Evidence of Your Creative Life

I.
As I was looking over grad school admission requirements a few months ago, I was amazed at the variation in selection methods and processes.
One school simply asked applicants to:
"Be prepared to show evidence of your creative life"
That phrase has stuck with me over the past several months as I ponder what I could bring as evidence.
Theatre is in so many ways fleeting and ethereal--how do you capture something that's only meant to happen once? Everything a director does in hindsight appears as shadows and echoes.

II.
It's all about the process I suppose. While I cannot show you footage of what it looked like to see a flower in my garden bloom, I could probably tell you about all the watering and weeding I did to help encourage it's growth. These are things a gardener knows well, and should have no trouble explaining and practicing.
If I planned ahead, I could probably document the various stages of a flower's development, and I might be able to capture some of the experience through pictures, or even a video clip. But the fact remains that none of those things will be quite the same as actually seeing the beauty of a flower firsthand. Of feeling the velvet of it's petals, smelling it's perfume, or watching the way a honeybee might emerge from it dusted in yellow flecks of pollen. Trying to capture any of these things would result in a less than genuine understanding.

III.
But that's the trick of theatre anyway, isn't it? And isn't that precisely what a good director aims to do? The actors in Cherry Orchard are not really in Russia, nor have they ever existed in any part of the time period in which the play takes place, but all the same, if the production is successful, the audience might be persuaded that these things could be. That is how we are creative. We engage the imagination of the audience to the point of belief and wonder.

IV.
In the end, presenting convincing evidence of a life (creative or otherwise) is the ultimate aim of a theatrical experience.