Excellent articulation of abstract corrollations

Excellent book on an undertreated topic.
Excellent articulation of abstract corrollations. At times his writing reminded me of Alan Watts.

This book should be REQUIRED READING for any tango dancer/student/teacher.
Much of what we teach at TangoLausanne.ch originates from an idea found in this book.

Find more books that tango-dancers might read, here: http://tangolausanne.ch/books/

What an inspiration! A lot of this has happened to me when I started to teach myself programming. I'd make up problems to solve with computer programs. some small, some too big for me to handle. This book brought back a lot of those memories of some 40 years ago! Everyone needs to play more and not be so serious! Great book!

Will be re-reading again and again.. Possibly my favorite book of all time. It DOES get a little bit "floaty" here and there, but that how I like my books haha. Fits in better with the times almost rhythmically when a book carries that element... At least for me. Bookshelf favorite for life ?

"We now find ourselves, as individuals, as nation-states, and as a species, involved in a period of intense and often bewildering transformation. The systems of government, production, culture, thought, and perception to which we have become accustomed and that have functioned for so long are not working. This presents us with a challenge. We can cling to that which is passing, or has already passed, or we can remain accessible to - even surrender to - the creative process, without insisting that we know in advance the ultimate outcome for us, our institutions, or our planet. To accept this challenge is to cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to find meaning."

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(Just a later paragraph that captures the zeitgeist of 2020 from 30 years ago. The rest is an expanded review after re-reading.)

At the core, Free Play is about wu wei, the Taoist and Zen principle of "action without action," pure awareness and responsiveness. It's a feeling Michelangelo channeled when he brushed the stone away from the statue inside - a feeling he called "intelletto," nonrational artistic awareness. Others call it "beginner's mind," "radical openness," or "oneness."

Nachmanovitch's book was the text for a senior seminar I took in transpersonal psychology (that would be the study of religious experiences, epiphanies, flow states, meditation, etc). It's as sonorous and streamlike as you'd expect from an admired improvisational violinist, but ten times more useful than you'd expect.

I've never found a more concentrated guide to creative processes. Inside out, outside in. If you ever feel stuck, this book tells you how to gently obliterate preconceptions. It goes into extraordinary detail on that easy thing that isn't easy, that difficult thing that isn't difficult, how and why you get blocked, avoidant, afraid. And it brings in oodles of great references, anecdotes, and poetic quotations that would be pretentious if they weren't so to the point.

If you're interested in ludology, he has a lot to say about the magic circle, which he calls temenos, ancient Greek for sacred grove. For those who don't know the magic circle by name, you do know it: it's any safe space where you are free to play, where you can enter a world of make-believe, something a little set apart from the rest of reality, with its own rules. It's the proverbial sandbox in all its manifestations.

Artistry goes beyond play, but without some form of play there is no art or invention. Play requires safety, or it isn't free and isn't really play; it's suffocated. Hence the creative blocks arise from fear. When people agree to play a game together (or simply let each other know they're playing around), as long as they cooperate and follow the rules, a new world appears in the midst of their imaginations. The rule-following (or at least not hurting anyone you're joking around with) corresponds to staying in the magic circle, and the imaginative world is the result. The metaphor refers to a magic spell cast in a circle of candles or a pentagram, and the rules (of play and safety) are the ritual of the spell itself, how it's cast.

The stage of a theater performance is part of its magic circle. When someone gets run through with a halberd on stage, you know not to worry too much, because inside that circle are found hypothesis, counterfactual, recapitulation, fantasy, performance, play, etc. When lights go off in a cinema, that's part of the magic circle. Dogs and wolves enter the magic circle by dropping on their front paws and wagging their tails; then everyone knows this is not a fight. Even formal debate occurs in a magic circle; participants shake hands to reinforce that what happens inside is a symbolic battle, a battle of ideas, not a display of personal animosity. This idea is shared across all the arts.

People are typically most creative in a state of free play, which might look very serious. The freedom is freedom to try something different - without any of that freedom, you can't. Removing heavy consequences makes experimentation possible. The magic circle is a metaphor, but it refers to the essence of what makes play itself.

Creative blocks can be analyzed usefully as fear in relation to that concept, though I wouldn't reduce the contents of the book quite so far as to say that's its entire thesis. It's a rich and faceted look at many kinds of creative processes and how they unfold, from a point of view that's both mystical and practical. It applies regardless of art form, and even on re-reading this, I found a number of surprisingly helpful suggestions and ways to subversively reframe things. Flights of fancy aside, it gives some very down-to-earth advice that anyone can follow.

The professor of the class I mentioned is somewhat famous for his lectures, a style of performance art I've never seen before or since. I liked them so much I took a second course with him, even though at the start of that, the seminar involving this book, he looked at all of us, then the ones he recognized, and yelled, "Why are you still here??? What are you doing? Didn't you learn the first time???" Anyway, his copy of Free Play was more inked up than the Hell's Angels. Whenever he read from it, he'd rest it in his palms carefully. An ancient, gigantic speckled moth. It looked like it might crumble if stared at.

The theme of this book is that, for art, the process is more important than the result. Evolution is a "process" by which nature creates, and it models all arts. Everything is art when it becomes "play." Play is an activity that is an "end in itself" rather than a means. Play without rules does not produce art, so artists "practice" their craft and learn its rules. Too much practice can impede creativity, so artists should regard every practice as a "performance." The mathematicians' definition of "elegance" is producing great results from scant means. Similarly, art is more elegant "under constraint" than in freedom. "Mistakes" are inevitable during the process of creation because they are creations themselves. Artists fear failures if they are fixated on results, and "fear of failure" inhibits creativity. Sometimes "not doing can be more productive than doing" because being stuck is also a part of the process. Making art is like making love. It's a "commitment" and you must be ready to love it even when it is not yet complete. Art is beautiful when it's truthful, and you can't be true to yourself if you are more worried about the result than the process.

Love the book. The book has taught me to turn discipline and learning into an adventure--- and in fact helped me become a better chef and hostess by preparing and the being playful.

The right book at the right time saves lives. Man, you can say that about Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. The thing about play in art, is it's a sign of strength to spare, wind to spare, like someone running a marathon who breaks out into a pirouette. Sometimes working on a long project, the task just seems monstrous--like trying to build a gothic cathedral all by yourself. This book is a reminder, for a writer in long form, that it's not stone on stone, a heavy, exhausting thing. That play, like the free jazz that the violinist author Nachmanovitch loves, makes heavy work light. That there are other ways to solve problems, other ways to approach the page, and that improvisation, the lightness of it, the in-the-momentness of its playfulness, IS the 'air that falls through the net' that Neruda describes.

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Here's my favorite part so far-- on editing.

"In producing large works… we are perforce taking the results of many inspirations and melding them together into a flowing structure that has its own integrity and endures through time…. We arrange them, cook them, render them down, digest them. We add, subtract, reframe, shift, break part, melt together. The play of revision and editing transforms the raw into the cooked. This is a whole art unto itself, of vision and revision, playing again with the half-baked products of our prior play. …

"Editing must come from the same inspired joy and abandon as free improvisation…. There is a stereotyped belief that the muse in us acts from inspiration, while the editor in us acts from reason and judgment. But if we leave our imp or improviser out of the process, re-vision becomes impossible. If I see the paragraph I wrote last month as mere words on a page, they become dead and so do I…

"Some elements of artistic editing: 1. deep feeling for the intentions beneath the surface; 2. sensual love of the language; 3. sense of elegance; and 4. ruthlessness. The first three can perhaps be summarized under the category of good taste, which involvers sensation, sense of balance and knowledge of the medium, leavened with an appropriate sense of outrageousness…."

I will definitely put Free Play on the shelf right next to The Art Spirit within arm's reach of my writing desk, to remind me about the air that falls through the net. I can't be reminded of it enough.

“We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion. And a perpetual invitation to create.”

Tenía mucha curiosidad por leer este libro, que parece ser sobre improvisación, y algo de eso cubre, pero es más sobre creatividad. Tiene cosas muy lindas, porque conecta la creatividad, y el arte, con cosas profundas, que van más allá de nuestra conciencia. Me encantaría que lo leyera cualquier persona que se dedique a la pedagogía, toca el Zen, habla de Jung, cita a e.e.cummings, a Henry Miller. Lo que quiero decir es que sus referencias son muy variadas. A momentos me parecía que idealizaba mucho es de “la vida de artista“, pero justo lo bueno que tiene es que lo abre hacia cualquier persona, y defiende que la creatividad es algo que tenemos cada persona que existimos, como parte de nuestra humanidad. Y con eso suscribo. El resultado puede ser bueno o malo, pero es el proceso creativo mismo lo que cuenta. Me hizo pensar en “Creative Quest“ de Questlove, un libro que también habla sobre estos procesos. Muy recomendado.

This is a powerful book, the kind of book that requires more than a single reading. I'll be back.

Loved this. It jives with a lot of my recent mindfulness/zen reading, and it also jives with my desire to free myself up to do some music again. I miss it. He speaks about flow states here too, which I've been trying to get more of. You can get flow with any activity you do, it helps if you are mindful. Things like dishes, driving, cleaning, etc can all be made into a flow state. But I would really like to get back to some regular music-making. I miss that kind of flow.