Create-Destroy-Recreate: The Power of Mistakes

“Equipment breaks down, it is Sunday night, the stores are all closed, and the audience is arriving in an hour. You are forced to do a little bricolage, improvising some new and crazy contraption. Then you attain some of your best moments. Ordinary objects or trash suddenly become valuable working materials, and your perceptions of what you need and what you don’t need radically shift. Among the things I love so much about performing are those totally unforeseen, impossible calamities. “In life, as in a Zen koan, we create by shifting our perspective to the point at which interruptions are the answer. The redirection of attention involved in incorporating the accident into the flow of our work frees us to see the interruption freshly, and find the alchemical gold in it.” Stephen Nachmanovitch Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art