Creativity and the Adelaide Festival

How is a work of art made? How much can we learn from and be inspired by the creative processes of other artists? In this course we will investigate the process behind the creation of artworks in a range of forms, focusing on three interrelated areas: creativity, collaboration, and curation. The course is run in partnership with the Adelaide Festival, which provides students with discounted tickets to selected productions, including Indigenous, theatrical and musical performances and visual art exhibitions, and students also attend sessions at Writers' Week. Students research the origins of a selected work, touching on its relation to conventions of genre, its performance history, the creative decisions that underpin its current iteration, collaborative inputs, and so forth. Students also have the option of responding to the artwork in their chosen creative form. With input from Festival staff, we will consider the role of the Festival itself, developing an understanding of the curatorial and commissioning roles of festivals in the broader arts ecology. NOTE: This course is taught as an intensive, beginning in Orientation week when the Festival begins. At the Orientation week seminar the structure and assessment tasks for the course will be explained and tickets will be distributed. Students need to be aware that the first three weeks of the course (Orientation Week and Weeks 1 and 2) are very intensive, since they are expected to attend six Festival productions plus a session at Writers Week in addition to the course seminars. Only students 18 years or older are permitted to enrol in the course, because Festival productions may contain material of a sexually explicit or confronting nature.