Why does creativity suck so bad?

AUTHOR'S NOTE 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 meta-commentary 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.