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.
how this work supports you.
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.
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.
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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