by Twyla Tharp
I don’t have to beat the audience over the head with the stool. They get the point: We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.
I’ve been doing this in real life for years in the studio. When I improvise alone or with a dancer to develop ideas for movement, I videotape the entire session. I want all of the session’s ideas—good, bad, and ridiculous—captured without a filter. The only judgment imposed is whatever self-censoring my partner and I have placed on ourselves, and that’s minimal, because we know we’re there to improvise and develop freely without restrictions. A three-hour session sets an implicit quota of three hours’ worth of ideas.
At day’s end, I go through all three hours of tape, searching for a scrap of interesting movement that I’ve never seen before. If I find thirty seconds of movement out of the three hours, I’m happy. Interestingly, like the stool exercise, the useful ideas tend to come at the end of the session, when we’re warmed up and have run through all the obvious steps. It never fails. But that doesn’t mean I fast forward to the end. The process of getting to the good stuff is valuable, too. In fact, it’s absolutely necessary. Sometimes you can’t identify a good idea until you’ve considered and discarded the bad ones.
This method is no different from a painter running through sketch after sketch until he gets something he likes. His studio floor is littered with crumpled sheets of rejected drawings. It’s a lawn of false starts and mediocre solutions, but it is not a lawn of failure. The crumpled sheets are the cost of getting it right. In effect, the artist is running through his quota of sixty ideas for a sketch, only he doesn’t know he has a quota.
Challenging your assumptions is another important corrective procedure.
If your car is in a rut, the first thing you do is put it in reverse to see if that provides better traction. Why not do the same to a stalled concept? Part of the excitement of creativity is the headlong rush into action when we latch onto a new idea. Yet, in the excitement, we often forget to apply pressure to the idea, poke it, challenge it, push it around, see if it stands up. Without that challenge, you never know how far astray your assumptions may have taken you.
I remember touring with my dance company in a van in the Midwest years ago. It was late in the afternoon, we were behind schedule and rushing to get to a performance at a college 250 miles north of Davenport, Iowa. We loaded the van, piled in, and somehow found the highway. About 30 miles into the trip, surrounded by flat farmland and no significant landmarks, one of the dancers sitting on the right side of the van looked up and basked in the beautiful setting sun. Then she said, “If we’re going north, shouldn’t the sun be on our left side?” We were going the wrong way.
Even though the evidence is staring you in the face, you don’t always read the evidence correctly—or even bother to think about it.
If you’re in a creative rut, the easiest way to challenge assumptions is to switch things around them and make the switch work. The process goes like this:
1. Identify the concept that isn’t working.
2. Write down your assumptions about it.
3. Challenge the assumptions.
4. Act on the challenge.
When Paul Newman first met the producers of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the producers wanted him for the role of Sundance. Newman told them he was much more interested in the Butch role. There was a pause in the room, everyone looked at one another, lightbulbs went off in their heads, and then they all said, “Of course. You’re Butch.” And that’s how Robert Redford was cast as the other guy.
Newman challenged the producers’ assumptions by reversing them. You won’t always have an outside agent in the person of a powerful star helping you reverse your way out of a rut. Most of the time you have to do it on your own. But this kind of thinking can save you.
(It’s fitting that challenging assumptions makes lightbulbs go off in people’s heads. The lightbulb was invented by Thomas Edison largely by challenging assumptions and ignoring—or at least tormenting—received wisdom. Lacking any formal education, which he considered his “blessing,” Edison approached ideas or experiences with both enthusiasm and skepticism. Edison was the master of challenging assumptions. He systematized this in his notebooks and he tested everything, including employees. Before Edison hired a research assistant, he would invite the candidate over to his lab for a bowl of soup; if the candidate seasoned the soup before tasting it, Edison would not hire the individual. He did not want people who had built so many assumptions into their everyday lives that they assumed the soup wasn’t properly seasoned. He wanted fresh minds that would make no assumptions, with an openness that allows ideas to wander in.)
As the Paul Newman story suggests, in the performing arts, casting is one of the assumptions that needs to be challenged violently but often isn’t. Theater lore is rife with tales of great scripts, great plays, great films bogged down or even ruined by poor casting. I can see how it happens. Casting is one of the few creative choices where the material you’re working with—that is, a real-life human being—has opinions and can talk back to you. If you’re writing a novel, your characters are lifeless until you breathe life into them, and even then they don’t walk into your studio complaining about their role, their dialogue, or the number of pages you’ve accorded them in the book. It’s the same with paints and marble and notes on a musical score; they don’t fight back. But in the theatrical arts, where human emotions are involved, muddled reasoning can creep into your decision making. You yield to the performers’ wishes against your better judgment. This role will make me. I need this role. You owe me more time on stage as a reward for my loyalty and hard work. These are all legitimate but softheaded thoughts. When the work starts to misfire, you have to get hardheaded about your views.
Sometimes a dancer is wrong for the part, so I recast it with a dancer who is a polar opposite. Sometimes there are too many dancers on stage, confusing the piece, overwhelming the music, or threatening to run into one another onstage—and I have to cut a dancer or two out of the piece or blend several of them into one role. In each case, someone’s feelings are hurt—and worse, he’s out of a job. It’s never an easy decision, but when your work is at stake, you have to be willing to turn everything upside down, damn the human cost.
I even think this way when it’s not my creation. If I find myself looking at my watch during a performance—meaning I’m disengaged, the creators and performers have lost my attention, when is this over?—I’ll entertain myself by changing and editing the work. What if Actresses A and B switched roles? What if Scene 4 became Scene 1, kicking off the piece rather than showing up too late? What if the ballerina entered from the back and crossed the stage on a diagonal, which might be more compelling to the eye? What if that tall kid in the corps were her partner instead of the fellow who doesn’t look as if he enjoys dancing with her? I don’t do this to be mean-spirited. I’m well aware of the compromises that have to be made with every production. But it’s a good exercise. I’m challenging the assumptions. It sharpens my rut-fighting skills.
This mental exercise serves double duty. It not only gets me out of a rut, it sharpens my show-doctoring skills for when I really need them. I learned this from Jerry Robbins, a true man of the theater, who made a point of going to see everything because he could find something useful in even the worst productions. He’d sit there, viewing the catastrophe onstage, and imagine how he would have done it differently. A bad evening at the theater for everyone else was a creative workout for him. It’s one way he honed the skills that made him one of the greatest show doctors of all time.
These are some methods to get you out of a rut, to help you regain momentum as you work. The ultimate goal is to find what I call, for lack of a better term, your groove.
Getting out of a rut is different from creating a groove. It’s the difference between knowing a bad idea (and avoiding it) and coming up with a good idea. They are not the same thing.
/> When you’re in a groove, you’re not spinning your wheels; you’re moving forward in a straight and narrow path without pauses or hitches. You’re unwavering, undeviating, and unparalleled in your purpose. A groove is the best place in the world. It’s where I strive to be, because when you’re in it you have the freedom to explore, where everything you question leads you to new avenues and new routes, everything you touch miraculously touches something else and transforms it for the better. When you rise in the morning, you know exactly what you’re doing that day. When I think of a groove, I imagine Bach bounding out of bed to compose his preludes and fugues, knowing that he had twenty-four keys to work with. “Let’s see,” he must have thought, “today I’ll tackle G sharp major and A flat minor.” A groove is a great comfort.
The funny thing about a groove is that you rarely know you’re in it until you fall out. My groove is like what athletes call being “in the zone.” Every pass finds the receiver. Every jump shot hits nothing but net. The pitcher’s best curveball looks as big as a volleyball as you smack it for a hit. You see the snaking twenty-five-foot putt going into the hole, and it accedes to your wishes, rolling into the cup as if it were on rails.
It’s the reason batters have hitting streaks, pitchers toss perfect games, basketball players light up the scoreboard for sixty points, and runners shatter world records. It’s the sweet spot in time when everything is in sync and nothing misfires. And then it’s over. Tiger Woods misses putts. Michael Jordan’s jump shot goes cold. There’s no point in analyzing it. If you could figure out how you get into a groove you could figure out how to maintain it. That’s not going to happen. The best you can hope for is the wisdom and good fortune to occasionally fall into a groove.
Grooves come in all shapes and sizes, and they’re usually preceded by a breakthrough idea, also in all shapes and sizes.
There are mini-grooves that last a morning or an afternoon. You sit down at the piano and a complete tune pours out of you. The breakthrough is usually emotional, not technical. It could be something as minor as hearing some good news, or meeting a sexy, flirtatious person the night before, or having a good breakfast. But just like a piece of good news or a good breakfast, the feeling fades. The next morning it’s not the same. The groove is gone.
There are grooves where everything flows for days, weeks, months, and you knock out a finished work in record time. The novelist Mark Salzman tells of all the agonizing missteps that led him to waste five years trying to write a follow-up to his first novel, The Soloist. When he reread the new manuscript, he realized it was bad and, as he told Lawrence Weschler in the New Yorker, he was “destroyed.” His wife suggested that a change of scenery in the form of a five-week stay at a New England artists’ retreat would do him good. “I went,” he says, “though without any particular intention of writing; that book had hurt me enough. I just wanted to exist as if in a kind of Zen retreat.
“And you know what? It was like waking from a bad dream. All of a sudden, everything was like a gift: the fall colors, the sounds, the little homemade cookies in the picnic baskets. But mainly the removal of all the reminders of art as a profession, as a way of making money or gaining a reputation and the like. Rather, here I was in a community of people who seemed dedicated to art almost like a sacred pursuit.”
Salzman’s novel is set in a Carmelite cloister and tells the story of a nun who suddenly and mysteriously matures as a poet. In midlife she is blessed with a radiance that feeds her creative outpourings and brings her closer to God. The cause, it turns out, is a brain tumor, which is operable. Her spiritual crisis is whether to have the tumor removed and return to her dull existence without death hovering, or to revel in the grace and beauty that has entered her life, even as it costs her that life. It’s a novel about a woman in a groove, albeit a terminal one.
The combination of story, change of scenery, and Salzman’s torment provided him with a breakthrough. “Suddenly, sitting there in my cabin,” he says, “I realized that all along I’d been living my nun’s life myself. And, once I saw that, the book wrote itself in five weeks, with me in a state that I can only describe as euphoric. The words were coming to me with labels attached: ‘Put me next to him.’ And when it was done, the way I felt about that book made everything that had come before worthwhile.”
I love happy endings, and Salzman’s tale is proof that grooves exist and can, with luck and pluck, be self-induced.
There also are mega-grooves, long stretches of time when piece after piece comes out of you with satisfying results. You don’t realize you’re in this state until you’re too far along or it’s gone, but it often starts with a mega-breakthrough.
Many creative thinkers have had an epiphanic moment where they make a quantum leap forward in ability and vision. It may not be obvious to the untrained eye, but you know it and it shows in your work.
One for me happened in 1969. I was married, twenty-eight years old, and living in upstate New York. I was unassailed by distractions: no artificially imposed schedules, no meetings, no inconvenient commuting. The phone did not ring for days. Like Salzman, I was in an artist’s retreat, only it was a decrepit farm that my husband and I worked. Everything was efficient, focused, with purpose. When I rowed a boat, kneaded bread, or mowed the grass, I felt linked to ancient physical chores. Everything from sweeping out corners to thinking about how a compost heap works informed my creative efforts. It was the year of the Woodstock festival, which took place just over the mountains from the farm. It was the year the New York Mets won the World Series. I listened to the games devoutly on the kitchen radio, and even Tom Seaver’s pitching motion found its way into a dance called The One Hundreds. I made more dance that summer than I ever have.
My breakthrough arrived in a piece called The Fugue, which was a set of twenty variations on a twenty-count theme for three dancers that I took from the fugal structure of Bach’s A Musical Offering. Mind you, I didn’t actually use Bach’s music (The Fugue is performed in silence); I was still a rustic who couldn’t afford music, live or recorded. Plus, I wanted my dances to stand on their own feet, without the support of anyone’s music. (As ever, it was all about self-reliance.) But in studying the score and imagining how it translated into dance, I began to see the logic in Bach’s majestic notes, how he would take a phrase and reverse it, or invert it, or switch it from the right hand to the left, or reverse the inversion. It struck me that, given the symmetry of the human body and how its joints function, you could do the same thing with dance steps. Take three steps forward (that’s one move). Take three steps backwards (that’s another). Now take those three steps to your left, then your right (that’s two more moves). Now switch everything to the other foot. Now run it backwards, or more accurately in retrograde, like film running backwards through a projector (I imagined milk being sucked back into a bottle after being poured). Now turn the body ninety degrees to the right or left to face a new front. Now add rhythmic alterations so that all these phrases can be done in the original tempo, in double time, or in half time. Now insert a quick arbitrary movement, say three fast hand claps, into one of the basic phrases (I called this “stuffing”). Now take these moves on one person and add a second dancer, and a third, each making canonic entrances two counts after the other (think of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and how everyone enters fixed beats after one another).
It gets complicated, but in devising The Fugue, one variation a day—outdoors in the pasture on sunny days, indoors when it rained—I discovered I had given myself a completely new way of handling movement. Reversal, inversion, retrograde, retrograded inversion, stuffing, canon, and so on. It was a vocabulary sufficiently rich with possibilities and variations that I would be using and building on it for the rest of my life.
I didn’t know if other choreographers knew this like the back of their hand and had never bothered to tell me, but it was a revelation to me. It was as if I had been painting with black, white, and red and someone said, “Twyla, have you heard
of the color blue? And green? And yellow? And all the shades of the spectrum in between?”
I could finally speak. I didn’t realize then that this was a choreographic language for the rest of my life, but I sensed it was a breakthrough.
Within a year of The Fugue’s premiere in August 1970, I was mounting new dances like Eight Jelly Rolls in New York City—with, for the first time, music, and Jelly Roll Morton no less! In short order, I made The Bix Pieces, to the jazz of Bix Beiderbecke, and The Raggedy Dances to Scott Joplin and Mozart, and Deuce Coupe to the songs of the Beach Boys. They are all pieces that endure and please me. They slide into one another, sharing a beautiful groove of rhythm and language and intention. They make sense taken together. They look inevitable.
You only appreciate a groove in hindsight. It’s hard even to notice it when you’re in the middle of it. You don’t congratulate yourself and say “I’m in a groove.” With a mega-groove like the one I was in, all you feel is This is what creating is like for me now. You know that you’re learning and growing and stretching and being at your best. You don’t know how long it’s going to last. All you can do is accept it with gratitude and try not to screw it up.