1 Creativity and Acting

Abstract

Day 2004, I was tuned into a TV show called The Greatest Australian. The program featured a panel of eminent Australians in fields ranging from 'the arts to the sciences, from sport to show business' and their task on this night was 'to convince the nation of their choice of The Greatest Australian' (King, 2004). According to the 'promo', the program promised 'to entertain, delight and surprise'. Surprise it did. A pleasant surprise was that theatre was represented in its own right. David Williamson, arguably Australia's most prolific and successful playwrights, was one of the panelists. The not so pleasant surprise came when his fellow panelist, Jackie Frank (founding editor of Marie Claire magazine) blackballed Nicole Kidman. In Frank's view, Nicole could not be in the running because (I waited for the answer with bated breath), she is just an actor and as an actor she is not 'creating work in her own right'. While nobody on the panel (not even Williamson) batted an eyelid, my world stopped and in this hiatus I screamed into the void: 'If Nicole Kidman is not creative, then what is she doing out there? And what have I been doing for the last twenty years?' While Frank's remarks roused me to the edge of my seat, what got me up on my feet was the simultaneous awareness that-aside from acting, so it seemed-creativity was beginning to be found everywhere. Creative acts were becoming ubiquitous. Creativity was occurring from the boardroom (Management and Creativity: from creative industries to creative management) to the bedroom (Sex 101: Over 350 Creative Ways to a Godly, Loving, Pleasurable Marriage), and was pertinent to a growing number of human endeavours: scrapbooking (Creativity Tips for Scrapbookers), bricklaying (Creative Brickwork), religion (Jesus and Creativity), and even divorce (The New Creative Divorce). Amazon yielded a staggering 355,163 references in English to 'creative' or 'creativity' in book titles. There was no question about it, creativity had in the closing decade of the twentieth century become a buzzword and growth industry, and it continues to be so. Perceived as a desirable personal attribute, integral to notions of self-development and expression, social and cultural success and even economic survival, it has become the province of potentially all people in a growing range of domains, and associated with an increasing array of activities. Our paradigms for creativity may have once been derived from the arts and sciences, but this has radically changed. Robert Weiner, who has written extensively on the subject, correctly observes that now 'all we need do is look at the telephone listings' to discover that the traditional domains of creativity 'are just a fraction of the spheres' in which it is evoked' (Weiner, 2000). Historian John Hope Mason is right to claim that during the course of the twentieth century an ever-increasing 'number of human attributes came to be crowned with the laurel wreath of creativity' (Hope Mason, 2003). Acting, however, was not one of them. Why not? As an actor,...