by Twyla Tharp
It didn’t work out that easily. I spent hours at my worktable and in the studio tackling the first challenge—moving a group of “migrant” dancers across the stage in a vague approximation of the Conestoga wagons traveling across the American West. I sketched. I fooled around with my coin exercise. But no matter what I tried, I couldn’t find a scheme to move the dancers interestingly across the stage. Everything I tried looked like I was rolling a lumpy human ball from stage left to stage right.
The music was no less vexing. I spent $800 on CDs by Ray Charles, B. B. King, and Van Morrison and listened to them. Nothing clicked. Eventually a friend, seeing me lost in the blues, turned me on to violinist Mark O’Connor, whose bluesy, jazzy fiddle playing promised to be a perfect fit for my conception. O’Connor (bless him) had written a piece so sweeping and lush and romantic—ten times more Aaron Copland than B. B. King—that it could never be mistaken for the blues.
In the end, the piece, a fourteen-minute high-energy celebratory romp, now known as Westerly Round, bore absolutely no resemblance to my original notion. With the migration metaphor fallen by the wayside and the blues soundtrack abandoned, I gave up the sad story line as well. The only idea that survived and made it to the stage were the linked hands of the dancers. I used the hand-holding as a controlling image in the piece for three boys and a girl. If it felt right to the artist drawing the figures on the pottery, it felt right to me as well. Ancient memory was at work.
Once you realize the power of memory, you begin to see how much is at your disposal in previously underappreciated places. The trick is figuring out how to tap into it. You can’t always wait for a photo of an ancient pot to appear in the Science section of the New York Times and jolt you into action. Sometimes you have to be proactive about mining the veins of memory within you.
Maybe it’s because I was an art history major whose basic education was how to look, but I am magnetically drawn to images, whether they’re paintings, photographs, film, or video. They are all lodestones of inspiration to me.
In my senior year, when I was torn between my art studies and a consuming urge to dance, I used to comfort myself by camping out in the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library.
I’m not sure what motivated me to do this. It wasn’t as if I woke up one day and announced, “Okay, I’m going to look at dance pictures today.” But I was an art student, looking at photographs of paintings and sculpture all day long and believing that everything in a picture was there for a reason. It was only logical that one day I asked myself, Why aren’t I looking at pictures of dance? That’s what I’m really interested in. So I did.
The New York Public Library houses one of the world’s great dance archives. I asked the curator to bring me photos of the women pioneers of dance: Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham. I could read their movement vocabulary from those photographs, keeping what was useful to me and ignoring what wasn’t. I would slide my hands over the plates, trying to connect with how they moved by how they looked frozen in time. It had nothing to do with their faces or makeup or clothes—nothing connected to their glamour or my vanity. I was trying to absorb how their bodies worked, taking their movement potential out of their bodies and imprinting it on my own, just as I did every day in class as I worked in the footsteps of great dancers.
A famous picture of Doris Humphrey nude in a circle, though obviously posed, fascinated me because she totally lacked self-consciousness. I could clearly see what her body was doing and I could see what obvious relish she took in fulfilling that position in the circle. Her feeling of pride also imprinted itself on me. I would pore over a Martha Graham picture so intently that I could gauge the size of her footsteps or feel her body’s tension as she torqued inside her costume.
If a picture is a memory captured, then these great dance photos helped me capture a new memory. The archival images came to me through my eyes and I absorbed them first in my brain, then in my body, and finally in my own memory. Once they were locked in me, I was free to call on them anytime.
If one day I was stuck, I could ask myself, How would Martha move? or What would Doris Humphrey feel like? I could harness their memory as easily as if it were my own, and use the things they were using to fashion my own solutions.
In a sense, I was apprenticing myself to these great women, much as Proust had to Ruskin and Chandler to Hemingway. A young friend of mine recently described an internship he was about to begin. He called the process “shadowing,” following around a mentor and learning from him. That’s what I was doing in the archives, shadowing my predecessors. This is how you earn your ancestry.
exercises
7 Name That Muse
Here’s an exercise in associative memory for you: below, I’ve listed the nine muses, those brilliant and charming and vexing daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne who held sway over the classical arts. You can remember them through fierce application of direct rote repetition, or you can attach to each some image or memory that the name or subject triggers as you look at the list. The latter works better; you might even find yourself honoring their mother by inventing a little memory aid or ditty—a mnemonic—to bring the nine names to mind.
Calliope
Epic poetry
Clio
History
Erato
Love poetry and lyric poetry
Euterpe
Music
Melpomene
Tragedy
Polyhymnia
Sacred song
Terpsichore
Dance and choral song
Thalia
Comedy
Urania
Astronomy
How would I remember the nine names? Can clear, earnest effort make proper things total up? That might help—the first letters of the nine words in that last sentence match the first letters of the names of the muses. But how do you associate each with her field?
The easy ones are Urania (sounds like the planet Uranus, hence astronomy), Polyhymnia (hymns are sacred songs), and Erato (eros means love). What do the other six remind you of? Can you connect them to their domains? And what types of memory do you use in calling forth those images?
Remembering the muses is no shortcut to creative bliss, though it will make crossword puzzles easier and classicists smile. And perhaps this nod in their direction will cause them to visit you when you need their help.
8 Trust Your Muscle Memory
For this exercise, you’ll have to come up with a simple set of discrete moves. Don’t worry if you’ve never invented movement before; you’re testing your body’s memory, not choreographing for Broadway. (And don’t try to fink out by claiming you have no space. Push the furniture back. Create a small space patch and get to work.) Take a set of ten moves: for example, raise your right arm, lift your left foot, drop the left foot, pivot 180 degrees to your right on your left foot, drop the right arm. Putting your hands on your hips, bend forward from the waist, then straighten up. Now turn 180 degrees to your right on your left foot and scoot forward on both feet.
This is a phrase. Repeat it five times the first day, four the second, three the third, two the fourth, and once the fifth. Now don’t do it for a week. But do think about it several times, picturing it in your mind during the course of the week. After one week, start the phrase by lifting the right arm. Now continue without thinking about what comes next. Let the body go on its own.
You may be surprised by how much you (or your muscles) remember.
Once you have seen the power of muscle memory, try this exercise: Flail about for ten seconds, and don’t think about it afterward. Can you repeat your flailing pattern tomorrow? Next time, do think about your flailing. Play the motions back in your mind. Think about the rhythms, in real time, in your imagination. Now, tomorrow, see if you can retrieve this flailing pattern any better than the first. You are learning how to train your muscle memory, your ability to retain and repeat motion.
Your muscles are smart
er than you think.
9 Mining for Memory in a Photograph
I’m always amused when people show me baby pictures. I love how much information and meaning, not to mention joy, they extract from a clumsy, poorly composed snapshot of a four-week-old child’s smiling face. In that face they can see a universe of inherited features and family resemblances—the eyes that come from their mother, the family chin passed down from a paternal grandfather, the brow and hairline that inarguably foretell premature baldness. Frankly, I don’t see it.
It’s another story when the picture involves me.
No picture has more resonance for me than this early snapshot with my mother. It helps to know the impact my mother had on my creative life, which in many ways was total and all-consuming. From naming me Twyla, to playing piano scales for me when I was three months old (to train my ear), to driving me thirty thousand miles a year throughout my youth to the finest teachers in Southern California (so I could study piano, baton, ballet, toe, flamenco, drums, elocution, painting, viola, violin, shorthand, German, and French), she built me step by step for a creative life. It helps to be aware of this when you look at the girl, age two, in her short dress (obviously a dance costume, no?). It connects to much more than my early years. It hooks me up to an intravenous line of mnemonic fluid, explaining my identity and providing the source as well.
Let me tell you what I see in this picture.
I see a little person here, very excited about the idea of stepping out into the real world. A little shy about it, actually, which is why she holds only one of her mother’s fingers. It’s not as if there is a real person here yet. This person—me—is a bicycle with training wheels, a person in a suspended state of yet-to-be.
I love the two stones behind the girl, a perfect platform constructed by my father, suggestive of an ancient Greek amphitheater. Conceivably, this could be my first stage photo. Note the left foot slightly forward. It’s as if the girl has stepped off a stage and is just beginning to address an audience.
I also like the mischief in the girl’s face, head slightly bowed, eyes shyly turned up but looking straight ahead. There’s a feeling of anticipation and curiosity here, as if she’s standing in front of a door and is about to walk through.
There’s also zest and dynamic energy in the girl. She wants to go.
I like the one finger of Mother’s hand. It could be perceived as tentative, as if the child needs assistance. But I remember it differently. The one finger is about as little as I could hold on to without going solo. It’s as if the girl is saying “I’d really rather be doing this by myself. But I can’t quite yet.”
I also like the period details: the short haircut (still stylish to me), the short dress baring dancer’s legs, the shoes and socks cut off because they would lack finesse and destroy the line. As for Mother being cropped out of the picture…well, let’s not go there.
This photo reminds me of how every young person grows up with an overwhelming sense of possibility, and how life, in some ways, is just a series of incidents in which that possibility is either enlarged or smacked out of you. How you adapt is your choice. In that sense, this photo is Darwinian: It’s the origin of species. And I’m the species.
More than anything, though, to me, this is the photo of a girl standing in front of the door…before she kicks it in. It summarizes me. If I ever have an identity crisis, this picture will cure it.
Now it’s your turn. Take a family picture, any picture, and study it. What do you see in it that is indisputably similar to your life today, to the person you’ve become? What is vaguely similar? What bears no resemblance or suggests nothing memorable? What ended up the opposite of what you see? Why these four different outcomes? Explain this to yourself. In doing so, note the people and events that spring to mind. What faces—relatives, friends, teachers, neighbors, nemeses, strangers, pets—appear unbidden? When was the last time you thought of these people? That’s memory, and it’s buried in everything you’ve saved, patiently waiting for you to dislodge it and, hopefully, use it.
It’s like poring through your high school yearbook. Who can look at yearbook photos without a swell of such emotions as nostalgia, regret, isolation, pleasure? The exercise here with a family photo is much the same. The goal is to connect with something old so it becomes new. Look and imagine.
Chapter 5
before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box
Everyone has
his or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at Office Depot for transferring files.
I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me.
The box documents the active research on every project. For a Maurice Sendak project, the box is filled with notes from Sendak, snippets of William Blake poetry, toys that talk back to you. I’m sure this is the sort of stuff that most people store on shelves or in files. I prefer a box.
There are separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done. If you want a glimpse into how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes.
The box makes me feel organized, that I have my act together even when I don’t know where I’m going yet.
It also represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I’ve started work.
The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.
Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place. I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it. It’s all in the box.
I like cardboard file boxes for a bunch of reasons, all willfully idiosyncratic. The shelving in my work area at home, which holds my audio equipment, hundreds of music CDs, and piles of musical scores, is not mere heavy-gauge industrial shelving; it’s scaffolding equipment, strong enough for painters to stand on when they’re working on the exterior of a house. In other words, the shelves are built for hard work. That’s a personal aesthetic choice. I want everything around me, from my dancers to my dances to my shelves, to be strong and built to last.
The file boxes reflect the same practicality. They’re easy to buy, and they’re cheap. (I don’t need to spend a thousand dollars on an exquisite cherry cabinet that fills up in a week.) They’re one hundred percent functional; they do exactly what I want them to do: hold stuff. I can write on them to identify their contents (you wouldn’t do that with a thousand-dollar cherry file cabinet). I can move them around (which is also hard to do with a heavy wood filing system). When one box fills up, I can easily unfold and construct another. And when I’m done with the box, I can ship it away, out of sight, out of mind, so I can move on to the next project, the next box.
Easily acquired. Inexpensive. Perfectly functional. Portable. Identifiable. Disposable. Eternal enough.
Those are my criteria for the perfect storage system. And I’ve found the answer in a simple file box.
It’s not the only answer, of course. Maurice Sendak has a room that’s the equivalent of my boxes, a working studio that contains a huge unit with flat pullout drawers in which he keeps sketches, reference materials, notes, articles. He works on several projects at a time, and he likes to keep the overlapping materials out of sight when he’s tackling any one of them. Other people rely on carefully arranged index cards. The more technological among us put it all on a computer. There’s no single correct sy
stem. Anything can work, so long as it lets you store and retrieve your ideas—and never lose them.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. I know one magazine editor who hoards newspaper and magazine clippings. A good chunk of his day is spent with scissors in hand clipping stories, photographs, and illustrations. After he clips, he opens a file drawer and deposits the clippings on a pile of other clippings. Then he closes the drawer, letting them accumulate in the drawer’s cool darkness. He doesn’t think about them much, but he knows they are there if needed, which happens whenever a colleague wanders into his office desperate for a good idea. He’ll open the drawer again, haul out its contents on his desk, and say, “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” Host and guest then leaf through the clippings together. Without fail, an intriguing headline or phrase or photo of someone will beget a thought that in turn suggests a story idea—and the guest will depart, slightly less desperate and infinitely more inspired. The drawer, in effect, contains the editor’s pre-ideas—those intriguing little tickles at the corners of your brain that tell you when something is interesting to you without your quite knowing why. Bringing them out reminds him of what he was thinking when he put them there in the first place.
I also like the simplicity of a box. There’s a purpose here, and it has a lot to do with efficiency. A writer with a good storage and retrieval system can write faster. He isn’t spending a lot of time looking things up, scouring his papers, and patrolling other rooms at home wondering where he left that perfect quote. It’s in the box.
A perfect archive also gives you more material to call on, to use as a spark for invention. Beethoven, despite his unruly reputation and wild romantic image, was well organized. He saved everything in a series of notebooks that were organized according to the level of development of the idea. He had notebooks for rough ideas, notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas, almost as if he was pre-aware of an idea’s early, middle, and late stages.