Conference paper presented by Hannah Banks and Briony Luttrell at the IASPM Australia-Aotearoa/New Zealand 2024 Branch Conference "Musical Translations and Transformations" on 4th December 2024.
ABSTRACT
The cultural myth of the tortured artist or creation as act of self-flagellation or therapy is rife in the arts and creative industries, especially popular music. Whilst there are therapeutic fields that advocate for creativity as an effective way to process emotions, the industrial practice of music making and generating new intellectual property for a commercial audience is at odds with methods of creating that put the maker at risk and undermine the sustainability of a career (Gross & Musgrave 2020). The industrial context of portfolio careers, the gig economy, and dramatically underpaid creative labour create an environment rife with burnout, financial, and emotional difficulties. Current scholarship also points to increasingly poor mental health in young people (Orygen 2017), creative practitioners (Elmes & Knox 2022) and the challenges of this in higher education contexts are only starting to be felt (Daniel 2022). We write this paper as creative practitioners and educators who have seen too many of our students and peers sacrifice their own wellbeing in a Sisyphean pursuit of romanticized suffering and ‘authentic’ and meaningful creative expression. We propose a model of teaching creative practice informed by Baim’s (2020) Drama Spiral, where we encourage students to not create from places of unresolved difficulties or mine their own trauma, instead encouraging them to develop personal creative safety and engage in emotionally and ethically sustainable creative practice.