The Humming Wire

Jane Fitzgerald is one of this year’s mentors on the Fresh Ink 18 to 26 year old program. We asked Jane to write about inspiration and creativity – her lovely response is below.

This is the first in a series of pieces for Fresh Ink looking at ideas of creativity and inspirations. To keep up to date, do subscribe to the blog (see, box right).

I was the kind of kid who put on shows, coercing my younger brother into various costumes and forcing my parents to watch.

Singing and dancing (preferably with someone watching) have always brought me a particular kind of profound pleasure and satisfaction, and although I didn’t end up as a star of stage or screen, they still do to this day.

I suppose I feel that they are my own acts of daily creativity, unremarkable but essential.

I’m not sure why it should be mildly embarrassing to reveal that I go to weekly dance classes and participate in amateur dance performances – and have done so for much of my life. Perhaps it’s because my working life has been largely in professional theatre, where the amateur is not always highly regarded. Perhaps, too, there’s something a little absurd about a middle-aged woman dressing up and blithely exposing her lack of artistic mastery.

In my childhood and teenage years it was ballet, with its almost brutal discipline and beauty, that attracted me. But in my late twenties I discovered Spanish flamenco dancing. Although technically very demanding, it is also deeply soulful, with its history in the displacement, poverty and suffering of the gypsy people. Without a genuine commitment to the intensity and sincerity of this dance, it is nothing, just a shallow facsimile. Every now and then, when I am truly present in the dance, feeling the singer and guitarist and responding to them, it doesn’t really matter that my technique is flawed – it is still an authentic and sustaining creative act.

A much-loved flamenco friend and I have a long-standing joke: every time one of us sees an inspiring dance performance we always text the other – ‘If I start training tomorrow…’ In other words, if we drop everything and work really hard for just a few years, there’s still time to join a gypsy troupe. I know that in reality flamenco can only be a small part of my life but its artistic energy is very important to me.

Wanting to dance is an intrinsic part of who I am.

Singing, too, feels part of the essential ‘me’. I love singing in choirs, but at the moment I find it hard to find the time. So I sing to myself, and with my children, and to my children every night before they go to sleep.

It’s a common enough ritual; a few moments of calming down and letting go of all the stuff of the day, an anchor in my day and theirs. It always felt to me the most natural way to say goodnight; it wasn’t a conscious design.

I remember I once heard someone on the radio explaining that humans probably sang long before they developed language. It is a form of expression that is ancient and ties us somehow to the human race – when I sing to my children I am part of an unimaginably long line of mothers who have done the same. Perhaps this is part of the essence of creativity: we need food and shelter to survive, but expressing and sharing song, dance, art or story-telling is what makes us feel human, connected to the other humans on our planet.

And when I sing each of my children their special song, I do feel that there is a direct and essential communication, a connection created between me and my child. The song has the desired effect (usually) of calming them and preparing them for sleep. It has an effect on me too – it centres me, brings me back to myself.

Partly I think this is about the physical sensations of singing – the breath which comes from deep within, the way the sound reverberates around my chest, throat and head, connecting my body and creating a sense of wholeness.

And partly it is about connecting with deep emotions that are felt without needing to be articulated – aching love, pride in the beautiful small people they are, wistful regret that they are growing up so quickly.

These moments are by definition intensely intimate, private, but creative and connective nonetheless.

My other great creative loves are theatre and literature – the areas in which my working life has evolved. And as a dramaturg, reader or audience member I think I’m always hoping for that thrill which comes with the feeling of connection. That recognition – yes, I’ve felt that too, I know that sensation, yes, that’s the way I would have described that kind of moment if only I’d thought of it.

Or, even more interestingly, I love to be taken somewhere I haven’t been before and to feel that through the writer or performer I’m glimpsing an understanding of something new. This sense of resonance, reverberation is something that brings me deep satisfaction – the sense that we’re all on the same, humming wire.

I think this connection – with the self, with others – is only felt when there is authenticity in the act of creation. I know my best singing or dancing, my most authentic, is when I feel I am offering myself, unvarnished and unguarded.

When an artist commits to the work, commits to offering something of themselves, it is an act of generosity and bravery.

When an artist commits to the work, commits to offering something of themselves, it is an act of generosity and bravery. It becomes not a simulation, not something clever or tricksy or flashy, but the genuine article.

It is hard to describe this genuine moment but you know it when you see it and you know it when you create it, whether it’s in a performance on a big stage or in an act of private, everyday creativity.