Comparing the attitudes of the Egyptian people now with those in the 1990s, the director, Tamara Cofman Wittes, said they "are mobilized; they refuse to live under a government that represses their dignity," not represses their "creativity".
Abby's version of this incident illustrates some of Mr. Moore's best ventriloquism for a teenage girl: "And they're all, 'So, what are you doing with your piercings and your magenta-on-black hair, and what can we do to further repress your creativity?
"I would feel myself being a little bit repressed in my creativity, and ideas would not come to me as easily.
After the John Birt regime, however, his ebullient leadership style involving "cut the crap" and "let's make it happen" initiatives was welcomed by staff,who had felt creativity had been repressed for far too long under the weight of bureaucracy.
Freedom of expression, creativity, entrepreneurship – these are repressed, not enhanced, by failing to treat people fairly, or with respect.
In that setting the teen-agers, mostly black and Latino, unexpectedly tapped mother lodes of creativity as well as repressed pain, confusion and other emotions for which they had found few outlets.
Creativity is natural... it is repressed under current pedagogy in America but it is natural to humans.
But this symbolism is all too clear, and the set-up — a seemingly proper, repressed older woman who has hidden her subversive creativity — feels heavy-handed.
This is what Picasso was pointing out: there's a cost of maturity, an unintended side-effect of being able to exert self-control that also stifles our creativity, that represses the imagination.
In a modern world that supposedly runs on rational principles, the convergence of artistic creativity and madness is thrilling; it promises escape from overly supervised consciousness and contact with otherwise repressed psychic forces.
