Divergent streets
In The Torch Principle I emphasize the importance of bringing divergence to all parts of your life. This becomes easier when you get to know, hang around and collaborate with other people who love divergence as well. Somebody just like that is my friend La CrisTalks. She is an amazing musician, able to improvise original music with any objects she finds around. When you speak with her, you notice that she can at any time associate whatever you are saying with something unexpected. Divergence is something very natural for La CrisTalks.
So what happens when we mix two people that love divergence and two different creative channels/languages? In this case we combined Video and Music. I went with La CrisTalks to the Gracia neighborhood in Barcelona, a picturesque and beautiful neighborhood full of life and cute streets (I recommend attending the Gracia celebrations every year in August, when they decorate each of their streets with a different theme).
In pure diverging mode we took a hybrid approach. We decided to brainstorm each separately the evening before and then generate our final idea right there and then at the final stage the next day. As I mention in The Torch Principle, Some insights only arise when the context around you is the real final one and the energy in the game is that of the final performance. That’s why the best movie directors keep options open until the very end. Even If we had a very precise screenplay we would still be open to change any parts of it during the actual filming (the interactions with executive producers are for another post).
La CrisTalks arrived with something in mind. Gracia is Grace in English, so she came with the popular song Amazing Grace in her mind. I came with the idea that we had to do something somehow light, ethereal, I had the feeling that something had to go up in the air, with grace (Gracia). And so we met and walked around one of the streets of the neighborhood, calle Asturias.
As we walked around incubating the context, we had a series of illuminations and came up with the idea of La CrisTalks walking out from a flower shop feeling joyful and then jumping at some point. She would then get frozen in the air and another La CrisTalks would exit the flower shop singing the Amazing Grace song to her own figure up in the air. At the end the figure up in the air would disintegrate and we would return to the one real La CrisTalks.
The concept can be interpreted in infinite ways. One possible interpretation is connected to parallel universes, to how through creativity and our imagination we can expand our boundaries and experience different versions of ourselves and even sometimes, like in this case, watch the process from the outside, contemplate our own soul from a different dimension. You may have tour own interpretation. And here is the result, enjoy this improvised divergence exercise.