Creativity and the cybernetics of self: Drama, embodied creation and feedback processes

What are the particular strengths and affordances for realising and cultivating creativity through drama and how do creativity processes work? This chapter investigates the creative system, feedback and interactions from a drama project involving young people in a performance-making program. The understandings that informed the work and analysis drew from systems theories of creativity as well as cybernetics. The understandings drawn from cybernetics included the importance of feedback processes, and how individually and collectively these might be understood as operating as what Bateson termed a ‘cybernetics of self.’ An examination of key vignettes from a dramatic playbuilding process highlights the importance of both flexibilities and constraints, and feedback interactions, including those that are individual and collective, fast and slow. The importance of immediate and embodied feedback as well as feedback that is more individual and reflective is characteristic of and integral to the development of dramatic work.