1:1 Creative Coaching
I empower artists to find their voice, avoid stagnation and bring ideas to life.
As makers and doers we all need support, guidance and many flexible maps.
You’re at the Crossroads…
- with beginning or finishing a project
- with how to identify your next steps for creative action
- of stretching and flexing your ideas
- with working in a vacuum, needing comprehensive creative support
- with establishing new patterns and engagement for the conditions that support your creative work with building an idea into a project
- of feeling directionless
- with translating ideas into generative material
- of finding & companioning with your unique voice
- with fatigue around feeling defeated and stuck
- with a yearning with igniting fresh wonder and robust creativity
You are a seeker, hungry to create impactful growth.
You know the value of process and examination. You are craving new creative protocols to lead you forward, to immerse you in exploration and discovery. You are looking for guidance, comprehensive and nuanced feedback that is aligned with your heart and vision. You have a desire to expand, deepening your practice and processes to create what matters most to you.
You Are The Curriculum.
Our work together is in the spirit of an artist’s residency, an experience built just for you. Not only for your process and exploration, but for building your work from the ideas up.
I architect custom creative engagement and guidance that is engineered to support growth, discovery and exploration in the pursuit of what matters most to you creatively. Partnered with consistent detailed and comprehensive feedback that empowers you to translate ideas into creative action and illuminate, expand and activate what you are making, have made, or dream of making
Enter a fresh and dedicated space created just for you that prioritizes your work, your process, your practice as a creative human, as a person, and as a body – one of the most important materials you own. You are not a compartmentalized being. Somatic practices may be integrated to regulate, sharpen and encourage the flow.
WHERE ARE YOU IN YOUR PROCESS?
THE WORK YOU WANT TO MAKE
Animate & Activate
You may feel frozen between thought and creative action. Perhaps you're stuck and don't know how to begin or proceed. You may need guidance on expanding an idea seed or concept. You're unsure with how to generate ideas and convert them into buildable material. Are you stuck in research mode? Feeling at sea, can't connect with desire or identify what's meaningful to you right now.
THE WORK YOU'RE MAKING
The Genesis ~ Under Construction
You are in the flow of your process or project, a rehearsal, a draft.
You're in a developing or revising stage. Aspects of the work require you to expand new creative capacities, expand material. You seek feedback and generative ideas and protocols.
THE WORK YOU DREAM OF MAKING
Creating New Work, Shifting Modalities, Returning Home to a Beloved Project
It's a project you've always wanted to tackle or something that's been on the back burner. You have a longing for the experience of creating in a new way, You desire to run breathlessly toward that burning idea and need pathways, strategies and new creative dexterity to bring it life.
Creative Strategy Session
Grab a 20 minute Zoom call, my treat.
Identifying challenges, solutions and creative action.
Expansion creates it’s own momentum.
I’ll just say that there is no one else I know who does this work like she does; backed by an overwhelming history of experience, achievement, and research.
Working with Darla for this year, has been so freeing creatively, instructive mentally and essential physically, making me a more authentic, centered, and confident artist. I was in the studio painting last week in an absolutely different headspace. no critic.It was revolutionary and curious and kind. Now when challenged I don’t doubt my skill or vision, I step back, I question, I problem solve. I allow for learning and experimentation.
Darla helps me question myself. Stay true to myself. She helps me point my energy in alignment with my ideas. I can’t say enough to recommend her to you if you want a surer creative footing for your practice.
Sometimes all we need is to be given the tools, or just a gentle nudge, to enter the process differently. I have always marveled at Darla’s way of looking at, and seeing into and through things. I envy the clarity of that seeing, but also her succinct articulation of what is not seen. As a maker, performer, director, educator, writer and creative coach, Darla brings a broad spectrum of gifts that adds tremendously to any creative process.
how this work supports you.
Project & Process Support
Through customized project and process support, I offer a transformative partnership that accelerates your growth, fosters innovation and empowers you to navigate the complexities of your projects with clarity, unparalleled confidence and purpose. In this space we might play with divergent thinking, integrate diverse disciplines and perspectives, delve into iterative experimentation and emotional resonance. We’ll discover new pathways an applications to expand your process. All will be aligned to where you are right now with flexible frameworks for where you want to go and for what you want to make.
Confident Creative Action
Trust your impulses and intuition and purposely and joyfully engage in an ever evolving creative practice. Learn past imposter syndrome, free creative paralysis from over thinking, negative rumination and an unruly inner critic. Increase dexterity to pivot and iterate new ideas, begin new projects and see them through, forge into new territories, acquire new competencies by broadening your creative arsenal and increasing adaptive skills.
Robust Idea Building
Learn how to mine, connect and build what you generate. Engage in diverse inspiration from a wide range of influences. Utilize creative problem solving to generate and refine ideas, Translate effective brainstorming into strategic action and build a repository of ideas. Jockey ideas across disciplines to expand boundaries and discovery. Learn how to mine, connect and build what you generate.
Revive Your Creative Heartbeat
To unlock doors to innovation and fresh wonder, to support embodied focus to get you back to self discovery and back to your work. Immerse in enlivened and joyful consistent creative engagement. Experience inspired renewal and engagement with an immersion in exploratory exercises, dynamic exploration, investigations, prompts and creative research to activate and inspire you.
Constant Growth Through Consistent Feedback
Maintain a sustainable creative momentum. Receive encouragement and motivation through deeply experienced and nuanced support. Utilize feedback as an innovation catalyst and be guided through a personal growth trajectory that’s aligned and tailored to what’s meaningful to your vision and aspirations. A feedback loop is a powerful tool to accelerate learning and deepening insights, identifying and targeting specific areas for development and growth. Continuous supports expands each iteration. Use feedback as a material, as a compass to adjust your trajectory and align your work.
Build an Idea into a Project
Cultivate creative flexibility and adaptability by encouraging your ideas to reconstitute and evolve. Create a conceptual foundation to ensure a solid mapping and navigation to guide and inform the idea building process. Experience strategic planning to break down creative action, work with custom prompts, exercises, creative propositions and inquiry to systematically transform ideas and generate material, embracing iterative development for continuous refinement and expansion as you progress through the process. Incorporate iterative feedback to increase momentum and utilize plural perspectives to create space for discovery and idea development. Expand confidence with creative risks by recognizing that innovation is charted in exploring uncharted territories.
Cultivating Your Voice
Cultivate your unique identity, discover the power of aligned expression to communicate your ideas, learn what is truly meaningful for you. Embrace and foster your individuality over comparison of others, companion with your creative voice as a trusted collaborator, embrace your own perspectives and innovation. Lead with a grounded sense of your own north star.
develop a sustainable work practice
Redefine productivity metrics by aligning them to your personal needs and creative goals, recognizing that success in your work is not solely measured by conventional standards but by the meaningful progress you experience. Re-thinking time constraints allow for flexible and adaptable schedules that support and accommodate the dynamic nature of your creative process. Reclaim time and attention and develop a personal workflow that gives energy over diminished energy, ensuring focused uninterrupted creative sessions while nurturing the capacity for rest and rejuvenation.
taking care of you
Body Work means so many different things to so many different bodies. To be strong, to be flexible, to be agile, to be still, to be calm, to be balanced, to be powerful. To be well.
Let’s highlight the intrinsic connection between physical, cognitive vitality, and increased mindfulness, by building flexibility, increasing mobility and regulating your nervous system to deepen focus and endurance, strengthen and ground emotional bandwidth to navigate the highs and lows inherent to the creative process. Benefit from a more buoyant and sustained creativity and support cognitive processing to facilitate swift resolutions to challenges and decrease stressors that may be diminishing accessibility to your creative process.
Darla’s ability to cultivate and foster a space that is innovative within multifaceted realms of creativity is remarkable. Her ability to authenticate the work radiates and brightens the mind. Her zealous spirit, and tenacity to all aspects, integrative to a rich and mindfully crafted approach is amazing. Beautifully articulated within her work, is her ability to innovate, rejuvenate and expand understanding beyond horizons to the wonderful place of the heart.
“Darla is a tremendous artist, mentor, and coach for anyone looking to unlock their artistic process. It can be incredibly vulnerable to admit feelings of unpreparedness, anxiety, or blockage around one’s creative process, and even more so to seek out assistance in navigating those feelings.
Darla truly meets you where you are, and furthermore generously offers opportunities for unlearning the kinds of negative self-talk and thought patterns that are anathema to creativity. She identified and reframed my mental blocks and fear around ‘play-writing’ and conception of theatrical work, all the while offering a level of compassion, clarity, and curiosity that allowed me to feel safe plumbing my own preconceptions, questions, and inspirations.
Moving through the initial stages of the creative process are often most challenging for me. Darla listened to these challenges and astutely presented an inventory of exercises and creative research to draw out my preconceptions and predictive outcomes that were paralytic to expansion and growth.
We began with the identification of several essential thematic/inspirational/contextual touchstones we could return to as we continued our work together. From there we began building an elemental inventory of ideas and generative stems to populate these thematic containers. Thanks to Darla’s expert guidance, I have cultivated the expansiveness to explore narrative/thematic opportunities without feeling beholden to outcomes or products, and to better trust my own artistic intuition.
Once we began populating our toolkit we moved into a series of exercises drawing specifically on paintings I was working with. In addition to this, Darla continued to provide elements and media of reference that supported in harmony and/or counterpoint the project we were engaging in together. One example of her curation was the introduction of “The Quiet Volume,” a work of Time Etchells, as an example of autoteatro, deeper reading into Italo Calvino through his “Six Memos for the New Millennium”, and the work of Charles Mee.
This was an essential element in keeping the work we were exploring together open and expansive to the potential of what could be “theatre,” “a world,” or “an immersive experience,” as Darla was able to correctly deduce that one of my key barriers was coming to finite conclusions about work that had not yet been given room to grow.
In that time since, I have successfully generated written work, both in my personal life, as well as in collaboration with my theatre company. In those respective processes, using the tools and language Darla provided me, I have built a library of fragments, sketches, poems, and particles that are rife with potential, but more importantly, delighted me to make.
Whether approaching new endeavors or delving deeper into one’s processes, Darla is truly the psychopomp you want at your side. If you’re feeling locked out of your goals, Darla’s deft mind, precise language, and abundant care will be the pick.
let's get started
1: Schedule Your Creative Strategy Session HERE.
I’ll respond via email with a few questions that will prime our conversation. Your responses inform and give context to this session.
During this 20 minute Zoom call we’ll dive into your questions, challenges and identify creative action that will support you where you are.
2: Creative Strategy Session Follow Up
After our Creativity Strategy Session, I’ll send recommendations and a proposed schema for how we’ll work together. Your needs and desires set the tone and criteria for the scope of our work. I’ll create a framework that aligns best with you.
This can look like a handful of sessions, an intensive immersion, ongoing or a custom mobile residency designed just for you.
3: How We Connect & Interact
Sessions take place over Zoom, however a majority of the work takes place outside of session. You’ll receive “response materials” via email including notes, prompts, inquiry, resource materials that we’ll consistently volley with. This interaction is crucial for momentum and provides alternative space to learn, think and make. This process is essential to our working together.
Materials are specific to you and your needs. At base you’ll need a computer, Zoom and a notebook.
Great Expectations
During our first session we start our creative research together, where we unpack and expand the map for entry points and intel, identify “containers” of work and propose how to deepen, enliven and expand them. We’ll prioritize and sequence next steps.
In addition to our session time, ongoing email volley is instrumental for growth and forward facing momentum. I send follow up take away notes, post-game prompts and propositions to further develop, deepen and evolve the work.
I have worked with painters, performers, photographers, actors, writers, scenic artists, dancers, singers, choreographers and interdisciplinary creative humans. These descriptors are indicators and in no way are meant to define you.
The only pre-requisite is that you strive to climb, learn differently and seek to deepen your practice. You value process and examination and are open to conceptual and exploratory approaches to animate and activate your work.
Conventional methods, modes and lenses are also at the ready.
I’ll guide you to create what you make with rigor, fresh wonder, compassion, and gentle precision.
It’s often difficult to seek out guidance when you don’t quite know what you are seeking.
In our first session, I didn’t know what questions to ask or which areas of my craft to explore. Nonetheless, you met me where I was at. You prompted conversation that helped curate new and specific questions. From these questions, we spent time exploring/imagining the broader strokes, as well as penning in the finer details.
Tangibly, we developed actionable inventories for my work in performance, visual work, and research/development, all while working to consolidate the space between my everyday work and the work that I’ve imagined for myself.
The separation between my “creative life” and my “everyday life” was removed. The gap between the artist that I see myself as and the artist that I want to become has diminished.
I am an educator and a maker. This can be thrilling work.
It is also lonely and draining. The highs and lows can decenter me.
When I am with Darla I become a learner and collaborator. Her deep, care-filled listening, and clear, concrete guidance re-connects me to my deepest sources of energy and creativity.
Her wisdom is lived, refined by deliberation and study, and clarified by the joys released and metabolized through action. While my work can feel solitary work, Darla is there as collaborater, companion and witness.
I have collaborated with Darla in the realms of Body Work and mindfulness for more than a decade. Thanks to her guidance and expertise, I have learned foundational practices that have helped me perform at my best as an artist and a professional.
Darla’s intent focus on the individual sets her apart from other practitioners and coaches. From the start, she makes a real investment in understanding you as a unique human — your goals and needs, your concerns, everything about where you are and where you’d like to be.
Drawing from her extensive library of tools and practices, Darla designs programs for you, and only you. There is never a one-size-fits-all approach. As your collaboration progresses, Darla will tune your practice in response to your feedback, experiences and results. Always with kindness, never with judgment. Whatever happens along the way — personally, professionally, artistically — Darla listens and rolls with you. She is far more than a coach. Darla is genuinely a collaborator and partner in achieving your goals.
MORE GOOD WORDS
You gave me a vocabulary and a series of techniques that allowed me to flourish as a student studying devised theater, and produce much deeper work. I found the structures oddly freeing. It gave me something to push against and use to find questions to take my work to a deeper level of specificity.
Creative Strategy Session
Grab a 20 minute Zoom call, my treat.
Identifying challenges, solutions and creative action.
Expansion creates it’s own momentum.
DARLA VILLANI NYC
Artist, Creative Coach & Collaborator
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