Lessons to be learned from watching Glee!

Not wishing to put too much significance on a TV show about a high school glee club, but I have become a little addicted to the TV show Glee!  The show (which debuts on E4 on the 15th December here in the UK) is set in a  fictional high school in the US where cheerleading is the dominant sport and the glee club is just for the misfits and the nerds.  The show is filled with clever and well produced dance and singing pieces that demonstrate the emotional resonance of performance.  It has made think a lot about creativity.  We think about about rules and restrictions within which we undertake our professional practice.  Where does the creativity sit?  Arts management (which is my area of expertise) is a practice informed by money, budgets, staffing and strategic plans, but being a creative arts manager, thats a more difficult thing to define.  I like to that its about creative solutions to problems, thinking outside the box and not relying on being told how to do something, but finding my own way.

Is there something to the idea that a song can inspire solutions and ideas entirely disconnected to the lyrics?  I don’t even like most of the music in the show (to be fair people Beyonce ain’t my bag!) but it makes me approach the problems that exist in my everyday workplace in a different way, perhaps wanting to replicate the feeling of sheer joy that comes from creation, but in a meeting or in the way I write a report or in the way I give your work some feedback.  Creativity for me comes sometimes from wrong stepping the way people think you should behave, or coming up with a way to say something that breaks through the clutter.

So, maybe, you might get the same idea from Glee, or perhaps you will just like it for a being a cool show about singers and dancers…whatever the case, think about how you can approach your professional practice in a creative as well as systematic way…

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