by Twyla Tharp
See? This is Forbes. It’s just your basic article about how you were looking to expand into broadcasting. Right? Okay now. The same day—I’ll never forget this—I’m reading Page Six of the New York Post and there’s this item on Bobby Stein, the radio talk show guy who does all those gross jokes about Ethiopia and the Betty Ford Center. Well, anyway, he’s hosting this charity auction that night. Real bluebloods and won’t that be funny? Now I turn the page to Suzy who does the society stuff and there’s this picture of your daughter—see, nice picture—and she’s helping to organize the charity ball. So I started to think: Trask, Radio, Trask, Radio…. So now here we are.
He’s impressed and hires her on the spot. Forget the fairy-tale plot; as a demonstration of how to link A to B and come up with C, Working Girl is a primer in the art of scratching.
Actually, in business it’s perfectly legitimate to use the ideas you’ve scratched for without worrying about transforming them into something new. A talent agent I know was meeting with an opera singer to discuss ways to enlarge her career and broaden her appeal to the popular market. The diva mentioned that she would like to see some of the famous arias she’d recorded appear in films and on movie soundtracks, so millions of people would be exposed to her voice. A worthy objective. The executive had an idea for her: He showed her how the songwriter Burt Bacharach had produced a 4-CD limited edition of all the different singers who have recorded his hits over the years. He stamped out one thousand copies of this private anthology and sent them to music executives and producers around the world. Bacharach’s objective was to get producers thinking of him when they were looking for tunes for their recording artists and soundtracks. The agent suggested the same for the diva: print up a private anthology of her best arias for the wider music community beyond the opera world. The agent was quite pleased with himself when he told me this useful idea. To my eye, he had taken A (Bacharach’s idea) and B (the diva’s desire to broaden her market) and come up with A (do the same as Bacharach). It was smart and practical, and it was probably the right answer. He’d done his homework. He hadn’t done anything particularly creative, but then that wasn’t his goal.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking this sort of connective thinking in business. It’s smart and practical. Use what worked before and adapt it to your situation. With profits, paychecks, and promotions at stake, it’s only natural to try to reduce the risk by relying on what’s already worked. We’ve all been in meetings to deal with a problem. Everyone is stumped until someone remembers how another group solved the same problem. Everyone nods with relief. “Great idea,” says the boss. “Let’s do that.” And moves on. That’s legitimate connective thinking in business.
But an artist cannot do that. People don’t want to see you copying someone else (in fact, if you do, they take special delight in figuring out who or what you have copied). Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guaranteed to please. Artists have bigger goals. If being an artist means pushing the envelope, you don’t want to stuff your material in someone else’s envelope. You don’t want to know the envelope has been invented. You want to find that out on your own.
Scratching is a wildly unruly process. But a few rules can make it a bit more manageable.
Be in Shape.
Scratching takes longer when you’re rusty. Just as an athlete performs better if he’s in top shape, ideas will come to you more quickly if you’ve been putting in the time at your chosen craft. If it’s my first day back after a long layoff, I’m prepared to write off a whole week of work; I know much of it will be worthless, but I have to go through that process to get my mind and body back into shape. When my conditioning is right, I can feel productive in two or three minutes. You may already know this. Whatever your medium, if you’ve been away from it for a few weeks, the first days are going to be clumsy and fruitless. But things get easier as the rust falls away. The ideas come more smoothly. The hands on the instrument, the fingers at the keyboard, the eye at the easel respond in sync to the urgings of your mind and heart. You are fit and gleaming. You can’t wait to attack your work.
Scratch in the Best Places.
When I’m searching for music for a dance, I go immediately to the best composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn. I listen to all their music because I want to educate my ear and, more important, I want to find their best music. You only go around once in this life, so I’m not interested in creating dances to their minor works.
I’m ruthless about this. I look at scratching in the best places as if I were working at a tailor’s table. You’ve got the bolt of fabric, the tracing paper patterns, the pins to attach the pattern to the fabric, the scissors to cut the fabric, and the thread to stitch it all together. But the key is the fabric. The better the fabric, the more likely you will do your best work. That’s why finding a great piece of music is key to making a great dance. The better the music, the better the dance. My objective is not to screw it up.
Sculptors know that half their job is selecting the best stone to work with. It’s all in the material. If they get the best material, they are over the hump. Directors say the same thing about casting: If you’ve got the best people, it’s hard to go wrong. That’s the way I feel about scratching among the masters. It makes it so much easier to get home.
You should do the same. If you read for inspiration, read the top-drawer writers, and read their masterworks first. If you get your inspiration from art, look at the masters. If it’s movies, focus on directors in the pantheon of greats. Scratch among the best and you will automatically raise the quality of ideas you uncover.
Never Scratch the Same Place Twice.
An integral part of Ulysses S. Grant’s battle strategy was to never go back over the same terrain—you might meet the enemy pursuing you. More important, you gain no new information if you retrace your steps over already familiar land. Grant was always scouting new routes over new ground. That works for me, too, with scratching. I improvise in new rooms, turn on different music, change my reading habits, all in an effort to fight off old habits and shake myself up. If you scratch the same way all the time, you’ll end up in the same place with the same old ideas.
Maintain the White Hot Pitch.
You’ve been there when a boss throws a temper tantrum in a meeting. Everyone in the room goes “Uh oh! The boss is mad. We better shape up.” The tantrum, judiciously applied, is a great wake-up call to get people to do something. It’s the same for you when you’re alone and scratching for an idea. Throw a tantrum at yourself. Anger is a cheap adrenaline rush, but when you’re going nowhere and can’t get started, it will do.
Scratching is not about control and repose. It’s about unleashing furious mindless energy and watching it bounce off everything in your path. The hope is that a spark will fly from all that contact and combustion—and it usually does.
I liken this mindless high-energy state to lifting deadweight off the ground. There is a moment when you’ve bent your knees, grabbed the bar, and are about to neutralize the massive gravity of this object. At that moment your mind is blank. You are all impulse and intention. You cannot think about the weight. You just have to lift it.
It’s the same with scratching. When you’re scratching for an idea, you don’t need to think ahead. You have to trust the unconscious rush and let it hurtle forward unedited and unencumbered. Let it be awful and awkward and wrong. You can fix the results later, but you won’t generate the ideas at all if you cool down the white hot pitch.
Scratching is where creativity begins. It is the moment where your ideas first take flight and begin to defy gravity. If you try to rein it in, you’ll never know how high you can go.
exercises
11 Chaos and Coins
Gathering chaos into a satisfying order is a daunting challenge. You have to train for this struggle. Here is my favorite exercise.
I take a handful of coins. It doesn’t matter how many or what denomination. I toss them onto
my worktable and study the result. Sometimes the coins fall into a random pattern that’s pleasing. But not often. So I fiddle with the coins, moving them around into strange or familiar geometries. Along the way I’ll line them up, stack them, tease them into shapes—a stolid cross perhaps or a fanciful Ursa Major star grouping. Eventually, I land on an arrangement that feels like a musical chord resolving. I look at the coins and they cry out, “This is us.” There in a nutshell is the essence of creativity: There are a number of possibilities, but only one solution looks inevitable.
You can do this at home with poker chips, pickup sticks, paper clips—any everyday item that fits into your hand and can be easily tossed onto a desk and arranged into a harmonious pattern. I work with coins because they’re readily at hand and shuffling them around is a nifty approximation of the arranging and rearranging of bodies I do in the studio. But even if the coins didn’t correspond to dancers—if, for example, I was a painter or composer—I’d still find this a useful mental warm-up. Just as athletes prepare their bodies to want to work, so this exercise can help you feel more optimistic about resolving disorder. Once I feel that, I put the coins away. I have already begun.
12 Reading Archaeologically
I read for a lot of reasons, pleasure being the least of them.
I read competitively, remembering Mark Twain’s admonition that “the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.
Mostly, I read for inspiration. But what inspires me is probably not the same as what inspires or pleases the general populace. Although I’m interested in characters and story line and sheer information, I usually read with a specific purpose: I’m searching for patterns and archetypes, concepts and situations that are so basic to the human condition that they’ll connect with an audience in a fundamental way, whether or not the audience is aware of the connection.
I tend to read “archaeologically.” Meaning, I read backwards in time. I’ll start with a contemporary book and then move on to a text that predates that book, and so on until I’m reading the most ancient texts and the most primitive ideas. For example, when I was casting about for the project that ultimately became the Bacchae piece, which is described in Chapter 7, I began by reading Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. That hooked me on Dionysus, and led me back to Carl Kerenyi’s study of Dionysos, which explained the place of goats as part of the worship of Dionysus, and the connection to the development of Greek tragedy. From there it was back to Euripides, and the text of The Bacchae, at last turning to a source that Jerome Robbins had suggested to me years earlier.
I don’t know if many people read archaeologically. A lot of people I know read chronologically: If they’re tackling all of Dostoyevsky, they start with his earliest works and plow through to his last writings, in much the same fashion as they did in school. Nothing wrong with that. They want to read along as the author grows from youth to maturity.
I do it the other way, as if I’m conducting a dig. I start with where the author ended and finish where he started. I’ve done this with Melville and Balzac as well as Dostoyevsky—and each time I feel like a detective solving the mystery of how the writer got that way, not how the writer ended up. A story told backwards is just as interesting as a story told the traditional way, maybe more so. The surest method for finding the path through a maze is to start at the end and work your way back to the beginning.
When I’m reading archaeologically, I’m not reading for pleasure. I read the way I scratch for an idea, digging down deep so I can get something out of it and use it in my work. I read transactionally: How can I use this? It’s not enough for me to read a book. I have to “own” it. I scribble in the margins. I circle sentences I like and connect them with arrows to other useful sentences. I draw stars and exclamation points on every good page, to the point where the book is almost unreadable. By writing all over the pages, I transform the author’s work into my book—and mine alone. (I hope, dear reader, you’ve been doing the same to this text throughout.)
Conduct your own reading dig. Take an author or a subject and start with the most recent text. Then work your way backwards to progressively older texts. If it’s a novelist’s body of work, you’ll learn just as much about the author’s recurring themes, philosophy, and style—but trust me, you’ll see them from an entirely different point of view. If it’s a particular subject, go back to the writer’s original sources; the distance you’ve traveled with the writer and how the idea has changed will intrigue you. But you will get something more precious as well: the original idea in its ancient and most unadulterated form.
P.S.: I have two other reading habits: I “read fat,” and I’m addicted to the Oxford English Dictionary.
“Reading fat” means not only reading, say, a novel, but reading related texts surrounding the novel, which may be books by the writer’s contemporaries, or commentaries on the novel, or a biography of the writer, or the writer’s letters. I admit it’s a compulsive way to read, but you mine more out of every book. You can listen fat and see fat, too. If I’m listening to a Mozart quintet, I don’t appreciate the piece as well as I do when I also listen to the works Mozart composed immediately before and after it. Likewise, with a painting, I like to see what the artist produced before and after the work at hand.
As for the OED, digging into the source of a word’s meaning is a great way to scratch for core ideas. Nothing in the English language fascinates me more than the multitude of definitions for words I think I know. Consulting the OED sitting on its table in my work area reminds me that I only know a fraction of what I think I know. Before I write about an idea such as ritual, I’ll look it up in the OED. But it’s not enough to digest the word’s sixteen definitions. Reading fat means I also look up the words immediately before and after “ritual.” You never know. The next good idea may be hiding there.
13 A Dozen Eggs
The exercise I call Egg is a great way to start a creative session. It couldn’t be simpler: I sit on the floor, bring my knees to my chest, curl my head down to my knees, and try to make myself as small as I can. In this minimalized shrunken state, I have nowhere else to go; I cannot become smaller, I can only expand and grow. And so it becomes a ritual of discovery for me. If I lift my head and straighten my back I become Tall Egg. If I stretch out my legs and point my toes, forming an L-shape, I become Jackknife Egg. I stick with it as long as it remains interesting, sometimes going through as many as a hundred positions. I’ve been doing this daily for years and I usually find something new in the process. I remember one time sitting in a ball and twisting slightly so I inched forward. Eureka! I discovered Walking Egg, which led to Walking Backwards Egg and a dozen other new positions. I live for those moments. The discovery delights me and lifts my spirit—and keeps me coming back to Egg.
Naming the positions is optional, a mental game that I consider a perk of the job.
I like the Egg routine because it is so basic. You don’t need to know anything or be in particularly good shape to do it (although some stretching is a definite help). The only requirement is a commitment to the process. The starting Egg position is your home base and you are setting out to see how far you can travel from home.
It may remind you of yoga, but there’s a difference. In yoga (or any other prescribed exercise routine) you are following a defined sequence of poses and positions that are good for different parts of the body. That’s not what’s going on here. There’s no instructor or manual telling you what to do, no exact purpose to the movements. You’re not asking anyone “What do I do next?” You’re following your impulses, letting your mind and body provide you with the answers.
I also like Egg because it forces you to think about change. Once you shrink yourself into a fetal ball, you have no choice but to do something expansive. You cannot hold the starting
position forever, though you can hold it for as long as you like. Eventually, though, you’ll have to do something. Egg is an exercise that teaches you how to accomplish the most difficult task in any creative endeavor: begin.
Egg makes you move. I can’t say enough about the connection between body and mind; when you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can’t simulate in a sedentary position. The brain is an organ, tied integrally to all the other systems in the body, and it’s affected by blood flow, neural transmission, all the processes you undergo when you put your body through its paces. You’re making it work differently, and new directions can result. I recommend you keep a pad and pencil nearby while doing Egg for fresh ideas. You probably already know that when you’re frustrated with your efforts, it helps to get up and walk around the room. Egg takes the principle and channels it without the frustration.
Finally, it imparts a lesson about skill. You don’t have to be a gymnast or dancer to get something out of Egg, but it helps. The more conditioning you bring to it, the farther you can go. I’m a trained dancer. I am accustomed to the tortures and contortions the body can endure, and I feel that I’ve seen nearly everything the body can do. Yet when I introduce Egg at colleges, the students often come up with Egg positions that are new to me. Their fearless young minds and bodies have come up with such novelties as Exploded Egg, Scrambled Egg, Humpty-Dumpty, Egg on the Half-Shell, Runny Egg, Egg-Cited, and Eggs-Aspirated.