I still remember being told as a child that it was wrong for me to be interested in multiple things. That I should focus on one thing and become good at that. There seemed to be this idea that a person can only be good at one thing. But whilst truly being an expert takes a lot of work (around 10,000 hours) most people don't need to be experts. I don't need to be a great pianist, for example, if all I want to do is run vocal exercises and plunk out parts when teaching vocal lines.
This week I have been working on many different things. Some of these are things that I am good at and others are things that I am learning to do, mostly because there is no one else to do them for me. I have been encouraged watching the workshops put on by the Collective Creative Initiative as I have gotten to hear other theatre makers talk about the different tasks they have to take on and how they are adapting to cope with the current problems in theatre.
Here are some of the things I have been doing this week:
Creating a programme using Adobe InDesign
Creating social media ads using Adobe Spark
Composing a soundscape for an online book project
Investigating how to get a bigger sound library for GarageBand
Creating art work for a new Christmas show using Adobe Illustrator
Writing copy for cast and composer biographies
Arranging a bilingual version of Silent Night
Researching public domain carols and songs
Putting together a risk analysis for our next production
I am fortunate that although I now mostly work in theatre and music, that my background is in computing. As you can see I use lots of software to help me achieve anything and I don't mind learning how to use it. I wish that I was better at creating graphics, but I imagine that I will get better at this over time. For now I will keep working and keep learning new things.
