Great acting comes from a well-developed imagination. But “use your imagination” can be a remarkably vague instruction. What do you actually do? How do you develop it? How do you notice when you are censoring an image before it has had a chance to become anything?
Your imagination is a source of creative material: images, sounds, places, people, sensations, possibilities. It can create something absent from the room or something that has never existed. It can also change your relationship to something directly in front of you.
There are many ways to cultivate it. Here are several you can explore in ordinary life.
Your imagination is a source of creative material: images, sounds, places, people, sensations, possibilities.
Jason Bennett, The Curious Imagination, original article.
Dreams are your imagination at play
A dream may arrive with a world already around it. A room has a particular atmosphere. A stranger seems familiar. An animal, a landscape, or an impossible event carries a feeling you cannot yet explain.
Begin by noticing. Put a notebook where you can reach it when you wake. If you remember an image, a sound, a fragment of action, or a feeling, write it down before trying to make the dream into a coherent story. A fragment is enough to begin.
You do not have to remember dreams to be a good actor. Night dreams are one doorway into the imagination. Daydreaming, deliberate invention, sensory exploration, reading, music, and rehearsal offer others.
If an image interests you, ask specific questions. What do you see? What is near you? What is far away? Is there a sound, texture, temperature, or movement? What happens as you attend to it? You are exploring creative material, not taking an examination in correct dream interpretation.
Avoid handing your imagination over to a dream-code book that announces what every image must mean. Your relationship to the image matters. You can investigate several possibilities and leave an image unexplained.
We explored ways to bring dream images into acting. My article “Using Dreams for Your Acting” offers two examples. An image may help with a character, an atmosphere, or a different quality of voice and movement. The next step is to test what it offers in the actual material.
Daydreams all day
A daydream can be one second long and consist of a single image. You see someone attractive and imagine a shared life. You are in a difficult job interview and imagine walking out. You are at a boring day job and picture yourself on a stage in front of thousands of people.
Notice the imaginative event and the response that accompanies it. An image of success may be exciting and frightening at once. An image of escape may bring relief and then sadness. There can be several impulses inside a moment that initially seemed simple.
Keep a journal of images. You can use the short questions of Personal Inventory to explore your response: “How do I feel?” “What do I notice?” You do not need to turn every image into a theory of yourself.
Fantasy and action are different. You can recognize an image without obeying it, believing it, or assigning it a fixed meaning. For acting, the question is what imaginative material you can work with and how you choose to use it.
Actively fantasize
Make up stories. Begin with a place, an object, a remembered detail, or an invented person. See how much specificity you can give the world.
Try this exercise: a person sits on a station bench carrying a small, carefully wrapped box. What is in it? A cake? A broken instrument? A gift they are no longer sure they should deliver? Choose one possibility and follow it. Then invent a completely different one.
What do they expect at the end of the trip? What might they be avoiding? Imagine the room where the box was wrapped. What does the paper feel like? What sound interrupted the wrapping? Who knows where this person is going?
You just make it up! Do it vividly. Use the sensory detail that is available to you. Be absurd and illogical sometimes. Be a kid. Have fun. A banana can grow out of someone's ear. A person can become an animal. A kitchen can float through the sky.
If a real stranger sparks a story, remember that you are inventing. Their appearance does not establish their private history, nationality, sexuality, motives, or character. Try several incompatible stories from the same observation. That can help you catch the moment when an imaginative possibility hardens into a stereotype.
The invented person belongs to the exercise. The real person belongs to themselves.
Be curious about actual people too
Great actors are curious about people. Invention is one practice; listening is another. When someone is willing to talk, ask about their work, their concerns, what they enjoy, and what they want you to understand. Let an answer disturb the story you would otherwise have made up.
Read beyond your familiar interests. Encounter different forms of theater, music, dance, film, and storytelling. Notice the worlds they assume and the experiences they make possible. A curious actor keeps expanding the material available to the imagination.
You are building an imaginative library of humanity: observed details, researched histories, invented circumstances, sounds, images, and stories. Keep track of which kind of material you are using. That distinction makes the library richer, not smaller.
Bring the discoveries into performance
Choose one image and test it with a short piece of text. Does it change the atmosphere? Your relation to distance? The person you seem to be speaking to? What does it make you want to do?
Then ask whether the discovery serves the scene. An image may be powerful and still belong somewhere else. You can adjust it, take only a trace of it, or let it go. The imagination provides possibilities; craft gives them a relationship to the story.
Honor yourself in the process. You do not need to pursue every disturbing image, disclose private fantasies, or force a dream into usefulness. The work should enlarge your capacity to choose and create.
Some people experience the imagination as spiritual, even sacred. Others understand it differently. You do not need to settle that question before you can work. Honor the Gods of the Imagination and Fantasy, if that language speaks to you. Give the imagination attention, room, and practice.
Be curious. Let the world surprise you. Then make something.
