Imagination, Creativity, and Acting

The chapter examines the relationship of acting—defined as aesthetically governed, embodied roleplaying—to creativity and to the imagination. Particular attention is paid to the body as a vehicle of a particular kind of imaginative agency. After offering a distinct sense by which actors create, drawing on the Hebrew barah (creativity in the sense of bringing something into existence and sustaining its vitality), acting is distinguished from overlapping notions, such as roleplaying in a certain profession or pretending. Finally, the unique experience of imagining as actor is related to three modes of existential amplification. Possible moral implications are discussed. The notion of “experiencing” is somewhat disambiguated.