The core of your craft as an actor is performance, but the deeper element certainly shouldn’t be forgotten: the CREATIVITY of it all – what goes far beyond just ‘acting’ something out, beyond playing pretend. We’re talking about developing your character, constructing some semblance of a backstory or drawing inspiration for your roles. This is all about seizing your control as an artist and using your creative license to add depth to the roles you play and the scenes you act out. Sometimes it can be easy to fall into a routine and forgot the depth and dimension that exists within your craft.

We found a great, concise piece on Developing Your Intuition To Enhance Your Acting Performance, which delves into honing your creative power and practicing a conscious focus shift. Here’s our favorite excerpt that speaks volumes to this concept:

“You need to move away from your ego to stay in a creative state.

“Anytime you’re shifting the focus back to yourself, you’re shutting down creative potential. It’s difficult to achieve a consistent openness, letting things flow through you, without your own judgments, your own personal history, or how you think it should be, interfering with that.

“Our thinking mind is different than our feeling mind, and if we start thinking, we shut down creative expression – for actors, anyway.”

Be sure to check out this fantastic interview with film acting teacher Jennifer Lehman On Awareness and Creative Expression, where professionals discuss the motivation behind strong creative acting.

“Creative living is life at a higher state of being than we operate on every day, although I’m finding you can live in that altered state without it making you crazy. But we’re walking every day on a pretty low level of energy, and we also have a lot of conditioning that places a burden on the energy. 

“You can see in a cold reading that when people work full-bore with their energy, the words fly off the page – it’s like the pages disappear. One student just commented that she didn’t know how she got a whole paragraph with one glance – but that’s an altered state, an expanded state of awareness.”

Next time you take on a big role, focus on the creative elements by developing a backstory, doing character research (or circumstance/experience research), and delve deep into who you’re becoming. Perhaps not as radical as method acting, this immersive method allows you to connect on a deeper level and really sell an authentic performance. That sets you apart from the rest of the pack – authenticity, education, confidence, and familiarity.