While collecting the artists’ answers about how they prepare for the creative pro-cess of composition, we grew aware of a nepro-cessary distinction about what unfolds throughout a lifetime and what happens right before the creative task� These two dimensions involve two different time ranges, the lifelong one, focused on iden-tity-building and skills/knowledge acquisition, and the one, often more limited in time, when the artists generate their artworks� Even though different, these dimensions would appear to be strictly related� It became apparent that our in-terviews went beyond the understanding of creativity as merely processes initi-ated at the moment of a tangible, definite creation� According to the interviewed artists, creation in their domain starts way back in an existential dimension and grows throughout the years of artistic practice, until it explodes into deliberate acts of creation� The retrospective nature of our interviews made it possible for the artists to look back at the very beginning of their interest for the arts� The stories they told us were vibrant with sensory details and meaningfulness� One example out of many might be Hustvedt’s moving recall of the very moment and place that inspired a life-changing spark of awareness about writing:
When I was 13 years old, I spent a summer in Iceland with my family� About a year ear-lier, I had discovered that books, which were once too difficult for me to read – books
with small print and extensive vocabularies – had suddenly become available to me� I had always been a passionate reader of books, especially novels, and that summer I read and read and read and, because the sun did not really set, but rather, in the wee hours of morning, the sky took on an eerie pallor, I had trouble sleeping for the first time in my life� I would stay up and read� One night I was reading David Copperfield, a great book that moved me deeply, and I put it down and went to the window, and I looked out at Reykjavik, illumined by this strange light, and I thought to myself, ‘If this is what read-ing is, if this is what a novel can do to a person, then I want to do it, too’� A transitional moment� That view from the window will always be associated for me with my decision to become a writer�
She defines this moment “transitional” and emphasises the fact that a firm deci-sion followed the experience� These transformative and often existential experi-ences allow the emergence of a need that is felt as so compelling that it becomes an irresistible drive to take action� Needs or drives, when mentioned in the in-terviews, are reported to be very specific and leading to concrete actions towards professional turns in the artists’ lives� Often this change involves at the same time an existential adjustment to the novel perception of oneself as an artist and con-crete actions, such as opera singer Marco Nisticò starting to learn and perform professionally and technically after years of denial, but also Ramsland who found out that, in spite of bad school experiences, he wanted to start literature studies at the university�
Transformational life experiences often start with a loss or a need, which has been labelled differently within learning theories: a disjuncture (Jarvis 2009, p� 22), a disorientation (Mezirow 2009, p� 94), an “emotionally felt difficulty, an uncertain situation” (Elkjaer 2009, pp� 79-80)� Likewise creativity studies that are sensitive to learning and development issues, point out the “dissatisfaction”
that ignites transformational experiences (Feldman 1999, p� 173)� This is clearly described by Varley and Barba, actress and director at Odin Teatret� Varley’s in-troduction to Odin Teatret’s tradition and community was traumatic at several levels: she suddenly felt no longer useful to the group she had left, to a cultural context, to a political ideology; moving from Italy to Denmark she lost her lan-guage, moving from a role of centrality in her theatre group back home to a marginal role in the new group, she moved from security to instability (Varley 2011)� Analogously, her theatre director over almost forty years describes his journey from Southern Italy to Norway as a “cultural shock” that obliged him to find a social identity, which he eventually found in theatrical experimentation�
If Varley’s journey consisted in finding her place in the group, Barba’s challenge was to find his place in a culture (Barba 2010)� Nisticò speaks of a rediscov-ery (of opera, in his case) and Julie Nord of finding something personal to say,
where Inger Exner describes the compulsiveness involved in these experiences:
“I couldn’t help it”� They all mention a need growing over the years, especially when individuals do not feel appreciated or encouraged to learn or express themselves, a need that suddenly –and sometimes unexpectedly– explodes in occasion of a transformative experience� When such a transformative experi-ence occurs in the artist’s life, it might be triggered by various encounters, such as a work of art that offers a unique connection or someone (peers, colleagues, friends) or cultural artefacts (tradition, artwork, group structure)� The trans-formative events appear to be crystallised in the artist’s memory, to the point of being described vividly with very precise details, feelings, bodily perceptions, as we saw in Hustvedt’s example above� From Ramsland’s narrative we are able to determine the specific elements that make this life experience a transformative milestone:
I suddenly discovered that literature could be about me, that it concerned me and my world and my emotional life in a completely different way� I think it was that moment – maybe it was the punk attitude in Strunge’s poems that spoke to something inside me in some way, which made its presence so strong� And after that poetry collection I started to write poems, almost overnight as it were and it’s been like that ever since� So you could say that was something that happened at exactly the right time in my life� It com-pletely changed my idea of literature and I can trace back my interest in literature to before then with books that I read, maybe novels that were more adult –a bit above my age– and I was interested in all sorts of different kinds of books, but it was that book that touched me in a way that made me want to write for myself�
He summarises a few fundamental elements that we have consistently found in most of the other descriptions of transformative experiences� These elements are partly corroborated in learning theories that conceptualise transformative learn-ing experiences, as we will see in Part Two� In Ramsland we find three stages and seven qualities of the experience:
1� Background interest that is frustrated by some sort of disjuncture 2� Transformative experience, which:
a� is sudden
b� is personal and meaningful c� is new
d� is not completely conscious or explicable e� pushes to action
f� feels as if it is happening at “the right time”
g� encourages persistence
3� Background interest flourishes (connection with self and profession)
The three steps are described as successive stages in time, while the characteris-tics of the transformative experience are qualities of the occurring life events and their individual perception� These descriptions are coherent with the concept of transformative learning (Illeris 2009, Mezirow 2000, 2009) and seem to be related to the artists’ learning journeys through trajectories that build identity, embrace serendipitous encounters and transform life events by means of will�
These experiences constitute a turning point that sets the course of the individu-al’s development, a “critical moment” that strongly affects a “sudden attachment to a domain, along with the motivation and sense of purpose that comes from knowing what one wants to do in life” (Feldman 1999, p� 172)� In other words, a deep, life-changing, learning experience�