I was playing some music the other day, reading a chart, trying to play the part just right, and I started to ponder what role creativity was playing in whatever it was that I was doing. How is creativity related to art? Clearly the two are closely linked, and with some kinds of artistic expression the answer is obvious. For example, painters and sculptors create a work of art that emerges from a particular vision. The only other player in the equation is the viewer who has no real role in the process beyond appreciating the result.
But in other fields of art, the relation to creativity is more complicated. In music for instance there’s most obviously the creativity of the composer, but to what degree are musicians who are playing a piece of music written by someone else—sometimes literally centuries earlier—engaged in a creative act? What they’re doing is without a doubt artistic but to what extent are their actions creative? Theater is the same way.
Does this mean that musicians and actors are somehow less artistic than painters and sculptors? No, it just means that their creativity exists in a different way. In music and theater, performers depend on technical abilities honed through years of practice to carry out their actions. A violin player must know how to play a run of sixteenth notes up and down the fingerboard, and an actor must know how to recall and say lines in a way that looks natural. But beyond such technical aptitude lies something that transforms rote repetition into a creative act.
That something is imagination. Nearly everyone has heard some performance that could be described as “unartistic.” In such cases it’s often the human imaginative element that’s missing or insufficiently developed. Like the painter who projects herself into a painting to understand it, gauge what’s needed, and determine when it’s finished, the musician must project some portion of himself into the piece he’s playing to make it as alive for a contemporary audience as it was for the composer who created it. It’s the same way with an actor. The creativity of a performing artist comes when he or she, through an imaginative act, puts art itself back into the mere ink scratches on the paper.
