I’m excited to welcome my friend and colleague Rev. Dr. Cláudio Carvalhaes to talk with me and you about many things, starting this week with creative process. Claudio is a professor, minister, liturgist, artist, and author. A year ago he produced and played the main character in his very first play, “When Wajcha meets Pachamama.” (The clown character meets Earth Mother.) The production was awarded the “Most Creative Play” in the New York Theater Festival in Fall of 2023!
In the first part of our conversation we talk about Cláudio’s creative process in putting the musical play together. Cláudio is from Brazil, and he drew on his childhood stories, music, and relationships as this new form of performance was born and took shape. His entire aim is to help his students — and all of us — consider the climate emergency from a new point of view.
Creative Process
Cláudio says this process began when his own consciousness about climate change bagan to take hold. Yet he found as he opened himself to the new understandings, and taught more classes, his students were feeling overwhelmed by the intensity of the climate crisis. Some of them felt paralyzed by anxiety and fear. So he began looking for new ways to teach about the disaster.
He says when we open ourselves to new directions, we are not the only ones moving. Other people and ideas and resources start to come our way.
How did he open himself? He took daily walks during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. On those walks he began to encounter spiritual visits from his father who died in 2005. His father liked to clown around with his children. And the encounters inspired Cláudio to wonder: What would a clown do in the face of a forest fire? How would anyone whose essential character is joy approach the experience of climate disaster?
The walks continued to be a time of creative generativity. The story of the play began to take shape. And each day after his walk, Cláudio would come in and type up portions of the emerging play.
The Process of Practice
To give birth to the main character Wajcha, Cláudio had to spend months getting in touch with the “clown in himself.” He had partners who helped to draw out the character. But it took time and practice for everything to come together.
Much like ministry, or any other complex and subtle practice, the final character does not arrive all at once. Learning is a process and a practice. Watch the (9-minute) video to learn more about how the creative process unfolded for Cláudio. Let it spark your thinking about how creativity emerges in your life and ministry.
Ask yourself… what is my creative process? Where is the Spirit of God nudging or luring me? What from my past and future is coming together in this moment to draw me into my vocation?
