate sources together in harmony to illuminate the truth and heart of a story. Curation uses the skill of interpretation to identify common threads and create something new.
Curation is important because it plays a major role in the safeguarding and care-taking of legacy. It brings people together and engages them around a particular subject, and it builds the bridge between preserving heritage and supporting new work. Curation can provoke deep thought, promote understanding and initiate change.
As artists and people, we curate things in our lives every day. We curate our closets and our bookshelves, our social media feeds and our audition books. We choose what is important to us, the message we want to send, and the story we want to tell based on the things that we choose to showcase together.
The wonderful thing about curation is that, in addition to giving yourself the ability to create something new and to assert your own point of view, curation also allows you to amplify other voices in collaboration. It provides an opportunity to give voices that matter a platform for representation.
Art can be created, interpreted or curated. We can expand our artistry by trying our hand at all three.
Here are some examples of things to curate:
Playlists of music, videos, or podcasts
Reading lists
Favorite collaborators
Repertoire for auditions
Setlists for concerts
People to follow on social media
Research and resources
Lessons learned
Voices to amplify
Topics for discussion
If opportunities to interpret are coming up empty and creation feels too far a leap, then I encourage you to try curation. Curating might take the form of blog posts, a conversation series, email newsletters, online concerts, a social media feed, a page on your website and more. Start by considering what you’re passionate about and how you might share that passion in a way that is of service of others.
Have you ever thought of yourself as a curator? What might become possible if you did? Share your ideas for curation in the comments below: