Why does creativity suck so bad?

This talk was written specifically in response to an invitation from
Game Changer for me to be a provocateur to the drama educators
and researchers assembled for this conference, to present a TED-style
talk that would ‘push boundaries, be a little (or a lot) controversial,
be forward thinking and future focused, explore the taboo, and/or
set the tone for some real game-changing conversation’ – and it is in
this spirit that I wrote and performed the talk below. It is important
to know this context when reading it, because the written word is
a different beast than the performed and spoken word, as drama
educators know so well. I am not offering this contextualisation as
an equivocation of the views expressed below, but rather a metacommentary
on the need for us to remain both positive about
creativity’s arrival into mainstream education, AND critical of our
impulse toward a commodification of creativity in the present era. And
while that standardising, commodifying, structuralist creative turn
has many good and useful aspects to celebrate – aspects I myself am
celebrating in my current research – I offer this talk as a cheeky but
sincere critical troubling of that move toward bridling and taming
creativity – in education and other spaces.