Creating the Conditions

If you’ve observed children in imaginative play, you may have noticed the extensive care they’ll take in setting up the world they’re creating. It’s serious business, done with great attention to detail and investment of time: figures placed just so, items rounded up from the kitchen and the closets precisely arranged to transform the mundane into the magical. Children seem to understand that it’s important to get this phase right in order for great possibilities to become available in the next.

As a professor and director of theatre, I’m involved in what I call “taking playfulness seriously.” In the rehearsal process with actors, I use the analogy of setting up a jungle gym, then playing boldly within that structure in performance. If an actor isn’t confident in that structure – if they cannot fully trust the preparations – they will not find the freedom to truly play on stage. There will only be fearful clinging to the safe and predictable, and the performance will lack authentic, responsive presence and the electric “aliveness” an audience wants to witness. Creativity requires building the structure and playing within it.

This applies to individual rehearsals as well, where rehearsal is viewed as a time of generative work – actors actively making choices, making new things happen in the space – rather than merely the transfer of previously made decisions. In this approach, the preparations are mostly made by the director and design team: they make offerings to the actors for them to play with, and the actors come ready to play, that is, to explore, imagine, receive, share, respond, and transform. It is not known whether anything with sticking power comes out of a session like this. We can only set up the conditions that enable creativity, then live fully within them. Importantly, approaching any generative process in this way requires the maker to relinquish control within the flow of work and release themselves and collaborators from attachment to predetermined outcomes. Working in this way is an exercise in faith.

Whatever the mode of creative activity, you can consider what “creating the conditions” means for you and your time of making. This is not the same as a list of productivity tips the internet could provide, though care-full preparations may certainly result in a “productive” period of work, insomuch as you were focused and things got made, maybe even things you like and will keep. The conditions are deeply personal and specific to the nature of the project. When considering the conditions that could allow for abundant creative activity to happen, available factors include time, space, physical state, materials, and other sensory inputs. You might ask yourself, “What could I make available to be explored? What can I surround myself with that could inspire? What constraints are needed to limit scope and prevent overwhelm? What reduces fearfulness and induces a state of play?” Perhaps these are questions you are asking and answering yourself; perhaps you are trying to create these conditions for others.

Creative confidence and capacity are developed through valuing the time spent fully present within the conditions as much as we might value any product. Great improvisational actors know, a lot of bad ideas are going to be put out there before a good one emerges. The very best ones, no one saw coming. They can’t be afraid of the weak ideas, or they’ll never get to the good stuff. It’s important to love the making, the generous generative state. Improv-ers also know, they can’t be attached to and precious with their own ideas. They must be willing to toss something aside just as quickly as it emerged, trusting that any gems will be recovered later. That’s not a negative reflection on the maker; that’s just the work: a lot of humanness, released into shared space and time, good, bad, ugly, beautiful.

It has been said that the best actors love the rehearsal process more than the performance; the best athletes value their practice more than games won or lost. The artifact in front of you at the end of a session is merely a byproduct of something much more valuable that has happened within yourself and, if present, among collaborators. Creative activity, done in this way, becomes a teacher of presence, patience, joy, and hopeful surrender to something more than what we can perceive at the start. Like a spiritual discipline, getting present and awake to the immediate opens up the soul to what’s beyond. In this state, we can make without being clouded by doubts or fearful grasping; we are free to make more: more boldly, more trustingly, more truthfully, more abundantly.

Artists are especially attuned to their materials while working, as if in a dance with them; they are willing to be led by their conditions, and therefore must take great care in setting them up. They’ll describe being surprised by what they’ve made; discoveries along the way igniting new ideas; the medium inviting a next move that preplanning and unheedful manipulation would have destroyed.

Care with the process is the key to a lively product. This is not an idea unique to the fine arts; anyone applying their craft well over time can tell you the same: the how determines the what. Joyful investment in the process, including setting up conditions that awaken, nourish, invite, can keep us coming back to our work in a way that feels more like play, perhaps even yielding results beyond what we could have anticipated.