by Twyla Tharp
Eventually the groove shut down and I became stalled in a rut. My marriage broke up and my personal life began insinuating itself into the spines and stories of my dances. I veered away—as anyone eventually would—from the exquisite musical groove that jazz and popular music provided and tried my hand at other musical sources such as symphonies and works by my contemporaries. An unsettling period ensued for six or seven years in the 1970s. It wasn’t exactly a rut—some of my “greatest hits” like Sue’s Leg and Push Comes to Shove came during this period—but you could say it was grooveless. In hindsight, I think it happened because I had started doing more freelance projects outside my own company; I had left my home base, a big source of my groove. In 1979, when I returned to the home base of my own repertory company, I also returned to the classic jazz of Willie “the Lion” Smith for Bakers Dozen and, once again, I felt regrooved with the spirit of my first jazz dances.
I mention this because there’s a lesson here about finding your groove. Yes, you can find it via a breakthrough in your craft. But you can also find it through other means—in congenial material, in a perfect partner, in a favorite character or comfortable subject matter.
In my early jazz pieces, I found my groove in the grooves created by others. The jazz masters had a style that was congenial to me. Material that feels compatible can lead you right into a whole new groove.
You can also find a groove in a perfect partner. Witness Mozart and his three Da Ponte operas, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and Così fan tutte. Mozart, perhaps more than anyone ever, made his own grooves, but he surely found something congenial in the brilliant librettos of Lorenzo Da Ponte. Mozart wrote other great operas, but those three are miraculous. He found his groove in a collaborator.
John Updike seems to find his novelistic groove in the character of Rabbit Angstrom. His nearly twenty novels vary in quality, but the four devoted to this single character—Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest—seem to provide a booster rocket even to Updike’s considerable powers.
Rembrandt found his best subject in himself. Throughout his career he painted, etched, and sketched self-portraits. The genre of self-portrait was a groove for him. It was comfortable—and convenient. After all, he was always available when he needed a model.
In the end, ruts and grooves are different sides of the same coin. The work itself will tell you which side you’re looking at. Does it give you pleasure or pain? You must try to escape the ruts and create the grooves.
The call to a creative life is not supposed to be torture. Yes, it’s hard work and you have to make sacrifices. Yes, it’s a noble calling; you’re volunteering in an army of sorts, alongside a phalanx of artists who have preceded you, many of whom are your mentors and guides, upon whose work you build, without whom you have no fixed points of reference. They form a tradition that you have implicitly sworn to protect, even while you aim to refashion it and sometimes even shatter it.
But it’s also supposed to be fun.
My rituals and preparations and “weeks without” might make the creative life sound like a tough stretch on Parris Island. That is not what it’s like at all. I look forward to the moment the dancers walk into the studio, and I miss them immediately when they go for the day. I regard all the great composers who give me music to dance to as my inamorati. I get a thrill akin to scoring a touchdown when a dancer takes a difficult move and absolutely nails it—and then takes it a step or two beyond what I had even imagined. At moments like that, if I had a ball, I would spike it on the studio floor.
exercises
27 Do a Verb
Of all the exercises that help me when I’m at a creative dead end, my favorite is “Do a Verb.” All it means is that I pick a verb and act it out physically. For example, the verb “squirm” may get me wiggling my hips, shrugging my shoulders, and contorting my limbs in such a way that I’m forced to extend it into a complete dance phrase. I could do the same for “dart” or “twirl” or “chafe” or hundreds of other verbs. As part of the exercise, I videotape myself, and reviewing the tape almost always reveals something strange and new—a tilt of the head, a bend of the elbow, a turn of the ankle—or any new combination of moves—that thrills or surprises and gets me started.
You may not think that doing a verb is practical or productive for anyone but a dancer. I disagree. The chemistry of the body is inseparable from the chemistry of the brain. Movement can stimulate anyone.
I’ve been conducting “Do a Verb” sessions in my lectures for the past few years. I invite people in the audience to pick ten verbs and then do them onstage. It loosens people up, gets them involved, and gives them something doable to do. That’s important: An exercise must be doable, not frustrating, if you want it to yield something productive. It must tax you enough that your creative muscles will adapt and get stronger, but not so much that it leads you to abandon the effort. It should present a way of thinking or acting that’s different from your usual mode; after all, you’re doing the exercise because the usual isn’t working for you right now.
For a few months I collected all the verb lists that people handed in and I analyzed them. Not surprisingly, certain verbs appeared no matter where I was or who was in the audience. I call them my Civilian Big Ten: push, spin, run, jump, twist, roll, skip, turn, walk, and fall. Perhaps I was influencing the audience; if they’ve come to see me, there’s a good chance they’re interested in dance and what I do, and these particular verbs reflect what my dancers do onstage. No matter. The verb choices may be predictable and common, but here’s the amazing thing: No one who comes up onto the stage ever does these ten verbs exactly the same way. Take, for example, the verb “twist.” People twist to the left and they twist to the right. Some twist their neck. Some twist their upper body. Some twist below the waist. Some twist their arms, some twist their fingers, some twist their legs and toes. One fellow twisted his tongue.
It was the same thing with all the other verbs. The most mundane verbs yielded the most uncommon responses. This is a testament to everyone’s innate creativity. If you tax yourself, if you force yourself to stretch a little, you will astonish yourself and possibly others. That’s reason enough to “Do a Verb.”
The best thing about it, though, is that everyone can do it—and discover something about themselves. In Seattle one woman who came up onstage was so shy and nervous and closed-in that she couldn’t come up with ten verbs. (Yet she had the nerve to get onstage in front of five hundred people.) So I asked her to start with one verb. She chose “walk,” and I suspect she chose it because she believed that anyone can walk, even she. She started walking…and walking…and walking in the most tedious manner, so tediously in fact that I fretted the audience would walk out on us. I stopped her and told her to change the walk. I showed her that she could perhaps walk backwards. She refused to do that. She continued walking around the stage, tedious as ever…and then an idea struck her: “Well,” she said, “I can change my rhythm.” And her walk changed. “And I could add a turn after five steps,” she said. And she turned. “And I could throw in a hop, and reverse the direction of the turn, and repeat it.” It was quite stunning and memorable. Once she realized she could alter the rhythm of her walk, the floodgates of her imagination opened. There onstage in Seattle, the woman was coming very close to creating choreography on herself. The audience gave her a standing ovation.
I admit that, as a choreographer, I have an extreme bias about the untapped power of movement in our creative lives. Movement and physical activity are my materials, but more than that, they’re how we stay in touch with our body—and the body is how we stay in touch with the outside world. Anything that puts our instrument through its paces has to improve us, make us sharper, more connected to the world.
Choreography is not the purpose of “Do a Verb.” But choosing a word and applying movement to it generates ideas, and one idea begets another, to a point where you achieve a creative momentum that’s hard to stop and
takes you to places you could never predict. An exercise that lets you discover your potential this way is one you should eagerly come back to day after day.
28 Build a Bridge to the Next Day
The only bad thing about having a good creative day is that it ends, and there’s no guarantee we can repeat it tomorrow. One good day does not necessarily beget another. But there are ways to increase the chances of successive successes.
Ernest Hemingway had the nifty trick of always calling it a day at a point when he knew what came next. He built himself a bridge to the next day. I cannot think of a better creative organizational tool. The Hemingway bridge is how you extend a mini-groove.
I try to do a variation on this bridge. I always quit for the day before everyone’s totally exhausted. I stop when there’s still some energy left in the room and I know where we would have gone if we hadn’t stopped. Knowing what comes next is like crocheting: The end of one day knits into the next, and you wind up with a garment that is flexible but strong.
A savvy stand-up comedian always knows to leave the audience begging for more. You should do the same with your work. Don’t drive yourself to the point of being totally spent. Try to stop while you have a few drops left in the tank, and use that fuel to build a bridge to the next day.
Some people, if only for sanity and the maintenance of a humane routine, give themselves a creative quota. Painters stop when they fill up a measurable section of canvas, playwrights when they draft out a complete scene, writers when they hit one thousand words or the clock chimes 5:00 P.M. They stop no matter where they are on the canvas or page. I know one writer who gives himself both options: He stops at a set time or when he hits his word quota, whichever comes first. He is religious about this routine. But he connects to the next day with a fixed nighttime routine as well: Just before he falls asleep, he reads the last few sentences he wrote. Without fail, he wakes up the next morning brimming with ideas, sentences, whole paragraphs for the next portion of his story. He claims he flies out of bed sometimes so he can get all the words down before they disappear. Apparently, filling up with words and ideas before sleep gives his tired brain some useful work to do as it regroups and refreshes itself overnight. What his conscious brain can’t handle, his subconscious can.
He may be one of those blessed individuals who can compartmentalize his thoughts and turn his creativity on and off at will. But he’s on to something useful. In effect, he’s letting his subconscious build his bridge for him. That just might work for you, too.
In every situation, at the beginning or end of the workday, you have a choice. You can look back or you can look forward. My advice: look forward. Always think about the next day. Don’t go into the studio thinking, “Hmmm, let’s see, what was I doing yesterday?” It takes more energy to twist yourself around and look back than it does to face forward.
If you’ve been following a don’t-stop-till-you-drop routine—that is, you only quit when you’re totally wiped out—rethink that. This is how ruts form. As an exercise, for the next week or so, end your working day when you still have something in reserve.
Now ask yourself, exactly what is it that you’re putting into reserve. Is it raw energy? Is it desire? Is it a few more ideas left unexplored? Is it something you meant to say to someone but didn’t? Whatever it is, describe it in writing on a notepad or index card. Put the note away and don’t think about it for the rest of the day. Start the next day by looking at your note.
Harry Truman said that whenever he wrote a letter in anger to anyone, he put the letter away in a desk drawer for twenty-four hours, then he reread it to make sure he still felt the way he did when he wrote it. It’s the same with your note. When you start the next day with the note, you’ll be tapping into that reserve from the day before. If it’s true, as John Updike writes, that “each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead,” then you will approach the impulse behind the note as a new person. At worst, the note will give you something to start with. More likely, the new you will find a way to improve on it.
With methods like these are grooves formed.
29 Know When to Stop Tinkering
The poet Paul Valéry said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
We all know people who are forever tinkering with their work—editing, refining, redoing, trying to make it perfect (whatever that means!). They don’t know when to stop.
Knowing when to stop is almost as critical as knowing how to start. How do you know when something is not only the best that you can do but the best that it can be?
Some people are lucky in having artificial and arbitrary stop signs that put an end to all their fussing. Writers have deadlines. Playwrights have strictly scheduled openings based on theater availability. Filmmakers have fixed premieres. Painters and sculptors have gallery exhibitions. The calendar tells them when they are finished.
It’s much trickier when you’re working on your own, and for your own reasons.
Think of the messiest room in your house. One day you decide to clear the clutter. How do you know when you’re done cleaning and organizing? In theory, the only perfectly clean room is an empty room. But that doesn’t stop you from charging into a room, trashing the unwanted items, putting the books back on shelves, folding the clothes neatly into their appropriate drawers, putting the papers in their appropriate files and the pencils and paper clips and floppy disks where they belong. Then you sweep and scrub and dust. If you’re really good at this, you have a system for organizing clutter: You allocate resting places for your glasses, keys, wallet, and slippers so you can always find them; you store similar things together; you put things you use most often in the easiest-to-get places; you label boxes so you know what’s in them; you arrange your clothes according to color. Eventually you reach a point where you look around and you’re satisfied. There are no loose ends. Everything is in its place, put away or accounted for or easily accessed. The room exudes order and harmony. When you look around, you’re happy.
That, more or less, is the feeling you get when it’s time to stop. There are no loose ends, no clutter, and all the moving parts of the work are in their proper places. There are no more problems that keep you up nights, and the solutions feel elegant and inevitable.
Remember this the next time you wonder if a piece is finished. If you don’t have the feeling that you’ve straightened out a messy room, keep working.
It’s a little awkward for me to appreciate this because a dance doesn’t stand still, even when you think you’ve stopped working on it. A book is done when it’s published, a film when it’s released, a painting when it leaves the artist’s studio. A marble sculpture is literally set in stone. But in dance, there is no script to follow and no two performances are alike. The work exists only when it is performed and then repeated; between performances, it disappears. As its creator, I have to constantly monitor the performances to make sure the audience is getting a reasonable facsimile of what I thought I had finished. In this environment, it’s hard to say when you’ve stopped working on a piece.
To force myself to let my creations go, I’ve developed a ritual that gives me satisfying closure: I name the piece. Attaching a name to the work is always the last thing I do. It’s a signal to myself that I finally understand it. As Tracy Kidder wrote in The Soul of a New Machine, “Good engineers ship.” In other words, while perfection is a wonderful goal, there comes a point where you have to let your creation out into the world or it isn’t worth a tinkerer’s damn.
30 Brew Ruts into Grooves
A bad habit—that is, one that doesn’t produce good results—is a rut. Coffee is a rut for me. I need a cup or two every morning, and I don’t know why. Part of it, I’m sure, is its addictive properties. But I don’t enjoy it that much.
At one point, I played a game of delaying my daily coffee until I produced something solid that day. No good work, no good coffee. I transformed coffee from rut to reward. To be honest, this didn
’t last long. Within a month, I was back into my coffee grind. I don’t know. You can’t be stoic and strong about everything. Some things in life are just meant to be enjoyed simply because you enjoy them. They are their own rationale.
But the mere act of thinking about my coffee rut had a transformative effect. I now regard coffee in a positive light. It’s my coffee groove.
Pick a “bad” habit—whether it’s coffee or reading the newspaper in its entirety every day to avoid writing—and do something to make it “good.” Realize that you don’t need elimination, just moderation, so it’s working for you. Exorcise the rut. Exercise the groove.
an “A” in failure
Chapter 11
A math professor
at Williams College bases ten percent of his students’ grades on failure. Mathematics is all about trying out new ideas—new formulas, theorems, approaches—and knowing that the vast majority of them will be dead ends. To encourage his students not to be afraid of testing their quirkiest ideas in public, he rewards rather than punishes them for coming up with wrong answers.
Every creative person has to learn to deal with failure, because failure, like death and taxes, is inescapable. If Leonardo and Beethoven and Goethe failed on occasion, what makes you think you’ll be the exception?
I don’t mean to romanticize failure, to parrot the cliché “If you’re not failing, you’re not taking enough risks,” especially if that view “liberates” you to fail too often. Believe me, success is preferable to failure. But there is a therapeutic power to failure. It cleanses. It helps you put aside who you aren’t and reminds you who you are. Failure humbles.