Is Creativity Dead?

My passion is helping students, both young and old, rediscover their imagination and creativity through music. But lately I’ve been wondering: is creativity dead?

When I give students an open-ended activity to do, most of them seem to stare at me with panicked looks on their faces. They seem frozen and unable to begin, let alone complete the activity.

Trying Something New

Last week, my nonprofit took our Introduction to Opera program that I have written into an elementary school. I was trained in opera and I really enjoy presenting the genre to young students in a new, fresh way.

The program is an easy to learn, accessible introduction to opera. Students listen to a few examples of opera music and we discuss the genre. Then they learn, briefly rehearse, and “perform” an opera for children that I have written just for their age group. We discuss character development, they learn basic stage directions, and can even design and create costumes and sets! They get to sing their opera with a professional opera singer who visits on the last day of the program.

Laying The Groundwork

I visited the classes prior to the actual “performance” day to introduce the program. For the first part of my lesson, I played a few short examples of some opera.

The two pieces I chose were Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen, from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Toreador Song from Bizet’s Carmen. Both of these pieces are upbeat, exciting, and I thought they may be familiar to some students.

To encourage active listening, the students fill out a listening page. They get a little squirrely if I ask them to just sit there and listen! The listening worksheet asks them to draw what they heard. I intentionally kept the instructions vague, to try to allow for imagination and open-ended answers.

I told them, “you can draw a picture, or a line, or some shapes. You can even write words if that is what you feel as you are listening.”

The music began. I was met with a room of blank stares. Not one student was drawing or writing anything. And as the music continued to play, still- nothing but blank stares.

“I don’t know what to draw!”

“What should I draw?” asked one student. “I don’t know how,” said another. “I hate it,” said an opinionated little boy in the front row.

“That’s ok!” I said. After the first piece, I paused a bit and explained that it was ok if they didn’t like the music. That it was probably new and different, and it was alright if it wasn’t their favorite. But, after playing the second piece, most of the papers were still completely blank.

I was so disappointed. I had prepped and planned. Put hours of time into writing an opera just for them. Compiled all of the lesson plans and materials, and it felt like an enormous flop.

Maybe it’s just this activity, I thought. We discussed the music a bit, and I moved on. Next up was character development. Surely this will go better, right?

Not So Fast…

The “opera” I wrote for this program is based on the Shoemaker and the Elves story. The professional opera singer is the shoemaker and the students are, of course, the elves.

After showing a few pictures of elves on the board, I asked students to flip over their papers to the character creation page that was on the other side. Students draw a picture of their character using their imaginations. They write their character’s names, ages, and three facts about their elf characters. (You can find character development materials here.)

There are no right or wrong answers here! The idea is to give them creative freedom in their choices. After they create a character, I ask them to share a bit about it (if they would like to). Next, we begin to experiment with how they will show their character through their actions, facial expressions, and any hand movements that they will be using while they sing their part in the opera.

My studio students do pretty well with this after I give them the initial context for the piece/character they are working on. I love using this activity in my studio. Unfortunately, these kids just stared at me again.

Most of them had absolutely no idea where to start with creating a character completely from their imaginations. Many of the pages were blank. A few had a quickly sketched a head on top of a stick body.

A Total Failure?

The entire lesson felt like a flop. I was so discouraged and at a loss. Now maybe it was the fact that it was the end of the day, and the kids were just tapped out. But even after I thought about it for a few days, it felt like most of the students had no idea how to access their imaginative thinking and just create freely.

As I went over over and over how things had gone in my mind in the days after, I tried to figure out what was happening. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time I have given students an open-ended activity and they had no idea what to do.

Is it the amount of screen time that children have? Or the fact that teachers have to wear so many hats and teach to the test? Does creativity have to get pushed lower on the list of things to teach? Or maybe that they weren’t allowed time to use their imaginations for free play?

After giving it a lot of thought, I realized it’s probably all of those things. The ability to think creatively and independently is such an important skill and the whole experience renewed my passion for continuing to help students access and develop it. And, if you were wondering how things turned out, when the opera singer came in, the students had a great time and performed their opera wonderfully.

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