Bricolage: 
A Review of Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art  (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam,

Bricolage, a  French word, “means making do with the material at hand; a bricoleur is a kind of jack-of-all trades or handyman who can fix anything.  In popular movies, the power of bricolage is symbolized by the resourceful hero who saves the world with a Swiss army knife and a couple of clever tricks.  The bricoleur is an artist of limits.

“We see bricolage in small children, who will incorporate anything into their play—whatever small piece of stuff is lying on he ground, whatever piece of information they picked up at breakfast.  Dreams and myths work in the same way; in dreamtime we take whatever happened that day, bits and pieces of material and events, and transform them into the deep symbolism of our own personal mythology.

“These magical acts of creations are analogous to puling a large amount of rabbit from a small amount of hat.  As in the greatest known form of magic, organic growth and evolution, the output is greater than the input.   There is a net gain of information, complexity, and richness.  Bricolage implies what mathematicians call ‘elegance,’ that is, such economy of statement that a single line of thought has a great many implications and outcomes. . .

  “ . . .  to a child’s imagination a twig is a man, a bridge a telescope.   This transmutation through creative vision is the actual day-to-day realization of alchemy.  In bricolage we take the ordinary materials in our hands and turn them into new living matter—the “green gold” of the alchemists.  The fulcrum of the transformation is in mind-at-play, having nothing to gain and nothing to lose, working and playing around the limits and resistances of the tools we hold in our hands.

 “ . . . The artistic attitude, which always involves a healthy attitude of bricolage, frees us to see the possibilities before us; then we can take an ordinary instrument and make it extraordinary.” (pp. 86-87)

These comments from Free Play  are a small sample of the wisdom offered in this book.    While the author is writing about improvisation in music, his wisdom applies to any creative process.    If you are interested in freeing your own intelligence to be creative, then Nachmanovitch provides a jump start.  Free Play is a book that needs to be read by everyone.

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