by Twyla Tharp
Beethoven, the most truculent of artists, not only picked fights with musical forms, reinventing our notions of the shape and scope of symphonies and sonatas, he reinvented how society regarded composers and musicians. Before Beethoven, composers were treated like skilled servants; they were paid whatever their rich and royal patrons wanted to pay. Beethoven changed all that. He demanded and got lucrative fees for his services, and was one of the first composers to dine with his hosts rather than with the help when he performed in his patrons’ homes. I don’t think he could operate as an artist without the feeling that he was at war with someone or something.
This fighting mode is not for everyone, but there’s something to be said for getting into a warrior’s frame of mind, especially when you’re troubled by some aspect of your creative life. If something isn’t right in the piece you’re working on, you can’t always fix it by the sheer application of skill. Tinkering and tweaking will only take you so far. Sometimes, to force change, you have to attack the work with outrage and violence. You see this a lot of times with students who, in their work, pick fights with their teachers; instinctively, they sense they’ll be judged on whom they do battle with. They know that in order to break away and find their own voice, they must defy, even mock, their artistic mentors.
You won’t always win, but the exercise is liberating.
17 Our Perfect World
If I were sublimely fortunate, I would work in my perfect world daily. At rare times, I have been privileged to work with dancers on the following basis: I am exchanging my time for theirs, with no money or performance goals, no ulterior motive other than the mutual challenge in sight, just working together to create in an empty space. I call this uncomplicated condition Our Perfect World. These are my ground rules.
Quiet.
No one present who does not belong—no observers.
All the time in the world. No worry that you will be thrown out or
that you will go into overtime.
No goal other than to try things.
No fear of failure; nothing will fail.
No obligations other than to do your best.
We entertain each other: I challenge them, and they challenge me.
Each day completes itself. The next day is new.
My perfect world does not exist, but it’s there as a goal. What are the conditions of your perfect world? Which of them are essential, and which can you work around?
You may discover that you are not that far from heaven.
18 How to Be Lucky
Be generous.
I don’t use that word lightly. Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you. If you’re generous to someone, if you do something to help him out, you are in effect making him lucky. This is important. It’s like inviting yourself into a community of good fortune.
Whenever I feel I’m working in a groove it’s invariably because I feel I am being the benefactor in the situation rather than the beneficiary. I am sharing my art with others, lending my craft to theirs, interest-free with no IOU. I want the dancers to look great, so I try to give them great steps. In return, they live up to the potential I see in them. Then I am the one who feels lucky. In the luck equation, who is the winner here?
Someone once asked me why the superstar dancers of the ballet world don’t make very good choreographers. The quick answer is that few of them have the facility to teach effectively since a lot of what they do has come so easily to them. But I think the bigger issue is generosity. Stars become stars because they have a gift for pulling the world into them; they draw people’s attention through their beauty, talent, charisma, and wiles. As a result, I don’t think they’re generally willing to project their own artistic hopes and desires onto other people. They are used to having their own assets supported. This isn’t evil selfishness or egotism; it’s simply a part of their creative DNA, the way they are.
To be a great choreographer (or teacher), you have to invest everything you have in your dancers. You have to be so devoted to them and to the finished creation that your dancers become your heroes. It takes courage to be generous like that, to believe that the better the dancers look (or the actors in your film, or the singers of your song), the better the scene will play and the more satisfying the work itself will be. Without that generosity, you’ll always hold something back. The finished work shows it, and your audience knows it.
It took me years to appreciate this. When I was younger (read: more limber, athletic, and strong) I used to do this awful thing to myself: Whatever dance I was working on, I would literally put myself in the center of the piece, even though I knew full well that I wasn’t going to get to perform it. For a few years there, when I was in my forties and could still move well, I would get really pissy when the inevitable moment arrived and I would have to recuse myself from the piece and hand it over to one of my dancers. Of course, injecting myself into the piece was one of the ways I identified what the piece was about. (Every director does this—tries each role on herself.) But each advancing year taught me a little more about generosity. Nearing my sixth decade, I could no longer rationally harbor illusions that I was the only one who could perform my work. In fact, I couldn’t. If I could, it would not have been challenging enough for my extraordinary (read: younger) dancers. Age forced me to learn how to give everything to my dancers. That’s not an easy lesson to learn, but I’m grateful for it. (Still pissed off, but grateful.)
I cannot overstate how much a generous spirit contributes to good luck. Look at the luckiest people around you, the ones you envy, the ones who seem to have destiny falling habitually into their laps. What are they doing that singles them out? It isn’t dumb luck if it happens repeatedly. If they’re anything like the fortunate people I know, they’re prepared, they’re always working at their craft, they’re alert, they involve their friends in their work, and they tend to make others feel lucky to be around them.
19 Work with the Best
If it’s true that who you are now and who you will be in five years depend on what books you read and which people you meet, then you need to think more aggressively about those you invite into your creative life. New collaborators bring new vectors of energy into your static world—and they can be combustible. When people say they have good chemistry with others, they’re not using the lab metaphor loosely. Their molecules bounce off your molecules.
It doesn’t matter what genre you work in, you need to rub up against other people. If you’re a composer, it’s your collaborators on lyrics, or the singer, or the members of your band (think Mozart without Da Ponte, Verdi without Boito, Rodgers without Hammerstein, Lennon without McCartney). If you’re a playwright, it’s an actor for whom you want to write a great role or a director who knows how to put your work on the stage. If you’re a novelist, it’s an editor with helpful suggestions or a friendly reader who can locate your voice. If you’re a painter, it’s a model who inspires you. It can be a gallery owner who eagerly shows your work, a producer who wants to record your songs, a foundation adviser who gives you a grant, a club owner who lets your band take the stage, a theater manager who gives you space to rehearse and perform—somewhere along the line, you’re going to need the contributions and judgment of other people. It’s a worthwhile exercise: Work with the best people you can find.
It’s easy to think of Igor Stravinsky, for example, as a dedicated, productive, energetic composer working in a vacuum. The truth is quite the opposite. Stravinsky had impeccable taste (and luck) in the people he invited into his creative orbit. In his early years he was tapped by the century’s greatest impresario, Sergey Diaghilev, to compose for the Ballets Russes. This gave the young composer a reason to produce such masterpieces as Petrouchka and Firebird and his revolutionary Le sacre du printemps. It also provided him with a venue to have his music heard by people who could appreciate it. Through Diaghilev, he later teamed up with Pablo Picasso to create the ballet Pulcinella. He created the opera Oedipus Rex with th
e French poet Jean Cocteau, Perséphone with the novelist André Gide, and The Rake’s Progress with W. H. Auden. Diaghilev, Picasso, Cocteau, Gide, Auden—an impressive roster, confirming that Stravinsky’s talent for finding great partners was equal to his gift for composition. His most fruitful collaboration was with George Balanchine; he composed music for more than a dozen Balanchine ballets over a forty-year period, finding in Balanchine a creative equal who could add dramatic resonance to his most intricate scores. This was also shrewd: As long as Balanchine had a dance company, Stravinsky’s music would be performed.
In my career, I’ve collaborated with artists from David Byrne to Milos Forman to Jerome Robbins to Philip Glass. This didn’t happen by accident. But it made good accidents happen.
Chapter 8
spine
I once made
the mistake of announcing that a new ballet was based on Euripides’ The Bacchae. It was a mistake because after the first performance, everyone asked me “Where was The Bacchae?” Frankly, by then I was so immersed in what the dancers were doing onstage, I, too, had lost track of Euripides. The Bacchae had been compelling source material that I latched on to as the spine of the piece when I started choreographing. But that’s all it was—an initial impulse for the core of a ballet, not what the ballet became. I realize now that a Greek tragedy was too much information for the audience to handle; it was okay for me to think it, but an audience would find it a distraction. Instead of enjoying the dance, they sat in their seats looking for its skeletal frame. Yet for me, the spine was an essential preparatory step in the ballet’s creation. Without it, there would be no starting point, no coherence, no North Star to guide me—and ultimately no dance. My only mistake was that I should have kept it to myself.
Spine, to put it bluntly, begins with your first strong idea. You were scratching to come up with an idea, you found one, and through the next stages of creative thinking you nurtured it into the spine of your creation. The idea is the toehold that gets you started. The spine is the statement you make to yourself outlining your intentions for the work. You intend to tell this story. You intend to explore this theme. You intend to employ this structure. The audience may infer it or not. But if you stick to your spine, the piece will work.
As I mentioned earlier, my Bacchae-inspired dance, Surfer at the River Styx, began when Jerome Robbins suggested I choreograph a piece to the Euripides play. I don’t usually accept unsolicited advice from other choreographers, but Jerry was a close friend and collaborator, and I knew him to be singularly shrewd about narrative-driven ideas. After all, he was the man who placed Romeo and Juliet on Manhattan’s West Side. He definitely knew a good story when he saw it. In effect, he did my scratching for me.
So I reread The Bacchae, a story (in twelve words or less) about a king who flouts the god Dionysus and pays for it dearly. The story line was rich with conflict and tension (valuable elements in any staged piece), but I didn’t have the forces to flesh out the play’s characters and its large, essential chorus. I needed to scale it down to accommodate my small troupe of six dancers. I asked myself, What is the essence of The Bacchae? My answer was hubris—that most compelling of tragic flaws. The king, Pentheus, rejects the divinity of Dionysus, who takes vengeance by driving mad his followers, the Bacchae (women worshippers of Bacchus, another name for Dionysus), who then tear Pentheus to pieces. Pentheus’s hubris, by itself, is not much of a story (although it does lead to his death), but it was enough of an idea to get me started. As I began casting the piece and creating steps for the dancers, this flimsy tendon of an idea gradually turned into the solid spine of a narrative arc: Dionysus poses as a humble man, and from this stance he regains his status as a deity. Humility conquers hubris, and a god is resurrected. That would be the spine of the piece.
With the principal roles in place (if only in my mind), I thought about how to represent the conflict between the two. For no good reason I had begun to think of my small chorus of four dancers as a river. That’s it, I thought: I would place one character (in this case, Dionysus) in consort with the river; the king would be in conflict with the river. The river became the controlling image for the dance, a template for defining the movement of the entire cast.
By the time I had transformed my chorus into a river, I had traveled a long way from The Bacchae, and I’m not surprised that my reference to it left that first audience confused. But in my mind the origin and the final outcome are inextricable. You can see Surfer a hundred times and never know the role Euripides played in its creation. But I know he’s in there, and without him there would be no piece.
I believe that every work of art needs a spine—an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn’t have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.
This hit me years ago when I read Bernard Malamud’s first novel, The Natural. It’s the story of an aging baseball player named Roy Hobbes whose promising career was derailed by a woman with a gun. He returns mysteriously to the major leagues after two decades, nearing forty, to play for the ailing New York Knights. He brings his own bat, which he calls Wonderboy, and quickly becomes a hitting sensation. He restores the team, then disappears as mysteriously as he appeared. Strange things happen in the book. Lightning strikes a baseball bat to give it astonishing powers. Losing streaks take on the tragic grandeur of droughts. But more than anything, it’s a classic baseball yarn.
Many people know that Malamud drew some of his story from a real incident in the middle of the 1949 season: All-Star first baseman Eddie Waitkus was shot in a hotel room by a woman he had never met before. Though that’s as much of the real-life Waitkus as the novelist borrowed, the tale surely served as an inspiration to Malamud. An inspiration, but not his spine.
I would not have realized the distinction in the case of The Natural if not for a scholarly friend who told me, “You know it’s based on the quest for the Holy Grail, don’t you?” In the tones of the English professor he was, he told me about the myth of the Fisher King and drew out all the parallels between Malamud’s tale and the myth. The team was named the Knights, a nod to Arthurian legend. The team manager was Pop Fisher. The hero’s first name, Roy, is an analogue for “king.” And so on. These were not coincidences. Malamud was intentionally making a connection between baseball myth and an equally powerful mythic story from centuries before. Waitkus’s story was the idea he had scratched for, the one that got him started; the Grail myth was his spine.
I’m not sure knowing this deepened my appreciation for the book, which was already considerable, but it made Malamud’s achievement even more impressive. It also clarified for me the difference between story and theme and spine. Malamud’s story was a simple baseball yarn. His theme, as I discerned it, was redemption. And his spine was that search for the Grail.
Somewhere in the triad of story, theme, and spine were permanent distinctions that applied to my work. I rarely have a story to tell—although I recall playwright John Guare saying that every tale tells one of two stories: Romeo and Juliet, or David and Goliath—but I always have a spine.
There’s an obvious reason why, as a choreographer, I am constantly groping for a spine. Dance is preverbal; it doesn’t have the writer’s advantage of using language to establish meaning and intent. The vocabulary of dance is movement, not words. So I need something more in the form of an idea, an image, a memory, a metaphor to make my intentions comprehensible to the audience. I have to articulate this to myself because I won’t be using words to articulate it in public.
(Let me hasten to add that I don’t think of movement as being poorer than language in conveying meaning. What movement lacks in specificity it more than makes up for in primal power.)
Before I made the spine a habitual part of my creative preparation, I used to agonize through rehearsal periods. If rehearsals weren’t going well, I would be dimly aware of it, but I wouldn’t know why specifically. I would have
a vague feeling of dissatisfaction during the rehearsal (“This isn’t working.”) and a more clearly etched feeling of emptiness and despair afterward (“I stink. I’ll never do anything good again.”). It was a horrible feeling, like walking through a thick fog.
I gained one of my earliest introductions to spine when I worked with figure skater John Curry, the 1976 Olympic gold medalist. Curry was a great athlete who wanted his skating to come as close to art as possible within the boundaries of the sport. He showed me that the three components in every athletic performance were the warm-up, the action, and the cooldown. These three components became the spine of the piece I created for him. I put John’s daily three-part routine into a dance. It starts out slowly (to allow the athlete to get loose and warm, and to strengthen the muscles and tendons for what they’ll have to do next), evolves into a middle section of strenuous, crowd-pleasing leaps and turns requiring maximum exertion, and ends with Curry cooling down in one long continuous glide, elegantly placed on one leg as his momentum slows, then stops as if by magic in the center of the ice.