Well I am finally returned from a nifty little trip down to Punta Gorda, Florida, for three performances of “Peter versus the wolf.” Many thanks to Maestro Francis Wada and to Chari Leitch, the executive director of the Charlotte (County) Symphony. Also many thanks to the Wyvern Hotel, fabulous service and I love that rooftop pool and bar.
The performances were fabulous… the actors were all high school kids and they did a great job. They even did some ad libs which I may steal and put into the script permanently. However, speaking of ad libs, and as an author…
When I was a young man coming up through the ranks of artistic training, I learned an awful lot about art, and what that word was supposed to mean. I didn’t learn that much about it in any formal setting… most of my primary artistic training was “cultural,” that is to say, I just picked it up from the other “artistic” people that I both worked and socialized with.
In order to become a professional performer, you have to become somewhat driven, and somewhat strict. It’s a very competitive, and you are constantly putting yourself out on stage, so of course you want to feel satisfied in your mind that you are doing things at the highest levels of “correctness.” The most obvious element, of course, is simply not playing wrong notes. But besides that most obvious example of “incorrectness,” this “artistic” culture imbued me with the tremendous intolerance for variation from, well, I don’t know what to call it except “high tradition.” There were many accepted ways of playing the music of a given composer, and the idea that you could just go off and do some little variation that appealed to you was seen as a cardinal sin. People would jump on you if you ever did such things. I bought into this philosophy hook line and sinker, partly because it made me feel like I belong to this exclusive club, and mostly because embracing it made me feel superior to people who didn’t. I never considered its actual market value. So many people thought this was so important I just assumed it was terribly monetizable.
Anyway, after decades of worshiping long dead composers and the generally accepted traditions of playing their music, I now find myself on the other side of it. Instead of playing the music of a long dead composer, now I am a composer of sorts myself. And when I see people performing something that I wrote, I observe with great interest how they set about executing the performance.
I’m always expecting to see people obediently following my carefully crafted script, spending their entire day thinking about Justin Locke, but instead, they generally ignore me. When people do “Peter Versus the Wolf,” they invariably put in variations. This show in Punta Gorda, for example, replaced the “court reporter” with a rather burly bailiff, and they added a great deal of dialogue and stage action to involve him more in the show. There were a few other little changes as well.
Now this is where we come to the conflict between my artistic training and the advice I get from David Meerman Scott.
Unlike my rather severe artistic training, one of David’s tenets of marketing is to “lose control.” (He also talks about how the Grateful Dead would give permission to people to record their concerts, sell their logo merchandise, and generally “partner” with entrepreneurs.)
When I see people altering one of my scripts, I confess, there’s a part of me that really dislikes this. I want performers to venerate me and my creation the same way I was taught to blindly venerate all those long dead composers.
On the other hand, when people producing my show do their own little variations, they inevitably begin to feel ownership, and they occasionally actually add value beyond the core text. This has happened so often that I’m starting to understand that it’s actually necessary for people to do this. It’s a kind of a compliment, because when people enjoy something and find it to be interesting and clever, they inevitably want to do a “mash up” of it . . . This is partly, I think, because the creativity of the script has inspired their own creative juices. Since my primary goal in writing the show was to inspire greater individual creative energy, I guess I can’t complain if people start to exhibit greater individual creative energy. Duh.
So anyway, I want to say a big thank you to David Meerman Scott, because for years my original artistic training has always led me to react to changes to my script with an inner voice shouting out, “hey, you’re not supposed to do that!” . . . and now, instead of feeling insulted, when I see people making changes to my stuff, I hear something different for my inner voice. Now it is much easier for me to accept these changes, because I hear it saying, “even though all of my artistic training says this is wrong, David said it was okay for people to do this.” As you can at left, the kids seemed to like it.
© Justin Locke
ps visit david’s blog and books at http://www.webinknow.com/
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