Bear with me.
I want you to imagine you are alone in a graveyard at night. Take a moment to really picture your surroundings. Place yourself there. Feel the sharp, early winter breeze chilling the pink into your cheeks. Smell the raw earth of a freshly laid grave. As you turn, you see a hand begin to rise from that grave. Moving the soil aside, a dead body, reanimated, emerges - all exposed bone and rotting flesh. Take a moment to truly picture that terrifying image.
Okay, that was the scary bit. Therapy sessions are available for those of you with the most fertile imaginations.
Now ask yourself; ‘is that a picture of the undead from my imagination or am I seeing an image of a zombie from a horror movie I have seen?’
This is the conundrum of creativity. This is the challenge the artist faces in the pursuit of originality. What is a genuine creation and what is a rehash of something else? And, as a conundrum - keeping with the unifying call of our times – “it’s complicated.”
We live in a karaoke culture. Almost everything we create, devise or produce, is based on or is the offshoot, of something else. The imperative for an artist is to make sure that something is being added to the picture. How am I moving the conversation on? Or is what I have created just a reassembling of existing parts?
There is only one yardstick that can protect you from the cliched and the banal, and that is the truth. And the truth is, of course, elusive. The truth has to come from a deep and profound place. A place where risk is the only transit system.
I have been commissioned by The Court to write a play. I don’t want to rehash my previous work. I want to grow and expand. Journey deeper. My goal is to reveal something about the human condition that hasn’t been expressed before.
A play has the potential to take an audience to a part of themselves they may never have been before. It will take courage and risk and I look forward to the time when you can join me on that journey. I don’t know where we will end up, but I know we will both be arriving at the same time.
Ross Gumbley
Artistic Advisor / Lead Director