The Creative Habit

by Twyla Tharp

  For my first dance, the seven-minute-long Tank Dive performed in Room 1604 at Hunter College in New York City in 1965, I had no money, no scenery, no music, no stage to speak of. How limited is that? In fact, for my first five years I choreographed to silence. And yet those impoverished circumstances forced me to discover my own dance vocabulary. Dizzy Gillespie once said of Louis Armstrong’s giant influence on jazz, “No him, no me.” I feel the same way about my years of extremely limited resources: No deprivation, no inspiration. No then, no now.

  Even George Balanchine, who created a blissful cocoon of nearly unlimited resources at New York City Ballet, liked to feel that he worked under restrictions. When someone asked him how he made dances, he replied, “On union time.” Meaning, he could only create when he had the dancers in the room, and the dancers were in the room for only fifty-five minutes at a time, between their union-mandated hourly five-minute breaks. Balanchine had everything a choreographer needed—his own company, his own theater, his own orchestra (!), his own deep-pocketed patrons—yet even he had limits imposed: He operated at the mercy of AGMA, the dancers’ union. Based on the evidence, he obviously made it work.

  Remember this the next time you moan about the hand you’re dealt: No matter how limited your resources, they’re enough to get you started. Time, for example, is our most limited resource, but it is not the enemy of creativity that we think it is. The ticking clock is our friend if it gets us moving with urgency and passion. Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I’ll show you a writer who never delivers. Likewise with money, which comes a close second as our most limited resource. It’s tempting to believe that the quantity and quality of our creative productivity would increase exponentially if only we could afford everything we’ve imagined, but I’ve seen too many artists dry up the moment they had enough money in the bank. For every artist who is empowered and inspired by money, there is another who gets lazy and self-satisfied because of it. Necessity will continue to be the mother of invention.

  The Wrong Structure.

  Creating is all about playing and innovating within familiar forms. It’s natural to want to establish as many ground rules as possible about form before we get down to work, but you have to choose the form that’s not only appropriate to you but right for your particular idea.

  The novel that seems to be going nowhere might be better as a short story; conversely, the story whose characters are bursting with unfulfilled promise should grow into a novella. The screenplay whose dialogue crackles but lacks a strong visual component could make a great one-act play. The portrait whose lines fascinate but in which color is a distraction might have a sculpture inside it dying to come out.

  Poets face this all the time because of the multitude of forms. Free verse liberates, but haiku concentrates. Poems come in many forms, from sonnets to villanelles to pantoums and sestinas. Some forms confine the poet, others make him or her sing.

  The sestina, for example, is a puzzling form, handed down from the twelfth-century French troubadour Arnaut Daniel. It consists of thirty-nine lines—six stanzas of six lines each with an envoi of three lines at the end. It does not rhyme. Instead, the lines must end with just six different words throughout, and there is a prescribed pattern for these repetitions: The word that appears at the end of a stanza must end the first line of the next stanza, and the end-word of the first line of each stanza moves to the second line of the next stanza. It’s amazing that such a goofily willful form survives, but some contemporary poets are intrigued by all that self-guiding structure. W. H. Auden tried his hand at one sestina; it’s called “Paysage Moralisé,” and you can find it in his Collected Poems. It acquires a certain power through its numbing repetitions, but it strikes me as more of a parlor trick than a deeply felt poem.

  The sonnet has a very clear structure requiring fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a defined rhyme scheme, but it is still flexible enough to breathe. You can select from the three major rhyme schemes: Italian, Spenserian, and Shakespearean. Unlike the testy sestina, the sonnet’s length and rhymes make it pleasing to the ear, and provide room for linguistic and thematic invention. You need look no further than Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets for proof of the beauty and range possible within the confines of the sonnet. The difference between the sonnet and the sestina is the difference between going fishing with a fishing net or in a diving bell: Both devices are built for the water, but the diving bell is hard, inviolate, confining, and inviting only to extremely curious fish; the net is flexible, porous, and expansive—perfectly designed to haul ’em in.

  A Sense of Obligation.

  I once spent six weeks rehearsing sixteen dancers on a bad piece of music called “The Hollywood Kiss” because I felt obligated to a composer who had done a favor for me. I had a company of dancers on full payroll, so I was obliged to keep them busy. I was obligated to the studio I had rented out and the staff I had hired. But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working. So, after six weeks of going nowhere with the meter running, I scuttled the project. Despite the most meticulous planning—or more likely because of it—I wasted six weeks of everyone’s time. In hindsight, I should have heeded the CEO who told me, “You only need one good reason to commit to an idea, not four hundred. But if you have four hundred reasons to say yes and one reason to say no, the answer is probably no.”

  Whatever your reasons for starting with a project—whether crass or noble—they have to be clear and unencumbered. Obligation is a flimsy base for creativity, way down the list behind passion, courage, instinct, and the desire to do something great.

  The Wrong Materials.

  Another error of planning is to pursue a goal with the wrong materials. I used to be guilty of this. I’d be hell-bent on making a quartet, and only three dancers would show up at rehearsal that day. I would fume to myself, “It’s not fair!” I was so locked into my plan for four dancers that I’d be totally unprepared to work with three. An entire day would be lost. Eventually I wised up and saw the flaw in any method of working that doesn’t accommodate the notion of injury to dancers. Injuries are part of the business. It’s like a wedding planner not taking into consideration the possibility that an outdoor wedding reception might be sabotaged by rain. Solution: You put up a tent!

  It took me a while to accept this. I tend toward optimism and ignore Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong will”) at every turn. But I learned to adapt and to plan differently. If you’re fixated on making a quartet, I told myself, you’d better have four dancers and at least two understudies, because somebody will get injured and disappear for a spell, or else you shouldn’t be making quartets.

  These mistakes—relying too much on others, waiting for the perfect setup, overthinking structure, feeling obligated to finish what you’ve started, and working with the wrong materials—are deadly. Any one of them will undermine your best efforts.

  Incredibly, in what I like to think of as my sage years when I should have known better, I made all of these mistakes at once. It was in 1999, when the New York City Ballet, home of the Balanchine tradition, invited me to make a dance for the company.

  I should have been on red alert the moment Peter Martins, the artistic director, generously put the entire company at my disposal. “It’s all yours for the next four weeks,” he said. “You can have any dancer you want. All the rehearsal time you need. Whatever musicians you want.”

  Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.

  With the extraordinary dancers of the City Ballet available to me, I turned to a musical selection I’d always loved, a late Beethoven piano sonata, #31 in A flat major, Op. 110. This might not have been my best impulse. After all, I had an entire world-class orchestra at my disposal, willing and able to play anything in the vast Western repertory. Instead, I said, “No thank you, I don’t want an orchestra; I’ll take one lonely piano
player.” Traditionally, City Ballet’s dancers have “quiet feet”—that is, they don’t make a lot of noise on the stage floor during a performance. This is very difficult to achieve, but it’s characteristic of City Ballet training that their ballerinas practically float above the floor. I thought this would allow the sound of the solo piano to come through despite my desire to use a large complement of fourteen dancers. I had learned earlier from another Beethoven piano solo ballet that if you’re using a great piece of music, the audience wants to hear it.

  What makes NYCB special is not that it has some of the best dancers in the world, but that it has so many of them. I was like a kid in a toy store. I wanted to get every dancer I’d admired at NYCB into my ballet. I pushed some very accomplished soloists to dance in ensembles, which they considered demeaning. They all wanted to be featured, but I had a large cast and not everyone could get a satisfying star turn. Too many dancers, not enough notes. I would have been better off choreographing a duet.

  Worse, the sound generated by so many feet, however well tempered, overwhelmed the music. As rehearsals progressed, I found myself asking them to be more and more quiet, to the point where it got to be a running joke. At night I had dreams of Balanchine up in heaven, chuckling down at me. “You silly woman,” he said. “You’re using Beethoven? I never used Beethoven. I was too smart to use Beethoven. He’s too good and very tough to dance to. And why are you only using a piano? How many times have I told you, ‘Use the damn orchestra!’? The audience has paid for it. They want to hear it. And it will make everything else bigger.”

  So two weeks into my four weeks of rehearsals it was out with the piano sonata and in with a really loud symphony that wouldn’t be drowned out by dancing feet—in this case, Beethoven’s jaunty, percussive Symphony #7.

  Now I had to graft two weeks of choreography made to an intimate piano sonata onto that boisterous symphony. I could see that it wasn’t working very well. Here is where the sense of obligation kicked in: I couldn’t just throw out all the work we had done, because that would mean erasing two weeks of the entire company’s time, which is worth a fortune. I felt obliged to the people providing me with these remarkable resources not to have wasted them.

  I worked all night to make the changes fit the dancers, but then I ran into the human equation: While building a lot of the ballet on the wrong piece of music, I used up a big portion of the dancers’ enthusiasm. Getting them re-excited midstream about a new piece of music created something of a credibility gap.

  Moreover, I’d had to learn how the company functioned along the way. This was my first foray into the company on my own (I had co-choreographed Brahms/Handel with Jerome Robbins a decade earlier), and it slowly dawned on me that I was in the dark about a lot of things I normally take for granted. I didn’t know how rehearsals were scheduled. I didn’t know how the dancers behaved; they were in the midst of a season, rehearsing during the day while performing at night, and I didn’t know their tolerance for new work or how much they would commit to such a project. I had to find that out as we went, and this added one more area of uncertainty and stress into the equation.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, I was mildly annoyed with the business deal that had brought me into City Ballet. Choreographers get a fee for their work, and I have worked long and hard to get one of the highest fees in the world. City Ballet doesn’t play that way. Every choreographer gets the same fee, no matter who they are. It’s called a Most Favored Nations clause. No one gets treated any better than anyone else, or any worse. I agreed to the deal but it must have bothered me subconsciously because my son, Jesse, picked up on it.

  “Remind me, Jesse,” I would ask him. “Why am I working so hard for so little money?”

  “This is New York City Ballet,” he would reply. “You’re paying for the opportunity to hit a home run out of Yankee Stadium.”

  And I would go, “Yes, that’s what I’m doing. I’m going to hit a home run out of Yankee Stadium.”

  That swing-for-the-fences mentality may be the most dangerous mistake I made. Everything I did was predicated on being bigger, bolder, grander. I was going to make a statement. I was going to change the company. All in one dance. At one point, in a display of hubris that makes me roar with laughter now, I actually asked the company to fly in the great Austrian conductor Carlos Kleiber (whose recording of Beethoven’s Seventh I admired greatly) to conduct the premiere. And NYCB was so willing to cater to my whims (again, those unlimited resources!), they actually made some inquiries with the famously elusive conductor.

  I could go on citing the petty misjudgments I made during this project, but you get the idea. When the ballet, called The Beethoven Seventh, premiered in January 2000, the response from audience and critics was respectful and in some cases quite warm. But it’s not my favorite work or my best work, and I’ll never be able to think about it without remembering the pains of the process. Considering that I went into the project hoping to make my mark in the annals of this historic company, I would have to say that I came up far short of my ambitions. This story could be taught at Harvard Business School as a case study: An executive gets a promotion to run a major division in a corporation, the company gives him a blank check to shake things up, and the new boss responds by (a) announcing unrealistic goals, (b) tackling the wrong problem out of the gate, (c) enlisting all the talented people he can find but assigning tasks that are not quite right for the people doing them, (d) changing his mind midstream, and (e) assuming he knows the only way to do things. A perfect plan for disaster.

  Six weeks later I was across the Lincoln Center plaza at American Ballet Theatre to make a new ballet, my fifteenth for the company. The circumstances were ideally horrible. It was as if ABT management had decided to give me the opposite of City Ballet’s carte blanche. ABT was giving me two weeks to mount a ballet from start to finish—an almost impossible schedule. The budget was minimal. Other than the two weeks, I had no fixed rehearsal times. If I wanted to use any of the principal dancers I would have to catch them on the run between other rehearsals and performances. The whole ballet would have to be spaced on stage, properly lit, and costumed in ninety minutes of technical rehearsal the afternoon of the world premiere. That day would also be the first time we would work with a live orchestra. Talk about limited resources!

  In hindsight, it was an ideal situation for me. With a constricted timetable, bare-bones budget, and dancers I couldn’t count on to be at my beck and call, I responded accordingly. The circumstances demanded total self-reliance and exquisite planning.

  The process that resulted in the ballet The Brahms-Haydn Variations was, to my mind, a model of proper planning. After my recent City Ballet experience, I had no delusions of grandeur. I also knew my materials well, the dancers I would be using, and how much time I would have to rehearse. I made a virtue of the clock ticking (you can’t overthink when you don’t have time to think at all). I consider this piece the most satisfying ballet of my career.

  The conditions were so limited that, as Samuel Johnson said about the prospect of being hanged, they concentrated the mind wonderfully.

  exercises

  16 Pick a Fight

  Too much planning implies you’ve got it all under control. That’s boring, unrealistic, and dangerous. It lulls you into a complacency that removes one of the artist’s most valuable conditions: being pissed. Art is competitive with yourself, with the past, with the future. It is a special war zone where first you make the rules, and then you test the consequences.

  Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning accepted truths and principles. You’re asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom:

  “Why do I have to obey the rules?”

  “Why can’t I be different?”

  “Why can’t I do it my way?”

  These are the impulses that guide all creative people whether they admit it or not. Every act of creation is also an act of destruct
ion or abandonment. Something has to be cast aside to make way for the new.

  But those lofty goals are the farthest thing from your mind at the start of a project. In those moments, you need to channel your innate defiance productively. So, pick a fight—with the system, the rules, your rituals, even your everyday routines.

  For one day, be completely contrary, to the point of orneriness and belligerence, with anything and everything you do. Turn everything upside down.

  When you get up in the morning, pick a fight with your wake-up routine. If you like to exercise (as I do), do your workout in reverse, or twice as fast (whew!), or twice as slow (ugh!). The change will challenge your muscles. The discomfort will stimulate your brain.

  When you set up to work, pick a fight with your rituals. Ask yourself why you need this ritual, what solace and protection does it bring, what state of mind does it create, what good does it produce. Questioning what’s gone unquestioned gets the brain humming.

  When you actually get down to work, pick a fight with your first impulse that day. Do the opposite of what your brain is telling you to do. That quick jolt of defiance might be enough to rewire your circuitry and deliver something new to your doorstep.

  These are private exercises. You’re picking a fight with yourself—to generate anger, emotion, combustion, and heat. You need to do this once in a while, if only to prepare yourself for the bigger battle, the one where you pick a fight with something outside yourself.

  Sometimes the most creative thing you can do in business is to pick a fight with entrenched systems and hierarchies, if only to get people questioning the wisdom of doing things the same old way. I can’t imagine any CEO taking over a company nowadays and telling his new subordinates, “Everything’s fine. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The smart CEOs come in swinging; they install their own team, establish new goals. In other words, they pick fights and start breaking things immediately.