How to be a successful artist: Marysia’s Podcast with Liz Ranken

Liz Ranken is a friend of mine, but yet again when I start to delve into the backstory and processes of my successful creative friends I am always amazed by their focus and achievements but most of all, their unrelenting focus forward on creating no matter what happens.

 

Liz Ranken, RSC/DV8/Shared Experience Movement Director, painter (@nationalportraitgallery), yoga queen vine.co/v/bUgFDKerVhF

— Marysia Trembecka (@MarysiaT) April 19, 2013

 

 

Liz Ranken is among many things 😉
-a RSC Associate Artiste. Imagine getting a letter from the Royal Shakespeare Company saying ‘I hope you consider the RSC a good creative home for your work’
– Movement Director over 50 RSC Productions
A Portrait Artist. Her painting of Michael Boyd is in the Portrait Collection of the RSC and the archive at the National Portrait Gallery, despite starting painting for the first time since school while Movement Directing at the RSC.
Associate Artiste at Shared Experience
Having given up the arts at school and then started taking ballet lessons while reading biology she went to become a Physical Theatre Performer and Choreographer in Award winning groundbreaking DV8 ’My Body Your Body’ & ‘Deep End’ and with Shared Experience in such shows as ‘Mill On The Floss’
Asthanga Yoga queen
Some links to DV8
DV8 Deep End that Liz did
DV8 Your Body My Body

These are some pictures she has done of Patrick Robinson who is a very established actor. He was cast as understudy for Romeo for the RSC in 1980 as landmark casting and has had a 24 year span in ‘Casualty’. He also had great success in BBC ‘Strictly Come Dancing in December 2014 getting to the last five.

The big take away from this  is
“Just do it don’t care what anyone says. If it feels like a passion just do it cos you get better by doing it.  Go with repetition and try something again and again or in different ways but you learn by repetition”

She shares

Tips on believing in yourself & your creativity
“Just do it .. be driven by the spiritual’,
Write affirmations before starting your work eg “I paint to my highest level so I might serve and inspire humanity’
“ I do 25 affirmations  before i do anything.”
“Whenever i don’t do the affirmations the difference is huge. it’s the ego thats stops so many of us, and sabotaging our work.”
These affirmations settle the ego down and bring her higher being up into more elevated state and in the bliss of the moment
“Failure… i dont read reviews.”

Full Transcript Follows

Hi this is Marysia at loveyourcreativity.com, this podcast interview is with Liz Ranken who is an everything, a movement director, a painter, a physical theatre practioner, a writer. Not only does she create in many ways but she’s also hugely successful in all of these areas. One of her paintings is in the National Portrait Gallery. She has worked at over fifty productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company and has been involved in huge amounts of ground breaking theatre and dance work in the UK. She really is legendary and wonderful. She talks about all of this in this podcast and her spiritual practice, how she really gets her ego out of the way, how she has explored doing affirmations and proper physical and spiritual warm up before she starts work which has had a huge impact on her ability to create.

Her big takeaway that she keeps coming back to is “just do it, don’t care what others say. If it feels like it’s a passion, do it because you’re going to get better at doing it, so do it”.

Now Seth Godin in his startup school podcasts says when he wishes when he first started working as a freelancer that he would’ve asked each client at the end of each job to give him a testimonial which he could then laminate, put in a folder and build a body of work and show him new clients. Liz has an amazing testimonial.

 

I said to Liz that I’d like to start the show by asking if there was any real memorable moments for her that made her think she made it creatively and she wandered over to the mountain piece and handed me a letter that’s rare as an Oscar in the theatre acting world because they don’t give them out every year.

 

Marysia: Hello Liz, how are you?

 

Liz: Well, good, good.

 

Marysia: This is  love your creativity and today I’m interviewing Liz Ranken. Well Liz is many things, you’re a movement director, you’re a painter, and you’re a yoga queen, physical theatre performer and a writer as well. Well before I start I’m going to ask if you have a memorable moment where you thought ‘wow, I made an impact creatively.’ Liz gave me this letter and I’m honestly scared to touch this letter. It’s from the RSC, the Royal Shakespeare Company, it’s from Liz Ranken. It’s from Michael Boyd, the artistic director, and it says:

“Before I go I would like to refresh the company of RSC associated artist the criteria include having made a serious commitment to the company with more than 1 season at work and having made an outstanding contribution to the life and the reputation of the company. So you are a shoe in!

You don’t get money but you do get to speak your mind on company policy and have your name in every program. Associate Artist title is offered with heartfelt thanks and admiration for your achievements within the company and with the hope that you will continue to consider the RSC a good creative home for your work. You have already played a role in defining the development of the RSC’s personality. I would love you to help define the future. Will you let me know if you’re happy to accept? ….

 

How did you feel when you get this letter?

 

Liz: I wanted to cry (laughs). I wanted to cry.

 

Marysia: Tell me about your work with the RSC.

 

Liz: Well, I have done, I think it’s about fifty shows. I’ve done a lot of work with the RSC. I’ve worked a lot with Michael Boyd; I have a close relationship with Michael Boyd. He was the first person I painted and it’s his portrait that got into the portrait collection at the RSC and the archive at the National Portrait Gallery.

 

Marysia: So my mind’s already blown. So before we get to painting, what to do you do with the RSC?

 

Liz: Movement director.

 

Marysia: Talk to me about movement director.

 

Liz: It means, it depends on what project you’re working on, generating physical staging ideas and work with the physical language.

 

Marysia: And for the character development as well?

 

Liz: Yes and usually pretty much the all the people I’m involved with is usually sort of expressionistic and abstract angle on the work. For example in the last show I did Michael Boyd’s “Boris Godunov” and we used the language of clothes for the battles. We choreographed a mound of clothes. The violence and warfare would be the people swirling or slamming down military coats.

 

Marysia: If you have an idea, you workshop it. This podcast is all about creativity and I know you’re so creative and I’m here sitting in your studio with some fantastic paintings behind you. But even in terms of how well one can switch  from one creative area to the other, as you say you’re a movement director at the RSC for fifty shows and why does someone think you can paint? Enough to paint Michael Boyd and to get to the National Portrait Gallery because that’s a bit of a leap.

 

Liz: There was part of me; at school I was very good at art. A teacher had said to me, she said actually you’re a great artist. I haven’t painted since O level; I gave up the arts of O level because I didn’t understand the value of the arts. My family were exceptionally good at the sciences. I read biology as a first thing, it stayed with me. I still found the painting something that was sacred that I did. I was good across the arts at school; I was picked out, really, pretty much all of them. I just knew the painting was in there and I just reached the point where I felt it wasn’t firing on all cylinders.

 

Marysia: Okay, this is why you were a movement director before this.

 

Liz: Why I’m a movement director. I knew there were other parts of my creativity that I wasn’t using that I felt were there waiting to be used.

 

Marysia: A hunch. Then you say it was a great hunch obviously. So then you said to Michael Boyd “Can I do your portrait?”

 

Liz: Yeah I did a few evening classes but I started drawing people, sort of pretty much every day I try and draw someone. The rehearsals were a good place to draw and have access for people that were available for me to draw. I did a lot of candid drawings for the class that means doing it when people didn’t know I was.

 

Marysia: I guess there were a lot of movements in the rehearsal. There was a lot of getting up and trying the same thing again.

 

Liz: Actually an artist came into the RSC and she’s encouraged me, she was just checking that I draw something every day; it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, just pick up a pen or a pencil and draw it.

 

Marysia: So this is definitely not someone you’re friends with, this is definitely someone older in life. You got someone coming here going “oh you’re doing that, do more of it.”

 

Liz: Yes, it wasn’t even that she said do more of it. I did a few art classes more in college but I just sort of had the feeling that if I persisted I could do something quite good. I said a determination that I would keep going. The thing about sort of painting in oils is you can paint over oils again and again; you can keep going until you are happy with what you’ve done. Also with art, if you don’t like it, don’t show it to anyone. There’s nothing to lose.

 

Marysia: I love that. That’s interesting. So let’s go back a little bit further. So you’re studying biology and suddenly you get into… how do you get from that into physical theatre then  a movement director at the RSC?

 

Liz: Well, it’s been a journey back into the arts because I gave them up at school because I didn’t value them. Ad for the biology degree, I said no, I wanted to be doing something with communication, I don’t want to be a biologist. I did start doing ballet lessons again while I was reading biology. My ballet teacher was sort of why don’t you try and join the company?

 

Marysia: So you obviously got huge natural gift as an artist? It seems that everyone you’ve been taught by goes…

 

Liz: Yeah yeah, I suppose I was. It’s a thing of focus for me that has always been a little bit of dilemma because at boarding school I was asked to do extra ballet, extra drama, extra art and you obviously got no parents near you. So it was like how do you structure a time, how do you focus?

 

Marysia: How do you do them now? You said that you’ve learned?

 

Liz: Well now I reach the point where I decided I’m just going to try to do everything I want to do. I’m not going to try to do just one thing. But I do enjoy… I’m pretty unstoppable. In some morning I get up very early, I find it good to switch between art forms.

 

Marysia: Do you do one art form a day? Or do you do three art forms a day? Or is it you have a project  and then you might do a little bit of something else?

 

Liz: I’m sort of experimenting. I have a deadline for that painting it is good to have a drive,  deadlines are good.

 

Marysia: I know recently you’ve just done an RSC play and there’s a photograph of  a portrait in the blog which is  being commissioned to do another piece of work which is of a lovely family. I’ve just looked at it and it’s incredible, I could never ever do that kind of detail in life ever no matter how much training. I mean, Da Vinci, I don’t know, anyone who came  down from the Gods to help me, I still couldn’t. So when you get to a deadline you try and just do blocks of time basically to work something.

 

Liz: Yes yes. I mean I enjoy splitting the day. I always do a very very long spiritual practice every day.

 

Marysia: So before you start your painting or research on your next play, what happens before it?

 

Liz: Well in the morning, I do three to four hours almost like spiritual warm-up every morning. So I do morning pages then I do silent meditation for thirty-five to fourty minutes. Then I do chanting for an hour. Then I do yoga before I go to lunch. But I find the quality of work is so much better and I’ve experimented, particularly, I found I have to do something physical. Because I find the painting is something static, I have to do something physical. I ride a bike to keep a flow of the energy going. I would say all the creative expression is to do sort of surrendering to a spiritual force. I lot of the time I hope or I think the paintings are sort of the manifestation of love.

 

Marysia: Love from?

 

Liz: The people that I painted. The people that I have relationship with that I feel love for.

 

Marysia: So this commission of this family, did you know them well?

 

Liz: Yeah there’s a lot of love. I’ve known Louise for years.

 

Marysia: You can absolutely see the expression of the detail is really incredible. Can I go back a little bit? Because I know you’ve been involved with Shared Experience and their groundbreaking theatre. So can I ask you a bit about how you got involved with that and also the DV8 as well? So can I ask you about that physical theatre perspective? Because obviously you’ve gone from biology into ballet lessons and then.

 

Liz: Then I had a degree in speech therapy because I wanted to do something about communication. My family were happy to pay for any course I wanted to do. So I went to Central School of Speech and Drama. The Principal of the Speech Therapy course said “you are an artist”

 

Marysia: Everybody in your life has been pointing you in the right direction.

 

Liz: She said “you can’t just be a speech therapist, you can’t. You’re too creative”. So I did a diploma then in choreography. Then I got picked up by  DV8.

 

Marysia: Talk to me about DV8.

 

Liz: DV8 physical theatre is a big groundbreaking and amazing company, Lloyd Newson is the artistic director. A lot of the work was very political and I used to dance in clubs a lot with him, with the artistic director. He wanted to make work that… a lot of our work explored about sexual politics, a groundbreaking work where the movements were done with intention and he was trying to not use sort of dance that you can talk. We were exploring movement metaphors or physicalizing the subtext or ideas you connect more with the theatre world.

 

Marysia: Then you did that. What about Shared Experience?

 

Liz: I was a movement director on a show and Nancy Meckler thought there was a lot of power in it and asked me to join Shared Experience.

 

Marysia: I see. So how long were you with them and what did you do? You were a movement director?

 

Liz: I’m an associate artist in Shared Experience as well. I did a lot with them. The world was expressionistic and using movement to sort of create landscape and to tell part of the drama. For example, we created the flood a sense of ability to tell it through movement. We’re sort of physicalizing water, a way of physicalizing that flood. Some sequences would be to sort of heighten the perspective of the protagonist. For example they were in love with someone; the movement might be slower around that incident or going to abstract movement.

 

Marysia: I want to ask questions to kind of help the creative people listening, anything into believing in yourself and your creativity?

 

Liz: I sort of lived by the motto of “just do it” I’m driven by the spiritual, I always do a spiritual preparation and I like affirmations before I do anything. Sometimes I paint to my highest potential for the service of humanity and to inspire humanity. I paint beautifully and brilliantly from my higher being. I always write about twenty-five affirmations before I do anything.

 

Marysia: So this is after the spiritual after you kind of start?

 

Liz: Yeah and I find it in an art class and I don’t know the destination. The difference is huge, particularly because I always try to say to come form my higher being because it’s the ego that stops many of us or sabotages our work. If you try and work from your higher being it seems to work at a level above the ego.

 

Marysia: You think this affirmation is somehow settled your ego down and bring your spirit up?

 

Liz: Yeah.

 

Marysia: So you can just produce in a far more efficient and beautiful way to serve humanity.

 

Liz: Yeah.

 

Marysia: So the beauty in the moment can come through in whatever you do.

 

Liz: Yeah you’re sort of in an elevated state and more in that place where you are in the moment and have that sort of bliss of doing something that holds you in the moment. So you don’t have a sense of is this good or not?

 

Marysia: Do you allow your editor to come in later and look at the work and try to refine it, or do you always then the next day you’ll come back in with a spiritual practice and again put the work on that elevated state.

 

Liz: With the painting it’s pretty much just what I think coming back we kind of lose something and come back to look at it again. With writing, obviously, we do need an editor.

 

Marysia: Obviously you’ve  known many directors, you’ve got Michael Boyd, you got all your actors and directors you have worked with. Have you got any thoughts on how you pick yourself up after failures or things not going as well as you hoped?

 

Liz: Well I don’t read reviews but I think most people don’t. I would say that creativity is sort of a journey of the ego. I can share something that went not well but I can say it was almost like my ego needed that shake up, it makes you question yourself. The ego is something that try…

 

(overcut on interview)

Marysia: Liz  has come to see so many of my shows and even the little workshops that I’ve done and now I’m faintly embarrassed with her back catalogue. It really shows a sense of her spirit of who she is.

 

Marysia: Liz, have you ever had any greats tips? I’m sure in the years of working with the people you have, how have you got that spirituality thing? Does that come from tips or just from life experience?

 

Liz: I would say there was someone who was an outstanding student who wanted to work with me but also was very insistent I have to learn to meditate. I would say the meditation was something also that so helped me with DV8, with performing because it’s sort of… it stills your pulse down.

 

Marysia: Before you went on stage.

 

Liz: Yeah. It takes you to a place where you’re sort of like I can feel gratitude and peace. It helps with sort of nerves.

 

Marysia: I remember Sandy Shaw who also chants. I was talking to her about doing some shows and I said it’s really hard to do even two minutes of chanting sometimes before you go on stage. She said “No way I’ve ever considered going on stage without having chanted. I need to, as one human being trying to touch  the audiences hearts”.

So now that’s how I do it. I always made sure that even if everyone is going crazy, I just need that five minutes chanting to the wall. Every time I’m just being transformed at some point during a concert. I remember singing with Bryn Terfel, and he’s singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone” and I’m staring back at three thousand people, my heart remembers it even now. I was just like ‘Oh my God” because you can really feel that man’s soul coming out. It’s magical.

So let’s wrap this up.

The last thing I want to ask is about time management. How do you manage to keep all your plates in the air? Any tips for people? For me? Because I’ve got plates.

 

Liz: I do sort of chant to focus according to divine intelligence.

 

Marysia: Wow that’s a good one.

 

Liz: I kind of think society is too… sort of instructing us that we should do one thing. Actually that’s not how our brains work. I mean I’ve worked in music theatre as well. There’s different parts in your brain that work, there’s a musical part, a language centre, a music centre, and actually I think they all feed each other. If you have the speech,  you get to sing the text to promote the inter-neural connections. I think we’re all supposed to use the different parts of our brain. We’re supposed to switch activities. I think people are stuck doing one thing. I think it can cause people happiness. The more we push ourselves into using different modalities, the happier we are. I know I’ve lived with someone whose father uhm, she had done so well at Oxford with politics and philosophy and he deliberately taught her drumming along side math and geography. Deliberately to trying to get these cross neural connection through different parts of the brain to be fired.

 

Marysia: Last question. What has gotten you really excited about what you’re doing or life at the moment?

 

Liz: With the chanting I can feel the Buddha stage. I think it just comes out. I’ve got a device I want to start with. I do want to work with my voice and movement with that. I put new ideas in painting. I want to stage something with my team. I think probably generating more stage work that fees more multimedia.

 

Marysia: Thank you Liz. Any last advice for creative who are selling their work, how they move  their life forward.

 

Liz: “Just do it”, that’s my motto. Do it, don’t care what anyone says. If it feels like a passion because you get better by doing it, if it gives you pleasure to do it, just do it. That would be my advice. A lot of theatre people I work with said just go with repetition. Just try again and again or in different ways. You learn by repetition.

 

Marysia: Thank you, I’m inspired. So that’s Liz Ranken. If people wanna get hold of you is there a good way to do so? Because I know…

 

Liz: Well, you can email me.  elizabethranken@gmail.com

 

Marysia: That would be great. Thank you, Liz.

 

Well I’m going to track down Liz’s agent and I’ll pop it on the end when I got it for the people who wants to get hold of her. All I can say to add to it is I hope you enjoyed it. I particularly love the spirituality aspect of it. I certainly will have a go with these affirmations and whatever your spiritual work is then I think it’s important to hang on to that and go into that place because we do get our dreams from somewhere and I would argue with this on a soul level or a God level or a Buddha level. I think Liz’s way of getting to your centre is just beautiful and if you see her work there’s a couple pictures of working process in the show. This is loveyourcreativity.com, thanks.

YouTube DV8 (modern work)

Shared Experience Modern Work

To contact Liz Ranken her email is      elizabethranken@gmail.com

About Marysia and Love Your Creativity
Love Your Creativity.com is dedicated to all creatives trying to make great work and make a living from it.
I blog at least three times a week on creativity and techniques to get your art on. Whether you are a musician, an actor or a choreographer I endeavour to make https://loveyourcreativity.com is a place to come for inspiration and motivation.
I podcast interviews with brilliant creatives and ask them their tips for moving forward and my weekly newsletter via podcast has creative tracking and  a 13 minute task of the day.
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