A festival aimed at inspiring its attendees gets underway Friday in Phoenix.

Space55 Theatre is putting on Muse Fest: The Inspiration Games this weekend and next at the Metropolitan Arts Institute in Phoenix. It includes performances, workshops and — if all goes well — sparks of inspiration.

Kim Porter is a writer and performer and the person behind Muse Fest. She joined The Show to talk more about the festival and where did the idea came from.

Woman with blonde hair and glasses smiles into camera

Amber Victoria Singer

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KJZZ

Kim Porter in the KJZZ’s studios in 2024.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Kim, where did the idea for this come from? 

KIM PORTER: So I was invited by Space 55 for their 20th season, this is their 20th season coming up, to produce “The 9 Muses” show, which is a show that we have done many times before that grew out of another show. At the heart of it is a variety show of nine female writer-performers inspired by the nine Greek muses.

And we’ve done it in the past, but this year when I was approached in the spring to produce this, I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea of inspiration and about what we do with our inspiration because I’ve been ruminating a lot on how overstimulated most of us are. I mean, I don’t know how many streaming services the average number of people has, but I’ll sit down at night and be like, “I’m so bored and I have like eight streaming services, right?”

So I started just thinking like, “what’s missing is the actual meaningful engagement. What do we do with our inspiration?”

And I’m obsessed with helping other people create stuff, so I started thinking, “how can I spin this one show into a whole festival that’s built around the idea of getting people off their sofas back out into those third spaces? How do we create a deadline and community so that we build both motivation and momentum? And how do we get people in a short period of time to create something so that they can remember what it was like to go out in the world and create something?”

BRODIE: Well, and that’s sort of the inspiration it sounds like for the second component of this festival, which is a show that will come up on the second weekend called “The 9 Amused,” which, am I right, this is nine male performers who basically have a week to take something that inspired them from “The 9 Muses” and put on a show about that. 

PORTER: That’s exactly right. And mirroring that is what we’re calling the “7 Minutes in 7 Days” show, which is the show created by the audience. So the audience can watch inspiration in action by coming to the first weekend and seeing “The 9 Muses” and then, you know, maybe contemplating all week what will those men create.

They only have seven days to do it, but if a person is feeling brave, they can also create a show for the last day of the festival. And the way that we’re supporting that show creation is on the first Sunday of the festival, we are running a workshop so people can get a head start creating something and at the last day of the festival, anybody in the audience who wants to can perform what they created.

So Muse Fest is like, come and see a show and then make a show and then show a show. But also maybe there’s some people that are shy and they only want to watch a show from the sidelines, and that’s totally fine as well.

BRODIE: I’m so intrigued by this concept that you brought up a couple of times now in terms of what we do with our inspiration. Because it seems to me that kind of goes beyond the idea of, “well, how do we get inspired? Like, where do we look for inspiration?” 

It sounds like what you’re saying is “that’s great and we need that, but then how do you take that next step and actually do something with it? How do you use it in some way?” 

PORTER: Yeah, I’ve spent the last like almost 30 years working in either small groups or one-on-one with people that are in the creative process. And what I have discovered over those almost 30 years is that almost everybody needs to construct some type of infrastructure that supports the places where their creative process falls down.

Most people can’t make it all the way from inspiration to completed project without something, whether it’s a writer’s group or a deadline or a contest they’re gonna enter or maybe they sign up for classes. Most people need something, right? Because most people don’t have every single one of the geniuses required.

We got a couple of the geniuses. Like maybe we’re great at wonder or we’re great at discernment, but we won’t do invention unless we have a deadline or intermittent gratification of showing up and reading our pages.

And so I’m saying like, “here we’re gonna inspire you and then we’re also gonna provide this other structure so that you can create something over the course of these seven days.”

And because we’re treating the whole thing like games in the kind of ancient Greek-style like the Pythian games or something, we’re hopefully making it low stakes enough that people feel comfortable risking in a silly and fun way.

BRODIE: Do you think that people know which step of the process they need help with when it comes to going from being inspired to using it in some way?

PORTER: I think most people do not know. I think what happens is they try to create a project, they come up against their resistance, and they either learn how to unpack that resistance or they end up telling themselves a story which is, “I guess I wasn’t meant to do it.”

And my philosophy is: you’re meant to do it. You just aren’t meant to write like Stephen King writes or any of the other books that you’ve read that have told you how to do it. You’re gonna have to unpack what’s stopping you. And then here’s about a million different tricks you can try to make yourself actually create something.

BRODIE: Is there something about this current moment that you think makes a festival like this particularly important? 

PORTER: I think we have become completely habituated to virtual and asynchronous communication. Who’s to say whether or not we would be as lost as we were if it weren’t for the pandemic? I mean, I think people are still trying to come back out. They’re still just now coming to terms with what became the new normal.

And I think we would have found ourselves in this weird place anyway, even if we hadn’t had the pandemic, because there’s just only so much constant entertainment. And the lack of the third space that we don’t have anymore. Our third space is, you know, social media. It’s not real. It’s asynchronous and I think we have to come back out into the real world.

I mean, if I could wave a magic wand, I would make every teenager have to drive around in a car and go find their group of friends hanging out in the McDonald’s parking lot again. If I could get people to remember what it was like to go into the real world, form a tiny gang, and make something happen, I would, but I don’t have that power.

KJZZ’s The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ’s programming is the audio record.

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