The Creative Habit

by Twyla Tharp

  27. At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp? I always, always feel that at the start. But you get lucky now and again, so I reach anyway. That’s why I study beginnings, so I can deal with those fears.

  28. What is your ideal creative activity? Dancing well.

  29. What is your greatest fear? That I won’t be able to do it.

  30. What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening? Possible and inevitable, in that order.

  31. Which of your answers would you most like to change? Number six. Down deep, I still want to have it all.

  32. What is your idea of mastery? Having the experience to know what you want to do, the vision to see how to do it, the courage to work with what you’re given, and the skill to execute that first impulse—all so you can take bigger chances.

  33. What is your greatest dream? To be paid on the same level as professional athletes and pop stars. This would mean I live in a world where dance is as popular as soccer or rock ’n’ roll. If the luckiest people in the world are the ones who get paid for doing what they would otherwise do for free, I am already lucky. But I’m an optimist. My greatest dream is always to be luckier.

  Chapter 4

  harness your memory

  When Homer composed

  the Iliad and Odyssey, he was drawing on centuries of history and folklore handed down by oral tradition. When Nicolas Poussin painted The Rape of the Sabine Women, he was re-creating Roman history. When Marcel Proust dipped his petites madeleines into his tea, the taste and aroma set off a flood of memories and emotions from which modern literature has still not recovered.

  There are as many forms of memory as there are ways of perceiving, and every one of them is worth mining for inspiration.

  Memory, as we most frequently think of it, encompasses every fact and experience that we can call up at will from our cranial hard drives. We all have this in varying abundance. It’s the skill that lets us store away the vital and seemingly trivial data and images and experiences of our lives. I say vital and seemingly trivial, but I really don’t distinguish between the two. To some people, vital information is their best friend’s phone number. To someone else, it’s the lyrics to the “Catalog Aria” from Don Giovanni or Rick’s airport speech from Casablanca or a recipe for couscous.

  I spend a lot of time worrying about memory. One of the horrors of growing older is the certainty that you will lose memory and that the loss of vocabulary or incident or imagery is going to diminish your imagination.

  As a result, I try to give my memory a workout, training it to keep it sharp. When I watch a rehearsal or performance of one of my dances, I strive to remember the first twelve to fourteen notes or corrections I want to discuss with the cast without writing them down. That’s my limit—twelve to fourteen notes—which is nothing to sneeze at. Most people can’t recall much more than three notes in any context. Think about the last lecture you heard or business meeting you attended or book you had to read. How many of the important take-away points could you recall if you didn’t memorialize them in writing?

  I don’t just try to remember the notes in an unconnected list; I sort them in my mind by category, remembering comments I want to make performer by performer, or scene by scene, remembering them by associating them with space, time, and music. The act of categorizing serves as a memory aid itself, as does ticking off the notes on my fingers. If I know that I have fourteen notes, I’ll be able to recall them through the associated muscle memory of the finger gestures as I count them out. I work a lot faster if I can walk into rehearsal the next day and rattle off my changes to the performers off the top of my head instead of consulting some pieces of paper. It also gives me authority. Think about the last time you were the only person in a room who remembered a salient fact. What did that do for your credibility at that precise moment? Memory has that power.

  But thinking of memory only in this way is simplistic. It shrinks our minds down to the size and sophistication of a personal computer—a machine defined and priced by how much it can remember and how quickly it can retrieve information. Creativity has little to do with this kind of memory. If it did, the most creative people would have hair-trigger memories of photographic proportions, and our artists would all be found slaughtering the competition on Jeopardy! Just because you can recite Shakespeare’s sonnets from memory doesn’t mean you have the poetic spark to write a sonnet of your own.

  Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we’re talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It’s not only how we express what we remember, it’s how we interpret it—for ourselves and others.

  When Shakespeare’s Macbeth asserts in eleven quick lines that life is a “brief candle,” that life is a “walking shadow,” that life is “a poor player,” and finally that life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” we take his meaning immediately because we can call up memories of candles, of shadows, of players, and of tales told by idiots. This is how lines written four hundred years ago connect with us today. They not only play on our memory, they rely on it.

  Metaphor, as Cynthia Ozick writes, “transforms the strange into the familiar. This is the rule even of the simplest metaphor—Homer’s wine-dark sea, for example. If you know wine, says the image, you will know the sea.”

  If all art is metaphor, then all art begins with memory. The ancient Greeks knew this: In their origin myths, they cite Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as the mother of the Nine Muses.

  To fully appreciate the authority of memory, you need to appreciate the more exotic forms of memory lurking on the fringes. You remember much more than you may think you do, in ways you haven’t considered.

  Muscle memory is one of the more valuable forms of memory, especially to a performer. It’s the notion that after diligent practice and repetition of certain physical movements, your body will remember those moves years, even decades, after you cease doing them. In the dance world, muscle memory comes into play every day; we couldn’t survive without it. Unlike musicians or actors, who have sheet music and scripts to study, dancers have nothing written down. It’s all in their heads and bodies. We’d have to start rehearsal from step one every day if our muscles didn’t remember. What’s amazing is how long dancers’ bodies retain the information. Let’s say I asked Rose Marie Wright, a dancer with whom I worked thirty years ago, to teach dances she performed for many years to another generation of dancers. If she demonstrates the dance without thinking about it, she will re-create each step and gesture perfectly on the spot the first time, as though she were a medium in a trance. That’s muscle memory. Automatic. Precise. A little scary. The second time through, however, or trying to explain the steps and patterns to the dancers, she will hesitate, second-guess herself, question her muscles, and forget. That’s because she’s thinking about it, using language to interpret something she knows nonverbally. Her memory of movement doesn’t need to be accessed through conscious effort.

  Learning steps is only one demonstration of the muscles’ intelligence. A virtuoso pianist is doing the same thing when he sits down at the keyboard and dashes off a piece of music he hasn’t thought about in years. He has practiced and played the piece so many times in the past, that the memory has never left him. It resides in the parts of his brain that govern his fingers and his muscles, not the parts he would use to ponder this sentence.

  Muscle memory has its uses in the creative process, perhaps more for acquiring skill than for developing inspiration. But it’s useful nevertheless. I know one novelist who taught himself the craft of fiction by retyping the stories of his favorite authors. The act of typing someone else’s words—rather than simply reading them—made him stop and think about how the author chose words,
constructed sentences and paragraphs, arranged dialogue, and structured a narrative. In this case, the exercise is less about muscles and more about perceiving structures and harmonies anew—from the vantage point of the author rather than the reader.

  Raymond Chandler and Proust went through a similar process when honing their very different crafts. Chandler believed Hemingway to be the greatest American novelist of his time, and he wrote imitations of Hemingway’s style to absorb what he loved about it. Proust went further, spending twelve years translating and annotating the writing of the English art historian John Ruskin. He also wrote a series of articles for Le Figaro imitating the styles of such nineteenth-century literary figures as Balzac and Flaubert.

  It’s no different from a young person sitting with a drawing pad in a museum copying a great artist. Skill gets imprinted through the action.

  If there’s a lesson here it’s: get busy copying. That’s not a popular notion today, not when we are all instructed to find our own way, admonished to be original and find our own voice at all costs! But it’s sound advice. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.

  When I started out as a dancer in New York, I became obsessed with studying every great dancer who was working at the time and patterning myself after him or her. I would literally stand behind them in class, in copying mode, and fall right into their footsteps. Their technique, style, and timing imprinted themselves on my muscles.

  That’s one of the ways I learned to dance. I’m not sure how much impact it had on my choreography, because I didn’t end up creating dances like anyone else. But, like a writer who writes more vividly because he has a huge vocabulary, or a painter who excels because of exquisite draftsmanship, I needed to hone my dancing skills in order to create. If I couldn’t dance well, how would I have the authority to tell others how to dance, or know what a good dance was?

  That’s the power of muscle memory. It gives you a path toward genuine creation through simple re-creation.

  There are more flamboyant examples of memory, such as virtual memory, which is the ability to project yourself into feelings and emotions from your past, and to let them manifest themselves physically. Actors do this all the time—every blush or flow of tears that’s ever touched you in a movie results from a performer who’s learned to mine the past. Actors train themselves to travel back to that beach ten years ago and feel the temperature and the air, to find a link between then and now and use it to give detail and personal resonance to a scene.

  You can even project your virtual memory into the future. Some businesspeople do this as an exercise in visualization, imagining the ending of a sensitive negotiation as a means to achieving the desired result. They remember what a successful deal feels and sounds like, and they call that imagery up, seeing everyone in the room smiling and shaking hands, then they retrace their steps to see how they got there, and how they can get there again. The flamboyant Cuban chess master José Capablanca, world champion through most of the 1920s, envisioned how the game would end and improvised his way to that point. The French ski champion Jean-Claude Killy, I’m told, was a master at this. If he was recovering from an injury and couldn’t take his practice runs the days before a race, he would rely on his memory of the mountain and picture himself racing the entire course. He would do this repeatedly until he felt the course implanted in his muscles. This gave him the feel of success.

  Then there’s sensual memory, where the sudden appearance of a smell or taste or sound or color instantly floods the imagination with images from the past. One taste of those madeleine crumbs and Proust is suddenly embarking on his monumental In Search of Lost Time (previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past). We’ve all experienced sensual memory, whether it’s the smell of oatmeal cookies hurtling us back to our childhood or the opening notes of a song that induces reveries (or nightmares) of who we were with the last time we heard it. This is potent stuff, and it’s there to be used.

  There’s also memory that arises from your environment. Businesses, for example, are set up in a way that gives people far greater access to the inspirational power of memory than they realize. One of the more successful executives I know once told me that whenever he was feeling stale or creatively stalled at work, he’d read the contents of four-or five-year-old files. This seemingly mundane act of poring through old correspondence and memos never failed to spark an idea or, at least, lift him out of his funk. The name of a forgotten colleague or customer would fly off the page of a musty letter and set his brain in motion. Like an actor doing sensory exercises, he’d picture the customer in his mind: what he looked like, how he talked, the reasons they met, the details of his business, the people they knew in common. The simple act of trying to recall the customer would open up a torrent of memories and associations. And in that torrent he’d inevitably find a useful idea.

  He even had a name for the space he was tapping into: institutional memory. As he told me, “Look, it’s very rare to come across something truly original in a corporate environment. Most, if not all, of your good ideas are probably sitting somewhere in your files or are locked up in the brains of the people who have worked at your company for years. In other words, the good ideas are institutionalized. They exist and they’re yours for the taking. All you’ve got to do is find a way to tap into them. To me, that means (a) digging through files and (b) really listening to the people who’ve worked here a long time. They know a lot more than anyone thinks. Hell, they don’t even know how much they remember until you ask them.”

  Whether he knew it or not, the executive was on to something profound and slightly ironic. While most people in the workplace—and in the arts—think they have to be constantly looking forward to be edgy and creative, this man found that the real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.

  Of all the forms of memory, ancient memory is the one that interests me most. That helps explain why this dispatch from Seth Mydans in the New York Times in March 2002 caught my eye. It was a story about the Cambodian dancer Sina Koy and how her homeland has influenced her life and art.

  “We believe our ancestors are watching us, even if we do not see them,” Sina Koy said. “It was because of the spirits of the ancestors inside me that I became a dancer.” Not long ago she visited the ancient temples of Angkor and studied the stone bas-reliefs where dancers bend and turn and float just as they do today on the broad bare stage of the practice hall. Seeing them, Sina Koy understood that nothing had changed. Everything that she does today was done then.

  I understand exactly what she feels. I once saw a news photograph of an ancient dance artifact. It was a pottery shard with a design showing a tribal migration that was believed to be the earliest known representation of dance. It gave me a twinge, if not a shock, of recognition. I felt as though I have that illustrated moment stored in me genetically or else I wouldn’t be a dancer. That’s ancient memory. This is not Jungian voodoo; it’s real. This first graven image of these dancers gives me an intense feeling of déjà vu. The memory is not only ancient, it’s ancestral. I felt proud. If you have ever danced in a group, those people on the pottery are your forebears.

  This kind of notion is tricky to put into words, particularly when the memory we’re dealing with is nonverbal and involves a physical movement. But I know there are many moments in my working day when I sit back and ask myself, How do I know that this particular creative decision on the dance floor, going from x to y, is right? What makes me so sure I’m making the right choice? The answer I whisper to myself is often nothing more than “It feels right.” And part of the reason it feels right is that the move has been reinforced in us over centuries of practice. Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.

  In the case of the pottery design, the shock of recognition was so jolting that it gave me the spine for a new dance, in a process that went something like this:

  The first thought that came to mind wh
en I saw the ancient figures was the idea of migration. So I started thinking of a piece that would tell a story of people migrating from one place to another. Migrations move in many directions, but to the American mind raised on Manifest Destiny they move from east to west. So that westerly direction became the guiding metaphor for the dance: I would move the dancers across the stage east to west (or stage left to stage right as I defined it) and the audience would literally watch them migrate from one side to the other.

  The notion of migration prompted images of people who were disadvantaged, politically and economically. After all, that’s why people uproot themselves and travel great distances: They’re escaping peril, suffering, and oppression. Thoughts of oppression led me to consider the blues as music for the piece, because blues is the signal expression of pain and suffering in our musical heritage.

  All these thoughts sprang to mind in a matter of seconds. I was bequeathed a new dance, complete with story line and structure and music, simply by the ancient memory of the first dancers. It was exhilarating.