by Twyla Tharp
For anyone who reads music, the sketchbooks literally record the progress of his invention. He would scribble his rough, unformed ideas in his pocket notebook and then leave them there, unused, in a state of suspension, but at least captured with pencil on paper. A few months later, in a bigger, more permanent notebook, you can find him picking up that idea again, but he’s not just copying the musical idea into another book. You can see him developing it, tormenting it, improving it in the new notebook. He might take an original three-note motif and push it to its next stage by dropping one of the notes a half tone and doubling it. Then he’d let the idea sit there for another six months. It would reappear in a third notebook, again not copied but further improved, perhaps inverted this time and ready to be used in a piano sonata.
He never puts the ideas back exactly the same. He always moves them forward, and by doing so, he re-energizes them.
The notebooks are remarkable for many reasons. Beethoven was a volatile and restless personality, always demanding a change of scene. In the thirty-two years he lived in and around Vienna, he never bought a home and moved more than forty times. I suspect that’s why he needed the elaborate system of notebooks. With all the turmoil in his personal life, the notebooks anchored the one part of his life that mattered: composing. As long as he had his ideas captured on paper, his creativity would never waver. In fact, it got stronger.
That’s the true value of the box: It contains your inspirations without confining your creativity. Let me explain how.
In the summer of 2000 I had an idea: to make a Broadway musical, all dancing, to the songs of Billy Joel. I have always believed in Billy’s music. I’ve been listening to his songs since he started recording. I also felt in my bones that he wrote great dancing music. At the same time, I had just started a new company of six marvelous dancers, so good, in fact, that I was dying to showcase them in something big and ambitious. A two-hour dance extravaganza to all the hits of a major American pop idol fit the bill.
Only trouble was, I didn’t know Billy Joel. I had never met him. I didn’t know if he was an egomaniac or a bored rock star or a cool guy open to something new. On the evidence of his songs, which were literate and told great stories, he seemed like a down-to-earth good guy. That was his reputation. I got his phone number and called him up. I said, “I have a project in mind and I would like to show you something.” The “something” I had in mind was a twenty-minute videotape of choreography I had prepared to some of his music.
(The tape was a critical piece of preparation, and vital to selling the idea to the two people who could make or break the project. The first person was me: I had to see that Billy’s music could “dance.” The tape was visual evidence of something I felt. The second person, of course, was Billy. That’s why I called him the moment I was sure. I have learned over the years that you should never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one. The usual routine for selling an idea is you set up a first meeting to explain it and then a second meeting to show it. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Who knew if I would ever get a second meeting? When busy people are involved, a lot of things can happen to foul up even well intentioned plans, so I decided to go for it all in one shot and invested my time and money into producing and editing the twenty-minute tape.)
When Billy came to my home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I mentioned that I had a little trouble figuring out both from his songs and the surname Joel whether he was Jewish, Irish, or Italian. He said, “My family is Jewish, I grew up in an Italian neighborhood, and every girl who broke my heart was Irish.”
I said, “Okay, I get it now. Come and look”—and I pulled him over to my video console.
I showed him some dancing to his newest compositions—solo piano music from his classical Fantasies and Delusions album—because I assumed he would be most engaged by his most recent material. He loved the dancing. Then I switched to his rock hits such as “Uptown Girl” and “Big Shot.” He said, “I didn’t know my stuff could look so good.” End of tape.
I think he was flattered by it all, so I pressed on. I asked him, “Whatever happened to Brenda and Eddie from the song ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’?”
He said he had never thought about it.
“Well, that’s the point,” I said. “I want to do a show using your songs to tell a story. I don’t know what it is yet. But first, I need your permission.”
He said, “Okay, you have it.”
“I’m also going to need access to your entire song catalog.”
He said, “Fine.”
That was it. It was one of those rare moments: an instant deal. We shook hands and he left.
That’s the moment I started my Billy Joel box for the show Movin’ Out.
First in: my precious twenty-minute tape.
Next in: two blue index cards. I believe in starting each project with a stated goal. Sometimes the goal is nothing more than a personal mantra such as “keep it simple” or “something perfect” or “economy” to remind me of what I was thinking at the beginning if and when I lose my way. I write it down on a slip of paper and it’s the first thing that goes into the box.
In this case, I had two goals. The first was “tell a story.” I felt that getting a handle on narrative in dance was my next big challenge, plus I wanted to find out what happened to Brenda and Eddie, the “popular steadies.” The second was “make dance pay for the dancers.” I’ve always been resentful of the fact that some of the so-called elite art forms can’t survive on their own without sponsorship and subsidies. It bothers me that dance companies around the world are not-for-profit organizations and that dancers, who are as devoted and disciplined as any NFL or NBA superstar, are at the low end of the entertainment industry’s income scale. I wanted this Broadway-bound project not only to elevate serious dance in the commercial arena but also to pay the dancers well. So I wrote my goals for the project, “tell a story” and “make dance pay,” on two blue index cards and watched them float to the bottom of the Joel box. Along with the tape, they were the first items in the box and they sit there as I write this, covered by months of research, like an anchor keeping me connected to my original impulse. (“When you’re up to your ass in alligators,” says a friend from Florida, “it’s easy to forget that your objective was to drain the swamp.”)
No matter what system you use, I recommend having a goal and putting it in writing. I read once that people who write down their New Year’s resolutions have a greater chance of achieving them than people who don’t. This is the sort of factoid that is probably apocryphal but, like many urban legends, sounds as though it should be true.
Into the box went all my research. A few days after we met, Billy sent his complete CDs. I listened to them in chronological order over the weekend, and by Monday I had the first hints of a story line running through my head. It was the opening line of Homer’s Iliad: “Sing to me muse of the rage of Achilles.” Billy was my Homer figure, the poet reciting an epic poem. The story would be set to twenty-seven Billy Joel songs about five kids from Long Island, from their high school days in 1965 through the Vietnam War and ending in 1984. The main characters—Eddie, Brenda, Tony, James, and Judy—could all be found in Billy’s songs. I studied Billy’s music videos for clues and meaning lurking in the songs. I watched tapes of his live performances through the years. I looked at TV dance shows from the era—such as Shindig and Soul Train—to refresh my memory of the dance styles back then. I screened Billy’s lectures to hear what he thought of his songs. All these items went into the box. Because the show’s story line included a pivotal section about the Vietnam War, I went to New York’s Museum of Television and Radio to watch news footage, refreshing my memory of what we were told during the war. Then I watched the movies about the Vietnam War, from The Deer Hunter to Platoon to Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. All into the box, along with seminal books from the time period (for example, Michael Herr’s Dispatches) and interesting period films (suc
h as Saturday Night Fever and even one I worked on, Hair). I went back farther to study The Wild Ones and Rebel Without a Cause to get a feel for an older character in our show who’d wear a black leather jacket and motorcycle boots. All in the box. From another box, abandoned and buried, I dug out old research for an unrealized film project based on David Rabe’s In the Boom Boom Room to develop ideas for a female character.
In the box you’ll also find my notebooks containing all the clips and images and scrawls to myself that I file away to jog my memory: photos of Billy from the early seventies to the mid-eighties; news clippings from the period helping me formulate a visual style; song lists, from first cut to final cut, and the notes passed between music director Stuart Malina and me about why a song should or shouldn’t be in the show. For example, there’s an elaborate set of notes on a beautiful ballad from an early part of Billy’s career, “She’s Got a Way About Her,” that is full of innocence and sweetness. But in my notes you can see the song morphing into something harsher, eventually becoming two simultaneous sleazy bar scenes, one in Vietnam, the other back home. I felt obliged to run this by Billy, warning him, “This is going to destroy the song.” But he wasn’t worried. “Go for it,” he said.
Also in the box is a green beret that belonged to a military adviser I consulted for the show. He gave me some worthwhile information for the night patrol sequence, about how the men signaled to each other down the line, because the thickness of the jungle made it impossible to see more than one man along in the fanned-out formation. The signals were quite elementary (pointing to one’s eyes means “look,” fist lifted at a right angle means “stop,” hand out flat pushing down means “get down”); we could have invented something equivalent for the scene, but real details created authenticity. Just seeing the beret in the box energizes me, reminding me how important it was to the man who gave it to me.
There are tchotchkes in the box as well, all of which link me to some essential aspect of the project. A pair of earrings and a macramé vest that started me thinking about costumes. Books about psychedelic light events that I might share with the lighting designer. Photographs of other production concepts that I could use to discuss space and detail with Santo Loquasto, my longtime production designer. There are research Polaroids from a reconnaissance trip to half a dozen village greens in Long Island where Billy Joel grew up. All of this helped me imagine the characters in their time and space when I started work in my pristine white studio in Manhattan. Eventually, the material for this show filled up twelve boxes.
That’s how a box is like soil to me. It’s basic, earthy, elemental. It’s home. It’s what I can always go back to when I need to regroup and keep my bearings. Knowing that the box is always there gives me the freedom to venture out, be bold, dare to fall flat on my face. Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box.
Now, let me tell you what a box isn’t.
The box is not a substitute for creating. The box doesn’t compose or write a poem or create a dance step. The box is the raw index of your preparation. It is the repository of your creative potential, but it is not that potential realized.
When a journalist gets a story assignment, he doesn’t immediately sit down and knock out a finished piece. He has a routine, which is common to all good journalists. First, he reads all the background material he can get his hands on. Then he talks to people to verify old information, unearth new information, and pull out lively quotes (which he knows are the lifeblood of solid reporting). He jots all this down in his notes. Filling up the notebook can take hours or months, depending on the journalist’s deadline. But only when his research and reporting are done and his notebook is full does he write the story. If his reporting is good, the writing will reflect that. It will come out clearly and quickly. If the reporting is shoddy, the writing will be, too. It will be torture to get the words out.
My box is like the journalist’s notes. It’s the “reporting” routine I follow before creating a piece. If the quality of a journalist’s work is a direct function of how much background material he sifted through, how many people he talked to, how many times he went back to his sources to challenge or check up on their statements—that is, how diligent and clever he was in assembling his research—then the quality of my creative output is also a function of how diligent and clever I’ve been in filling up my boxes.
It’s one thing to tell you that my Movin’ Out box has dozens of videotapes of Billy Joel performances and music videos. That’s obvious; if you’re working with the man’s music, you ought to know how that music has been treated visually in the past. That’s the bare minimum in research. It’s also basic research to review relevant films from the era. But I’m not sure everyone would log time reviewing U.S. Army training films from the Vietnam era. That’s the mildly over-the-top research that tells me I’m prepared—and arms me with confidence when I get down to the real work of creating.
Sadly, some people never get beyond the box stage in their creative life. We all know people who have announced that they’ve started work on a project—say, a book—but some time passes, and when you politely ask how it’s going, they tell you that they’re still researching. Weeks, months, years pass and they produce nothing. They have tons of research but it’s never enough to nudge them toward the actual process of writing the book. I’m not sure what’s going on here. Maybe they’re researching in the wrong places. Maybe they like the comfort zone of research as opposed to the hard work of writing. Maybe they’re just taking procrastination to a new extreme. All I know for sure is that they are trapped in the box.
My solution for them: This isn’t working. Free yourself. Get out of this box. Put it away for another day and start a new box. But do so with the faith that nothing is lost, that you haven’t put in all this effort for naught. Everything you’ve done is in the box. You can always come back to it.
There’s one final benefit to the box: It gives you a chance to look back. A lot of people don’t appreciate this. When they’re done with a project, they’re relieved. They’re ready for a break and then they want to move forward to the next idea. But the box gives you the opportunity to reflect on your performance. Dig down through the boxes archaeologically and you’ll see a project’s beginnings. This can be instructive. How did you do? Did you get to your goal? Did you improve on it? Did it change along the way? Could you have done it all more efficiently?
I find the box is most useful at three critical stages: when you’re getting going, when you’re lost, and after you’ve finished (that’s when you can look back and see the directions you didn’t take, the ideas that intrigued you but didn’t fit this time around and might be the start of your next box).
Above all, learn to respect your box’s strange and disorderly ways. As a repository of half-baked inspirations and unformed aids, the box can seem to be a haphazard tool while you’re filling it. But when you want to go back and make sense of your path, every step is there to be found, and the order emerges if only in hindsight. Your box is proof that you have prepared well. If you want to know how any creative project will turn out, your box’s contents are as good a predictor of success or failure as anything I know.
exercise
10 “Begin!”
My friend Irving Lavin, a Renaissance scholar at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, confessed that he had a horrible time writing because he never knew the beginning. Then he figured out that the paper’s beginning was not the same as beginning to write. So he just started writing about an important point in the paper and trusted that he’d find the beginning eventually. Chekhov, when asked by a nephew how he knew where to start, replied, “Take your blue book and tear it in half. Begin there.”
There’s a difference between a work’s beginning and starting to work.
I learned this with one of my earliest dances, The Fugue. Being a novice choreographer, I didn’t know how to begin. So I stood up in the center of the room, took a deep breath, stamp
ed my foot, and shouted “Begin!” Stamping the foot led me to think of the piece as tap dancing. The sound of my shoe against the floor gave me the idea of performing the piece in silence on an electronically amplified stage. To this day that’s how The Fugue starts out—with a stomp that rings in my mind “Begin!”
I guess that’s the real secret to creative preparation. If you’re at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout “Begin!” You never know where it will take you.
Chapter 6
scratching
The first steps
of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight. There is nothing yet to research. For me, these moments are not pretty. I look like a desperate woman, tortured by the simple message thumping away in my head: “You need an idea.” It’s not enough for me to walk into a studio and start dancing, hoping that something good will come of my aimless cavorting on the studio floor. Creativity doesn’t generally work that way for me. (The rare times when it has stand out like April blizzards.) You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun—paint into a painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.
Even though I look desperate, I don’t feel desperate, because I have a habitual routine to keep me going.