Episode 27 – A Child’s Creative Point of View with Scarlette Adams

In Episode 27 you’ll hear my great niece Scarlette Adams after her performance last week in Baltimore, Maryland’s White Marsh Ballet Academy’s The Nutcracker.

 It’s holiday time and whether you’re in the middle of Chanukah, still gathering stocking stuffers, shopping for the kwanzaa feast, or setting up your Festivus pole, kids play a big part in the celebration. I am getting to know my relatives better after moving to the east coast. I am fortunate to live closer to some of my youngest relatives now. I took the opportunity to talk with my great niece and get her ideas on creativity, making art for the stage, choreography, how to get along with your fellow artists, and artistic endeavor as play.

Although Scarlette is not a professional performing artist, I think she has a lot to offer grown-ups.  She still understands that making art is really fun. When we lose sight of that, we let the passion leak out. It’s like my old air mattress. Despite the slow leak, I kept using it for guests thinking it would somehow fix itself.

photo: Charley Adams

To expand the metaphor, let’s say the mattress is your performance and your guest who is forced to sleep on the mattress is the audience. When you keep that mattress inflated with the passion and play that you felt in childhood, your audience’s experience can be excellent. But when that passion starts to slowly leak out of the performance, your audience can expect a night of uncomfortable awareness. And your performance becomes presentational. When we take the opportunity to listen to what kids say about their own creative experiences, it can awaken us to that inner child who wants to play and have fun. We stop taking ourselves so seriously. It’s okay, and even preferable to take art seriously the way kids take playtime seriously. But taking yourself seriously is not the same thing.

I hope you’ll listen until the end of the interview for Concise Advice from the Interview, and today’s special treat, Words of Wisdom from my Dad.

Concise Advice from the Interview

7 No matter what anybody says about you, just keep on doing what you should be doing.

6 Don’t let those haters bother you.

5 When you witness bullying, do not be a bystander.

4 Be yourself.

3 When you create choreography, pause the music, work on your move and start over again going a little bit further and you can create a whole entire dance.

2 Think of something that you like and always smile.

1 Anyone can do something creative.

Check out the blog, SallyPAL.com, for articles and podcast episodes. Sign up for a FREE Creator’s Notebook insert at SallyPAL.com/join. And for the person who asked, there’s an iTunes link in the sidebar to my CD that has the song Stop for a Minute that you hear during the podcast.           

Thank you for sharing, subscribing, reviewing, joining, & thank you for listening. I want you to pursue your dream to have original work on the stage in front of a live audience. It’s scary, but I’m here with resources, encouragement, and a growing community of people like us. I’m Sally and this is SallyPAL (the P-A-L in PAL stands for "Performing Arts Lab").

If you’re downloading and listening on your drive to work, or falling asleep to my breathtaking blarney like my sister does, let me know you’re out there.  I want to help you create original shows for a live audience… All the performances you’ve seen on stage once lived only in someone’s imagination… Now… Think of something you like and smile!