Opinion | The Origin of Creativity | Observatory - Institute for the Future of Education

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Once a year at my friend Cristina’s school, each primary school class performs a didactic theatrical performance; all are based on a common theme that the school selects. The plays are written and directed by the class teacher, acted by the children, and performed before the other students of the same grade and the community of mothers and fathers.

Because of a long tradition, these stagings in school are called assemblies. Cristina and I have talked about whether it would be appropriate to replace this name with another that expresses more directly what the activity consists of: School Theater would be an example. However, as I said, this word has a long tradition. We concluded that it would be convenient to inquire a little more deeply into the word that perhaps would be discarded too easily.

In its ordinary meaning, the term assembly is applied to a community that meets to express opinions, discuss positions, and make decisions around a topic of interest to everyone. It therefore seems very formal and difficult to relate to dramatic arts, which is an eminently creative and playful activity. However, something tells me that we are starting from a prejudice, and that both are more similar than they seem.

To begin with, the essential element in both, without which they could not exist, is the same: a group of people gathered for a common purpose. It might be said, then, that an assembly could be compared to a party and a football match, a classroom or a concert, and yes, indeed, we might be right: no one can deny that a party can suddenly become a place for discussion and decisions, nor that a solemn meeting of congress members, by a strange twist, can end up becoming a party. Indeed, no rigor can prevent the assembly speaker from becoming a bit of an actor in a community discussion, using their imagination to convince others. Nor can it be prevented that the theater, besides shaking the public’s emotions, mobilizes opinions, controversies, and decisions, often spontaneously and unconsciously. World history (and comedies) are full of examples of things like these. It is said that after a performance of Doña Rosita la Soltera by Federico García Lorca (a piece of apparently naïve costumbrista theater), the audience took to the streets, spontaneously organizing as a political assembly.

I am sure that this magic (or, if you prefer, this inexplicable spontaneity) is something that can emerge anywhere people gather. Moreover, my philosophical fantasy leads me to affirm that whenever and wherever people gather, they do so to bring about that magic or at least wait for it. Whether it is chatting, celebrating, discussing, playing, making decisions, studying, working, or executing the most practical action, human beings come together expecting that something magical will happen to them, that something unexpected will shake and transform their individual being and, even better, their community ties.

Without this possibility, life has no meaning. Even in the most rigid routine (and before the most expressionless face), human beings expect a change, longing for something to surprise them. This magic, this hope, infiltrates our essence (and it is not bad at all; therefore, the events propitious for that magic to occur are called assemblies).

Magic is in our essence, yes, and by that I mean that the sudden and mysterious was already present at the moment when the first human communities were formed. And so we come to a second point about our school assemblies.

As I said, these school plays are all inspired by a common theme, on which each teacher researches and writes a script. The theme chosen for the next school cycle (25-26) is “Myth.” The proposal is that the teachers create their texts from a story of universal mythology. As for me (I am always looking for a way to relate everything to each other; let’s say, to put them in dialogue), I have the impression that this decision was not random but was intended to dive fully into the essence of the community and to infuse the assemblies with their powerful spirit.

The word myth has many definitions. A very common one is that of a lie repeated many times. My son provides me with an example right now, which he tried to refute unsuccessfully when he was in sixth grade: that Christopher Columbus discovered America. How can that be, he asks me, if this territory was discovered more than 30,000 years ago by people whose descendants were living here when he arrived?

The above is a common meaning. However, the word “myth” is mainly used to discuss foundational narratives, that is, stories that have to do with the emergence of communities and their physical environment and culture, as well as with the gods and heroes who intervened in them. Of course, the origins of every community can be traced back to the creation of the world and all of humanity. Similarly, the narrative about heroes begins by talking about dream leaders (such as Daedalus, the creator of so many fantastic inventions). It ends with characters that already border on the historical, such as Oedipus, whom some experts suspect was a king who actually existed.

This, then, is the meaning that we want to develop in the assemblies, that of the myths that go back to the origins.

Here, it is essential to mention that, for those who think like me, the origins of life are immersed in an inexplicable mystery, and that the same happens with myths: they are narratives that try to translate the experience of the inexplicable into human language. Myths are the stories that we human beings read in this strange world.

To make myself understood, I begin by imagining a first primate whose innovative cerebral cortex allows it to ask questions that none of its instincts can answer. Suddenly, the complexity of the universe becomes clear to him (as some current scientists and philosophers describe it to simplify things), which, in my view, is its simple, unfathomable being, its indecipherable reality. There she (or he), standing at the origins of the human, confronting that innovative mode of consciousness, shuddering before the cosmos and herself, translates the experience into delirious images, some of which, later on, already tired, she will remember.

In these images, everything she has discovered is mixed, including her desires, impulses, achievements, frustrations; there are her internal and external worlds, still not well differentiated, trying to narrate the empty fullness of the unfathomable. They are the first myths, delusions that can be at least partially related and shared with the first humans’ increasingly numerous progeny.

The community grows. Delusions, now gestated by each member in solitude, can be shared with others, can be narrated, and even acted out to evoke them more clearly and give them greater realism. One day, the community resorts to masks and costumes, noises, words, anything that helps to recreate for others what the conscious (asleep or awake) has glimpsed. Now, delusions and dreams have a language and can be transmitted: they create community questions, joint wonders, empathy, and clear sensations so that the mystery resonates better in the human collective. The myth has given the group an identity.

One of the first great myths is the existence of time. Time gives order to the world and the human community from the first moment. Yes, time finds order within chaos: it starts as something linear, it advances, it does not regress, it gives direction and meaning. It can be measured in the long periods of the seasons, in the shortest of the lunar cycles, in the even shorter periods of day and night, and in the immediate lapses of daily activity, where its passage is measured in a thousand details, for example, the amount of time it takes to cook meat or to spin an outfit.

Hence, Cronus (Time) is one of the first gods, according to the mythology that has come down to us through Greek culture.

Unfortunately, the awareness of time also entails that of death.

Once the human being identifies time, he ceases to be immortal (which is how he lived in his animal state). He realizes, hopelessly, that he is going to die. Time and death both place us in the present, in the duration, in the finite, in the world of everyday life. Becoming aware of time makes it not only ordering, but also deadly. It allows us to move forward, but it devours us. We walk into its jaws, and so, for human beings, progress becomes, besides a reassuring achievement, a crushing advance.

That is why, in the myth, Cronus, the god who gives order to Chaos, also appears devouring his children, barely born.

That myths translate universal truths is shown in the fact that this terrible contradiction ( progress simultaneously saves and kills) continues to operate today. We see it ourselves, day by day, in our devouring productivity, our endless haste, our frenetic activity that ends in constant frustration, in the race of those who (like in the old Roadrunner cartoons) do not realize that they have run out of ground (“self-exploitation,” the philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls it).

The interesting thing is that by warning us of this contradiction, the myth becomes a denunciation, evidence that something is wrong. Thus, not only does it seem to condemn us to a way of proceeding, to repeat history endlessly, but it also gives us the strength to oppose it. (One of the sons of Cronus ends up defeating him and taking his place, after imprisoning him in the deepest abyss: his name was Zeus.)

The myth is universal but never fixed. All myths, when investigated with a fruitful attitude, are prototypes of new truths, archetypes, seeds of reality, promoters of creation.

But what is a fruitful attitude? Definitely, the scientists do not have it; they see myths as primitive, pre-scientific descriptions of historical events or subjective, psychic experiences. Even less so, those who reduce myths to insignificant, somewhat funny stories, which can be used to create colorful shows, perhaps musical, full of lights and action, where the story, beautiful and enjoyable, is in fact the least important: after all, they are all alike and have no significance.

Apparently, a fruitful attitude has more to do with what Octavio Paz called the synthesis of tradition and rupture: a tradition that sinks into the past; a rupture that arises in the present as something unexpected.

Thus, we return to the beginning, to that magic that made our theatrical play an assembly.

That rupture, that discovery, sudden and inexplicable, the brilliant Edward De Bono calls “lateral” thinking. For his part, Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-French philosopher, relates it not so much to something that intrudes from the periphery but to something that falls, something that arrives vertically (as if dropped from the sky, and therefore more associated with faith and miracle).

The myth preserves its fertility, changing. It is always original, that is, it returns to its origin to create the new. It is thanks to these strange metamorphoses that Cronus, the devouring father, can reappear as a good father in the Hebrew myth of the earthly Paradise, maintaining, paradoxically, his cruelty, since it seems clear that the prohibition of eating the fruit of the Tree in the Garden of Eden is, in fact, a provocation to do so (and a desire, half-hidden, to expel the son to prevent him from replacing him). Centuries later, the same story comes down to us in the form of that fairy tale in which the protagonist protects, feeds, and clothes a man as if he were his son, and yet punishes him for desecrating the tree, for cutting down his most precious rose, the only good that was forbidden to him: I’m talking about Beauty and the Beast.

The myth has been placed in our hands so that we can recreate it with ever-growing fertility, always leafy, rooted in old territories, and seeking new limits.

And in this task of tillage, in this foreseen and changing, eternal and ephemeral fabric, the theater is our accomplice, art that arises, fixes, and vanishes; a dialogue that weaves stories from the initial chaos, from the dark cavity of the stage, where any miracle can suddenly arise.

All against monotony (monotone, single tone, single voice, univocal meaning of ourselves and of all things).

I thus come to the last of the three points for which Cristina has paused, focusing on the assemblies, and for which she has asked me to reflect with her on their theatrical magic and community spirit.

The theatre is a place where myth bursts forth with multiple voices, but none of them must impose itself on the others. That would give it a sterile univocity. Thus, my friend, attentive to any opportunity for the school to continue flourishing, also tells me the following. Since the theatrical tradition is so essential there (middle school and high school faculty also create their plays), the school auditorium has become a real, almost professional forum, with so many technical resources that the assemblies become authentic spectacles. Therefore, Cristina wants the content of the works to be up to the heights of this technology so that the students have profound experiences that allow them to both show off and express themselves, all as part of their education and academic training.

I think this is a message that we should all keep in mind. If there is one thing we know better than ever, it is that technology, no matter how innovative it may be, always falls into aridity and routine if the diversity of human life and creativity does not complement it. From scenic effects, we can expect no magic, no true miracle, unless an inspired and creative person designs them.

Myth is, therefore, that source of richness and creativity that teachers, assembly scriptwriters, can appropriate, update, and transform to give voice to the most authentic and current concerns of their teaching experience. The myth is the opportunity to let out their artistic selves and give their students and their entire community this magical way to come together for renewal.

Translation by: Daniel Wetta