“Don’t step outside your kinesthetic sphere as you work,” my professor said, watching us move.
I furrowed my brow. I couldn’t stretch the way I wanted to, walk across the room, run, or even move beyond the small circle of space my physical body could occupy. My mind immediately produced a never-ending list of limitations, and every one of them made me want to rebel against the direction. Surely I could do more if he gave me fewer rules.
I remember feeling this frustration throughout my first year of graduate school, when my professors seemed to be constantly creating rules for how we were allowed to dress, move, sound, breathe, and exist. How was I supposed to become a better actor and artist when so much of my attention was spent trying to remember everything I was meant to follow?
Even before graduate school, my director and mentor Liz Helman would encourage me to trust the process as she gave me more and more notes about the characters I was building. At the time, I often wondered how I was supposed to create a living person when all I seemed to have was a list of qualities, adjustments, and instructions.
It wasn’t until years later, while teaching a class of my own, that I began to understand what my teachers had been giving me. They were not creating rules to restrict our creativity. They were establishing boundaries, limitations, and shared forms so that we could become free inside them.
Imagine standing on an empty beach surrounded by miles of uninterrupted sand. I give you one instruction: build something.
Where do you begin?
Now imagine that I place a one-square-foot sandbox in front of you and give you the same assignment. Suddenly, the possibilities feel more immediate. How tall can the castle become? Could I build a sand skyscraper with a moat around it? A staircase? A city of stacked structures decorated with shells?
The walls of the sandbox have not eliminated creativity. They have made the act of creating manageable enough for imagination to begin. By defining the space, the structure gives us something to push against, explore, transform, and eventually exceed.
I have come to see this principle in nearly every part of my artistic practice.
In writing, story structure creates a form within which characters can become free. When I understand the shape of the story and the forces acting upon the characters, they begin to surprise me. Their choices alter the world of the book until it no longer feels as though I am controlling every part of it.
In acting, the circumstances of the script, the language, the relationships, and the blocking provide the boundaries through which a specific character can emerge. Every actor is working with the same text, yet each person brings a different body, imagination, history, and emotional life to it.
In directing, the responsibility is to build a shared form in which other artists can do their most expansive work. The director creates the sandbox, defining the central vision and the world of the story, while actors, designers, and collaborators discover what can be made inside it. Lighting, sound, costume, scenery, and performance each occupy their own area of the space, but their work eventually joins together to create something none of them could have built alone: a castle, a village, a distant planet, an entire world—and, within it, a story.
Structure does not create freedom by disappearing. It creates freedom by giving imagination somewhere to live.