What is a Creative Facilitator?

I finally accepted I can’t create ANYTHING alone and I hired a Creative Facilitator.

What’s a creative facilitator?

It’s a term I made up, when I realized that that was what Tim Maurice does for me – and today, Tim and I took a scalpel to the final song of my musical “The Golden Cage.”

The show hits the stage in NYC April 20-24, 2022 and Tim Maurice, a film composer and music director, is supporting me in editing the music and revising some of the accompaniments. He’s been the Music Director for all the workshops in the Boston-area.  He also creates ‘learning files’ – MP3s that help the actors memorize the music.  And, after years of working together, Tim can literally play what’s in my mind – taking my music and reorganizing it in the moment as I describe a new way I want to express it.

He does for me what I can’t do for myself: play what I’m thinking at a level of virtuosity and fluency that I simply don’t have.  And why is that so important?

After years of creating in isolation, I realize I can’t create anything alone anymore.

Tim entered my life about 5 years ago when I heard him play a piece of mine in concert, when he was the Music Director for a cabaret that included several songs of mine.

At the time I lived in a slow boil of agony that I couldn’t make progress on “The Golden Cage,” a musical about Bird-person on a quest to find a magical cage.

Until that moment, I thought I should be able to do this myself. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me: why couldn’t I do it?

I was stuck in my own cage. And the irony of that is that this show is literally about someone stuck in a Golden Cage.

So, I hired Tim to come to my house every Wednesday and play through the show.

“The show” was just a pile of papers – years of revisions piled randomly in a box.

But he played it, I sang it, and each week the shape emerged more and more clearly until we could do a reading, a recording, then back to the process: haphazardly, methodically playing through the piece.

[Notice in this photo that Tim is wearing ear-plugs.  I like to sing loud when I’m impersonating the characters]

We did this for years. We ‘completed’ the show once, did a reading, and a recording and then went back to more Wednesday sessions.  We ‘completed’ the show again – just before the pandemic, and did another reading. 

Then last year, the producer of the new CreateTheatre series in NYC chose “The Golden Cage” for their first-ever NewWorks Fest, and after saying “YES!” I immediately called Tim.

Now we meet TWO times a week, making finer and finer cuts.

And on April 20, 2022, that pile of papers will step onto the stage in front of an audience.  

And that’s the power of a Creative Facilitator.