Finding the Creative Spark

Josh Frieman is a renowned astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. Abigail Child, an award-winning filmmaker, wrote a book titled This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film.

They are quite different. And because of that, they couldn't be better suited for "Creativity: Worlds in the Making," a symposium that will begin Wednesday at Wake Forest University.

"Innovation cuts across disciplinary boundaries," said the symposium's organizer, Lynn Book, who is also the director of the Program for Creativity and Innovation at WFU.

"What does creativity look like in your work, in your field? What can I learn from that?"

These are questions that the symposium's participants will explore in a variety of ways:

Meredith Monk, an interdisciplinary performance pioneer, will perform Thursday in Brendle Recital, as part of the Secrest Artists Series at WFU.

Frieman and Child will participate in "Translations: An Astrophysicist and Filmmaker Talk," a dialogue they have already begun through e-mail exchanges.

And cutting-edge leaders in the arts, sciences and business will deliver keynote addresses throughout the symposium. These will include Monk; David Bornstein, who wrote How to the Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of Ideas; and Emil Kang, the executive director of the arts at UNC Chapel Hill.

Also speaking will be David Edwards. He is an entrepreneur, a biochemist at Harvard and the author of Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation."

The symposium will reflect a desire to "more fully embrace creativity and innovation to find solutions to the challenges facing our globalized world," press materials say.

And Book said that she is interested in seeing how people can "work with creativity in a more sophisticated, more knowledgeable kind of way to create a better circumstance for all of us into the future."

These sentiments seem to resonate with Rebecca Kahane, a college senior who studied arts entrepreneurship and creativity with Book at WFU. Kahane will be leading student volunteers at the symposium.

"I am very eager to see what kind of dialogue this event evokes between scholars of different disciplines," she said by e-mail. "The arts and sciences will need to work together in the future to solve looming conflicts.… We are facing so many issues right now concerning the environment, human rights, diversity of government and religion that fostering dialogue between a variety of people with different skills is really the only way that we will be able to find a cohesive solution to these problems."

Book said that part of the symposium will entail "training people to identify opportunities in a very fast-moving world" of intensity and complexity -- then to marry those opportunities with "creative imagination … to spark the new entrepreneurial venture."

"What's wrong?" Book said, asking what entrepreneurs ask. "Where's the gap? Where's my passion leading me to where I can find that bridge-connect?"

The symposium will not only generate ideas but also explore how they can be applied. Highlights of the symposium will be recorded on a Web site and in a documentary film. And a creativity-themed blog will continue after the symposium. The goal is to create a "virtual network," Book said. Book acknowledged that it's a "challenge" to generate creativity across different areas of expertise.

"We tend to compartmentalize, in terms of what the whole society teaches us," she said.

"I'm at those borders and saying, ‘Wait a second. They're flexible. They're permeable. They're not fixed. Or if they appear to be fixed, we want to understand how we can make them permeable.'"

She suggested that interdisciplinary innovation emerges when people leave something behind in their worlds.

"Anything new coming in is saying, ‘Out with the old, at least temporarily,'" Book said. "Then you go back and you look at that old and the old looks new because of what you've just done. You bring that new information into the old and it changes. That's what it's all about."

■ Meredith Monk will perform at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in Brendle Recital Hall at Wake Forest University. Her performance, part of the Secrest Artists Series, will also highlight a symposium called "Creativity: Worlds in the Making," which will be held Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at various locations around campus. Tickets for Monk's performance are $18, $15 for seniors and non-WFU students; call 758-5295. Admission is free for WFU faculty, staff and students. Admission to the symposium ranges from $20 to $235. For more information, see www.wfu.edu/creativity/symposium.

■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com.