This semester at university we had to write, organize and perform a musical as part of a simulated marketing campaign. We would work in teams of five and our final performance would be recorded for posterity.

What a fantastic experience it was!

When the project was announced, my two friends and I pinned our hopes on two new students who had joined our class year. One of them soon let us down by dropping out of the university just a couple weeks after the project had begun – I dare hope we played as small a part in her departure as she had in our musical so far. The other newcomer, however, undeniably brought a lot to our team. A ukulele enthusiast, amateur dancer and theatre aficionado, he couldn’t possibly have come at a better moment.

Our great project began with a story our professor had asked us to write down. We were to produce a stockpile of ideas that would make no sense at all and be written down with very loosely structured sentences (“there shouldn’t be a beginning, a middle or an end to your sentences”). They were to come to us automatically, and without any self-censorship whatever: there wouldn’t be any taboo for the duration of our class.

To do so, the professor made us lie down on the rows of chairs (or tables for the less fortunate) and asked us to close our eyes. He then put on some relaxing exotic music and read us a story from a book entitled “Fairytales for Managers” (I’m not kidding). We were told to visualize and feel the scenes as completely and in as much detail as we could.

The class was on creativity techniques, and it completely exceeded my expectations. I remember having an oddly liberating vision at the end, where I could see myself floating and swimming along the ceiling, as if it were the surface of water, and with psychedelic, circular tie-dyed patterns on the walls of the room.

Right after that “chairtime story” (before which he had also instructed us on how to breathe correctly), he made us come back to our seats (a relief for some) and gave us the story assignment I mentioned earlier.

Emotional overflow is key to effusive writing, and it is the state I am in at this very moment, having just watched again the video of our musical. It’s also the reason why so many of my articles are about music: songs are an endless source of emotion for me.

I was also in that state when I set out to write the story for our musical. I had seemingly overcome the limits of my imagination (had had an epiphany during the storytelling when I thought about all the rules that could be broken in art in general) and was in a way in direct connection with my subconscious. It might sound woo-woo put this way, but I just mean to say that I had a lot of ideas coming to my mind. I started writing down the vision I had had during the storytelling, and then continued from where it stopped. The story gradually got less and less coherent, up to the point where it simply stopped holding any meaning, a result, I suppose, of a conscious decision. At the end, I strung together a series of unrelated nouns, actually items I was successively laying my eyes on: X’s necklace, Y’s polo shirt, Z’s watch, the clock on the wall, and so on. To this I added lyrics from a song that was playing in my mind at the time; in my case, and not making the situation any better: “no no no no no no no no”, a pattern I reused a few lines further down with the word “stop”.

I remember the professor telling us there was no such thing as going over the top for that assignment, so I told myself I might as well go all out. Be that as it may, when I read him an extract (with uneasy looks and nervous laughs around me as I listed pieces of clothing and the people wearing them), he did say that maybe a bit more verbs wouldn’t go amiss.

Since I didn’t care much for my work, as I had done it as an experiment for myself above all, my team eventually opted for the story that two of my teammates had worked together on and that made a bit more sense structurally. Since I hadn’t read it (I just found now the origin of the website name) I would have the surprise later, and it would be all the better so. As it turned out, the story was as coherent as gravel and had quite a few scabrous passages, although I won’t blame my teammates for that, seeing as almost every group also had dirty moments at one point in their story – some of which you really don’t want to hear.

I forgot to mention that we had had to produce two teasers and a 100-page-long bilingual marketing document before that. The next logical step was thus to take our marketing plan and blend it together with the story, for instance treating the places, actions and characters as metaphors for markets, business deals and founders. Of course, we hadn’t written our story with the marketing plan in mind. As such, it wasn’t quite like combining two halves of a puzzle, with everything making sense after that. (What kind of person makes two-piece puzzles anyway?) While it did make a bit more sense, there were still weird bits left over. If there was something in our play that didn’t seem to make any sense (and that happened, to be honest, quite often), then you could be sure that it came from a segment beyond repair of our original story.

In spite of our difficulties, we were undeniably getting closer to producing our “marketing musical”… One problem, though, was that the stage looked a bit plain as it was then. To remedy this, the professor made us extract 20 keywords from our story and asked us to make props out of them, by drawing, modelling or with rebusses for example. They would be placed onstage for the musical, giving it a more theatrical feel. In a way, the professor was guiding us in our production.

As if that wasn’t enough, he also imposed further restrictions on us, making sure we would dance, sing and act in each scene, using songs of our likings but ideally as varied as possible. I’m glad I had a part in the writing of the musical: I wrote one entire scene out of the seven, and it was the opportunity for me to experiment freely and express myself (however distorted and wacky the way). Rehearsing scenes and being constantly moving after sitting down all day listening to classes was liberating, stimulating and truly refreshing. Being able to have projects and classes with no direct link to the Internet in a school dedicated to Internet jobs is a real boon, and I’m grateful for that. It really opens up new perspectives, just like next semester’s self-development classes will too, hopefully. The whole process gives us new ideas that could be applied to the Internet, or, well, pretty much anything. I don’t think the creativity techniques that we learned are bound to a certain domain of application. As long as you need to think something up, or if your creativity simply needs a nudge, these techniques will be there to help.

The musical lasted 20 minutes. Fortunately for us, it all went pretty well. Everybody gave their all. Of course there were a few misses but, well, paradoxically, that was part of the plan: something had to go awry; it was bound to happen. Case in point: during a fight scene, we somehow managed to put on classical music instead of hardcore metal. At other times the music and visuals on the backdrop (both linked together) tripped us up, the reason lying in a faulty remote control that often triggered “next slide” twice instead of once. Sometimes, you would see slides changing frantically in the background with the most varied transitions (zooming, fading, sliding…) along with songs each time beginning to play then stopping after a split second. Not very professional, but we’re not professionals either. At one point, one of us was hovering onstage awkwardly while waiting desperately for the others to join him as planned — the silence was palpable. I also somehow forgot bits in a dialogue and had to improvise for a bit while my partner was trying to get me back on track (this being said, on rewatch it feels like it was all planned – although maybe not written very well – so that’s all good). The strong sense of closed complicity elicited by this bit of improvisation piqued my interest quite a bit and sparked a fire lively enough to make me want to delve further into improvisation in the future.

In spite of those hiccups, our musical was overall a success, and the two-person jury seemed quite receptive to our references. For instance, for a minute and a half we reenacted the French “Carioca”, a cult scene from the French comedy “La Cité de la Peur” (http://bit.ly/1pMFlsg). It took us time to learn the dance moves, but it was well worth it and tons of fun. Apparently though, we weren’t pioneers since another student had also learned the moves — well, an alternative choreography, let us say — and had the habit of breaking into the dance at midnight with his friends at house parties. The dance was no problem for me during the final representation. However, I inadvertently sung the original lyrics for one line, and it took me a few seconds to get back on track…

I just realized that I completely omitted talking about the costumes and make-up, but suffice it to say that for the better part of the musical I was wearing a blonde wig, a bra (over my shirt) and stockings (that I ripped for lack of experience, not that it’s something I’m interested in gaining experience in), not to mention the lipstick that I forgot to put on… and even with that, I wouldn’t have been the worst off in my team; far from it. For example, at one moment, one of us was down on all fours playing a boar kept on a leash (actually a belt), sticking out his tongue and all, while another of us was baiting him with a McDonald’s French fry (“You want to be thirsty, don’t you ?”). It’s a curious coincidence that this part ended up being played by the most corporate student of our class; it must have been the first time I had seen him wear something other than a suit… And he seemed quite happy with his part.

That all of it was filmed and duly saved and backed up is a blessing and not at all a curse. I am sure that it will remain engraved in my memory forever, and I simply cannot encourage you enough to undertake similar projects; you’ll be surprised by what can happen, and all the fresh ideas and hilarious episodes that can arise.