by Twyla Tharp
The warm-up/action/cooldown became the spine of the piece. It worked for me because it reflected a physical truth: This is how athletes function. I have no idea if the audience could see it as clearly as I orchestrated it; if they noticed the structural underpinnings, they were not watching John skate. In the end, whether they see it is not part of the deal I’ve made with the audience. The spine is my little secret. It keeps me on message, but it is not the message itself.
Everyone who presents his or her work to the public eventually realizes that there is a quasi-legal transaction between artist and audience. A writer, for example, establishes the genre he works in, and you, the reader, agree to its terms. It’s a contract between the two of you. A humorist promises to make you laugh. A thriller writer promises to create evil and then conquer it. A mystery writer promises to build a murderous maze and then show you the way out. A romance novelist promises to make you cry. You feel gypped when the author breaks the contract.
It’s the same with my audience. We have a contract binding us with an implicit promise. My promise is not merely to entertain the audience with beautiful bodies moving in space—that’s the deal all dance audiences take for granted. My promise is to connect them to universal emotions and ancestral impulses through dance. That is why I struggle mightily at the start of any work to connect with roots and first causes and my most ancient memories. I can signal my intentions in many ways, even through the title. If I call a piece Surfer at the River Styx, the puzzled audience will at least get the hint that something ancient and mythic is happening onstage.
You might not see your work this way. You might not struggle for spine. You might be content to receive any random thought floating through the ether that happens to settle on you that day. You might think you don’t need a supporting mechanism for the art you’re constructing, a controlling image, a collateral idea to guide you. You might think getting lost is a big part of the adventure.
You may think that, but you’d be wrong.
Floating spinelessly can get you through the day, but at some point you’ll be lost in the middle of a project, whether it’s a painting, a novel, a song, or a poem, and you won’t know how to get back to what you’re trying to accomplish. It might not happen in your first creation, which, in your bubble of sweet inexperience, may skim from heart to mind to canvas, page, or stage exactly as you intended, perfect in shape, proportion, and meaning (in which case, consider yourself blessed). But it will happen in the next piece, or the one after that. It happens to everyone. You’ll find yourself pacing your particular white room, asking yourself, What am I trying to say? That is the moment when you will embrace, with gratitude, the notion of a spine.
Keep in mind that coming up with a spine is neither a chore nor a distraction that takes you away from the real work of the creative process. It is a tool, a gift you give yourself to make your job easier. As for the particular quality of your spine, I’m not concerned with how you’ve developed it or how you exploit it; your choice of spine is as personal as how you pray. It’s a private choice that only has to provide comfort and guidance to you. It’s your spine. Use what works for you.
You can discover the spine of a piece in many ways.
You can find it with the aid of a friend. That’s what editors do for writers who have lost their way. It’s the editor’s job to challenge writers who are handing in stories with shaky narratives and lazy sentences. The question is always “What are you trying to say?” (In such cases, the editor is functioning as a chiropractor, bringing the spine back into proper alignment.)
You can induce it with a ritual. I know a lawyer who has a useful gambit when questioning his clients: Whenever he hears a muddled explanation, he holds up his hands to silence the speaker and says, “Okay, explain it to me as if I’m ten years old.” That simple instruction, perhaps because it floods people with memories of a simpler time, gets them talking with clarity and purpose. That’s what the spine is to me: It’s my explanation to myself as if I’m ten years old again.
You can also discover the spine by recalling your original intentions and clarifying your goals. What was the first thing you dropped into your box for the project? Go back to it and remember how you started—that’s what it’s there for.
“Make them laugh” was the original impulse for an early piece of mine, Eight Jelly Rolls, set to the witty tunes of Jelly Roll Morton. Whenever I wavered in my intentions, I could always return to the home thought: Is it funny? Will they laugh?
For a later piece, Baker’s Dozen, my spine was a portrait of communities and how they function together positively. The key word is positively. In my mind I kept the image of Edward Hicks’s The Peaceable Kingdom—his famous painting of the beasts of the world together in blissful coexistence, lion beside ox, wolf next to lamb. That was the level of harmony I was aiming for. Whenever the piece, set to Willie “the Lion” Smith recordings, threatened to take a dark turn, I snapped it back to my sunny intentions: twelve dancers representing an ideal society, not a tortured one. It must have worked. The audience always leaves grinning.
For a later dance, Nine Sinatra Songs, the spinal thought was the life of a married couple from beginning (infatuation and passion) to end (ongoing acceptance). The story was silent, told by seven dancing couples, but the audience certainly picked up on it, cued in part by the lyrics of the songs. It became one of my biggest successes.
Sometimes the spine does double duty, both as the covert idea guiding the artist and the overt theme for the audience. That’s what makes Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick so powerful and enduring. It has a solid unrelenting spine: get the whale. And that spine totally supports the novel’s theme: obsession—get the whale. It is so clear and strong that readers stick with the book through all of Melville’s detours into ivory carving and sail making and Atlantic weather patterns. They know the author’s intentions. And they want to know if Ahab gets the whale.
Sometimes the spine of a piece comes from the music I’ve chosen. For example, I love to create dances in the form of theme and variations. In many ways, this genre is a perfect blueprint for organizing a dance: Each new variation is my cue to change dancers or groupings or steps. It makes my job a lot easier if the music tells me where to end one section and begin another. (Can you blame me for picking a form that gives me one less variable to worry about?) As a result, I have gladly tackled the behemoths of the form: Brahms’s Handel Variations, and his Haydn Variations and Paganini Variations, too, and the most intimidating set of all, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.
Musicologists have written books devoted solely to analyzing the mathematical complexities of this masterpiece from Beethoven’s later years. In 1819 the music publisher Anton Diabelli sent a simple waltz theme to every composer he could think of, inviting each to contribute one variation. The resulting work would be an anthology of contemporary music in all its guises.
Beethoven, that classic overachiever, initially tried his hand at eight to twelve of them, after first saying he wasn’t going to do any. (Remember, he was only asked to contribute one.) Diabelli’s theme, he concluded, was so laughably simple and amateurish, he wanted nothing to do with it. But the theme must have lodged in his head and taken root, because three years later, while he was composing his last piano sonata, Op. 111, he realized he was using the Diabelli theme, and that discovery sent him back to the project. He wound up writing a series of variations now formally known as Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, C Major, Op. 120. This gigantic composition for solo piano, nearly one hour in length, does not stray from the original theme. A sophisticated listener who can read music and understand composition is never lost because Diabelli’s theme is the spine of the piece and the spine stays intact in each variation. Beethoven has so much invention that he can transform the theme without losing it. In the first variation, he alters the original time signature from a 3/4 waltz to a 4/4 march. He also slows it down; it’s the same number of bars but twice as long. He hooks you
by repeating the same structure and then shakes you up by transforming it in ways that leave you gasping. That’s the magic. He created huge extremes, going from sforzando to pianissimo, developing dramatic effects that helped define the Romantic style. He creates a tension that’s almost tactile. As the variations unfold, you wonder with awe and amazement, “What’s next? Can he do another?”
My challenge was to match Beethoven’s notes with my steps. Can I do it? Can I keep up?
The key for me was to make my theme simple and serviceable. To set this music to dance, I needed a spine that would make sense of Beethoven’s daunting architecture and keep me grounded. Variations, by definition, begin with a theme and alter it. The wealth of techniques for varying the theme without destroying it creates the beauty of the form. I, too, could create a theme, expand it, turn it upside down, turn it inside out, or flip it front to back. I, too, could do all kinds of imaginable operations to it, translating all that music into movement. But eventually I would have to return home, like a prodigal son. That, I decided, would be my spine: Bring it home. I thought of Beethoven’s variations as a journey in which the hero (the original theme) leaves home, grows, matures, and then returns. If I could suggest that in dance, I would have the perfect analogue to the sweeping arc of Beethoven’s composition.
I also learned from Beethoven’s deep well of invention how useful a simple melody could be. Just as Diabelli’s tune became Beethoven’s spine, I developed a choreographic equivalent of that tune (a series of skips, hops, and stops) that would serve me as well and would recur throughout the piece. I wasn’t mimicking Beethoven; I was running parallel to his music.
Another part of the spine would be to figure out how the original has been changed and how it has profited from the journey. If its innocence is still intact, the piece is a comedy. If its innocence is lost and it hasn’t profited from the experience, the piece is a tragedy. When the source material that provides your spine is as clear as tragedy or comedy to you, then your foundation is sound and will mean something to others.
Once you accept the power of spine in the creative act, you will become much more efficient in your creativity. You will still get lost on occasion, but having a spine will anchor you. When you lose your way, it will show you the way home. It will remind you that this is what you have set out to do, this is the story you’re trying to tell, this is the effect you’re trying to achieve. Having a spine will snap you back to attention quickly and, as a result, will inject speed and economy into your work habits. Energy and time are finite resources; conserving them is very important.
I’ve always thought that one of the great rewards of being a creative person is that I get to do it. Like a writer who enjoys the process of knocking out the words at his or her desk (on good days), or the artist who can spend all day in the studio because he loves the mechanical act of applying paint onto canvas (on good days), I love being in a dance studio creating steps with dancers (on good days). I know writers who say they take little pleasure in writing but they love having written. I’m not like that. I’m more like the athlete who enjoys practicing as much as playing the actual game. I get a kick out of the sweat and rigor and sheer exertion of making my body move, whether it’s in the studio or in performance. If you have trouble appreciating this, imagine people dancing into the wee hours of the morning at a club. Most of them have spent all day working at demanding jobs. Yet their energy returns like magic at night when the music and dancing start up. Dancing, perhaps more than any other art form, has an energizing effect on people.
But there’s a danger here. The sheer pleasure of working in the studio introduces the temptation to linger, to fall in love with the process of creation rather than driving toward the end product. Take this sort of thing to an extreme and you’ll never finish anything.
This is where having a solid spine is invaluable. Having a spine lets me know where I am starting from and where I want to go. It’s easy to forget this when you’re enjoying yourself so much in the middle. In this sense, I think of spine as an efficiency expert holding a stopwatch as I work. It lets me know when I am dawdling or digressing or wasting time. It reminds me that everything I add is either on message or off. Most of all, it lets me know when I’m done.
I take my cues in this regard from Buster Keaton. What I like about Keaton is how simply he got to where he wanted to go. His productivity was extraordinary, in large part because he always had a clear idea of where to start and where to finish. He had an economy of purpose and execution, which I attribute to having a strong spine in his work. You could argue that all of his comic set pieces had the same spine: Get the last laugh. He knew that the payoff, the one big laugh, always came at the end, when he fell down a hole or slipped on a banana peel or watched everything come crashing down around him. Keaton knew that you don’t get the laugh when you set the scene up. You don’t get the laugh while you’re developing it during the middle section. You get the laugh at the end, when you actually hit the deck. It wasn’t that Keaton rushed a scene, but he was very economical about the middle. (Some scenes took their time. In the leisurely opening of the 1921 short film The Goat, a starving Keaton is sent to the back of a breadline; he doesn’t realize he’s standing behind two mannequins, so for perhaps the first time in film history we watch a character wait.)
In another short I think of Keaton standing on the street. On the balcony above is a girl he longs for. He scribbles a love note to her, folds it into an airplane, and sends it up to her. The camera stays on Keaton for a few moments, and then the paper comes floating back to him torn into little snowflakes. He turns his collar up to protect himself from the cold. That’s pure Keaton: He gets from the premise of the scene (would-be lover is rebuffed) to the punch line (the chill from paper snowflakes) with extraordinary economy of mood and action.
That technique was his spine.
Years ago I spent a lot of time studying Keaton’s films, trying to understand how he achieved his effects and hoping to do the same in my work. Patterns emerged. There was always a disaster in Keaton’s films, and he always survived. And there was always a moment in which he endured and suffered and waited for disaster to strike. I saw method in his mayhem. The story line may change from film to film, but Keaton had a theme (disaster strikes) and he had a spine (survive—to get the last laugh). He didn’t waste much time in the middle. He went from cause to effect as quickly as possible. The directness of his method can be summed up in his most famous stunt, the falling wall sequence from Steamboat Bill, Jr. He’s standing in front of a wall that’s about to come crashing down; he doesn’t know it, but we do. We see it falling down onto him—but someone’s left a window open, and so the wall falls to the ground around him.
What gives the punch line such impact is that it’s a surprise. We ask ourselves, “Why didn’t I see that?” We didn’t see it because Keaton didn’t give us time to think about it. He was getting on with it, not waiting. That’s my ideal version of spine. Whenever I find myself wandering down blind alleys, veering away from my spine, I think of Keaton and his straight path to the end.
Keep these images in mind whenever you work on developing the spine of a piece, if only to remind you that the process of creating can be thrilling and exciting—and will work better if you can get to the good parts as quickly as possible.
I could go on about spines, but that’s also the point: Every piece I make now has a spine. It’s habitual. It’s helpful. And it keeps me on my toes.
exercises
20 Make a Picture That’s Worth Ten Thousand Words
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then dance, because it moves, may be worth ten thousand.
I take comfort in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation of the resemblance among the various forms that music takes on. “The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is co
mmon.” Wittgenstein was pointing out that there are affinities between seemingly different objects that we comprehend pictorially but cannot verbalize. It is, after all, hard to express how musical thought and sound waves and the undulating scratchings of eighth notes and quarter notes on a sheet of music resemble one another. Each relies on different material and a different grammar. Yet we sense they are saying the same thing. We sense that they share a common structure, because we see and hear the waves.
Dance has that power of making us see and feel affinities.
Take the White Swan’s last exit in Act II of Swan Lake. The ballerina turns her back to the audience, facing Albrecht, her prince, and bourrées across the stage with her arms extended at her sides. As she executes her delicate journey on the points of her toes across the stage, a ripple of movement begins at her left hand’s fingertips and continues through all the joints of her left arm, her shoulders and back, through all the joints of her right arm to her right hand’s fingertips. The ripple then returns from right to left, again and again, until the undulating gesture accumulates power and creates a burning image of a wave. It is one of the most marvelous moments of beauty and heartbreak in the entire ballet canon. It never fails to elicit a gasp from the audience. It is a gasp of wonder and sorrow. We immediately sense that this ripple is a metaphor for the fluttering of bird’s wings. The ballerina is, after all, portraying a swan. But the exquisite move across the stage also reminds us of the wavelike motion of the water supporting this ballerina-swan. And her gesture suggests so much more. Is the swan waving good-bye to her prince? Or is she beckoning him? “Come with me.” Or is the ripple a gesture of resignation, her final spasm of life? Or is it all of the above?
Someone in the audience could write ten thousand words about this single moment in a three-hour ballet. That’s how rich movement can be.