Like many actors, my earliest training focused on applying sense memories of past personal experiences to the circumstances and emotional life of my characters. So that became my fallback method for preparing a role: I got lots of mileage out of dead puppies, bad boyfriends, etc. But the best actors know how to use their imagination too. Some teachers, in fact, believe imagination is everything.
Famed Group Theatre director Bobby Lewis wrote in Advice to the Players, "You are constantly called upon in plays to justify certain things that you would not yourself normally do in that particular manner. Without imagination, you cannot justify that required behavior." He called the imagination not something mystical but rather "a practical tool of your craft."
His colleague Stella Adler encouraged students to "get beyond that boring, personal, egocentric quality you take for 'real' life." She wrote in Stella Adler: The Art of Acting that when she worked with Stanislavsky in Paris, he stressed the importance of imagination over memories: "To remain in your personal past, which made you cry or gave you a past emotion, is false, because you're not now in those circumstances." She noted that when you're trying to find a personal experience to match Hamlet's state of indecision, your past waffling about whom to take to the prom won't do. It's all about making yourself believe in the circumstances of the play or film. Without imagination, you just can't go there—not convincingly, say many teachers.
Adler and Lewis were influenced by Michael Chekhov, who believed in "an objective world in which our images lead their independent life" and wrote in On the Technique of Acting that acknowledging this world frees actors "from the constant pressure of their too personal, too intellectual interference with the creative process." In his introduction to the book, theatre scholar Mel Gordon wrote, "Chekhov schooled his students to find fictional, external stimuli from outside their personal experiences that could fire their emotions and imaginations." Chekhov felt that personal memories were difficult to control; he believed "that the stimulus should always begin outside the private and internalized world of the performer," and he had tools to help actors connect to that special place.
I phoned Lenard Petit, artistic director of New York's Michael Chekhov Acting Studio, to learn how he carries forward Chekhov's teachings today. The studio draws inspiration from poet William Blake's assertion "What is now proved was once only imagined," Petit says, and he echoes Adler's declaration about the need to break out of your own personal experience: "When working with the imagination, you're appealing to your talent. When working with your own personality, you're only appealing to your own little personality."
Petit adds that when new students arrive, they know how to reconstruct personal experiences to fit the circumstances of the material. But, he explains, "there's a great limitation in that. The problem of the conventional forms of acting—and the teachers of it would agree—[is that] the actors are often in their heads. Working with psychoanalytical approaches, they justify everything from the intellect. This is not freeing; it's limiting." At his studio, students learn to place images within the body (see his example below). Petit says it's possible to physically transform yourself into the character the playwright imagines or describes. "You can change the shape of your hands, neck, face, shoulders, legs, or feet using the imagination," he says. "It's completely possible and doable and easy to access by anybody who wants to be an actor."
I'm not sure, however, that it's so easy to access the elusive imagination. I called Los Angeles teacher Eric Morris, who says he runs into students with dormant (but not nonexistent) imaginations.
"Almost every child has a fantastic willingness to believe in imagination," Morris explains. "As we grow older, we're told to grow up, stop fantasizing. The actors who hang on to that childlike willingness to believe and pretend are the most connected to their imagination." The rest of us, he says, need to practice reinvigorating our fantasy life: "You can't just decide you're going to have an imagination on stage. Too many years have gone by and stifled it. All the subparts of our child persona are part of our personality, but you can't just say, 'Okay, I'm going to believe in the given circumstances' after 30 years or whatever. You have to invest in stripping away all the obstacles that have buried the childhood imagination and liberate it into your life and work." Morris' rigorous classroom approach to stripping away that veneer, refined over 47 years of teaching, works for some but perhaps not others. (Full disclosure: I took his classes eons ago and liked them.)
He and other teachers offer many exercises to reinvigorate our dormant imaginative powers. Morris says our imagination is part of our consciousness; it's a willingness to pretend, to say I'm the knight and this broom is a horse. "We have masturbatory fantasies for pleasure," he says. "Why not fantasize for other kinds of pleasure too?"
As a child, Morris says, he helped himself fall asleep by imagining an exciting episodic adventure; he'd wake up sweating from a trek through the jungle. He still does this, he says, and it has helped him stay in touch with his imagination. My own childhood falling-asleep fantasies were much more low-key, involving floating down the street on my bed with all the neighborhood kids watching delightedly, but they were still fantasies. What were yours? If you feel out of touch with that side of yourself, tapping into those sleepy-time memories might be a good starting point.
Here are some exercises to help you buff up a recalcitrant imagination. But first, an admonishment from Lewis: "If you can't believe in your little moment in this exercise, chances are pretty good you'll never be able to summon the belief needed for your part in a play." Among Lewis' exercises: Have someone give you any word, then leap up and move in whatever way that word suggests to you, sort of a physical Rorschach reaction. Here's another: Assume an arbitrary pose and then justify it. Where are you? What are you doing?
Petit tells students to place an overflowing pot of honey inside their heads. "If you give yourself over to that image, it guides you completely," he says. "Honey takes over and does the work for you. For example, you can play somebody high or drunk with this kind of image in your head." He also offers another exercise: "Find the ugliest thing you've ever seen in your life and try to find something beautiful about it."
Morris has students return to childhood memories, to a time when their imagination was unfettered: "I'm 5 years old. My best friend is Danny. We're pirates," and so on. That way, he explains, you can bring up all the stuff that's been buried for years. And that material will find its way into your work; it will make you willing to believe in something you wouldn't ordinarily believe in.
Chekhov recommended reading fairy tales. "The images and events will of their own volition work in your creative subconscious, gradually implanting a sense of truth in you," he wrote. (Harry Potter awaits!) He also suggested reading biographies of famous people and imagining their lives.
And here's a snippet from one of Adler's exercises: Imagine you're walking along a country road. See absolutely everything in precise detail: "How long is your shadow?... How green is the grass?... Are there cows?... Tell me three or four things that make the cows logical and real." She wrote that the imagination is what animates the instrument and keeps it in tune: "You've imagined it. Therefore it exists."