The Creative Habit

by Twyla Tharp

  The best failures are the private ones you commit in the confines of your room, alone, with no strangers watching. Private failures are great. I encourage you to fail as much as you want in private. It will cost you a little in terms of efficiency—the more you fail, the longer it takes to finish—but no one has to see this. Private failures are the first drafts that get tossed in the wastebasket, the sketches crumpled up on the floor, the manuscripts that stay in the drawer. They are the not-so-good ideas you reject en route to finding the one that clicks.

  When I tape a three-hour improvisational session with a dancer and find only thirty seconds of useful material in the tape, I am earning straight A’s in failure. Do the math: I have rejected 99.7 percent of my work that day. It would be like a writer knocking out a two-thousand-word chapter and upon re-reading deciding that only six words were worth keeping. Painful, yes, but for me absolutely necessary.

  What’s so wonderful about wasting that kind of time? It’s simple: The more you fail in private, the less you will fail in public. In many ways, the creative act is editing. You’re editing out all the lame ideas that won’t resonate with the public. It’s not pandering. It’s exercising your judgment. It’s setting the bar a little higher for yourself, and therefore your audience.

  If you forget this—if you let down your guard, or lower your standards, or compromise too quickly, or leave in something that should be rejected—you’ll have to deal with the other, more painful kind of failure, the public kind.

  Some of my favorite dancers at New York City Ballet were the ones who fell the most. I always loved watching Mimi Paul; she took big risks onstage and went down often. Her falls reminded you that the dancers were doing superhuman things onstage, and when she fell, I would realize, “Damn, she’s human.” And hitting the ground seemed to transform Mimi: It was as though the stage absorbed the energy of her fall and injected it back into her with an extra dose of fearlessness. Mimi would bounce back up, ignore the fall, and right before my eyes would become superhuman again. I thought, “Go Mimi!” She became greater because she had fallen. Failure enlarged her dancing.

  That should be your model for dealing with failure.

  When you fail in public, you are forcing yourself to learn a whole new set of skills, skills that have nothing to do with creating and everything to do with surviving.

  Jerome Robbins liked to say that you do your best work after your biggest disasters. For one thing, it’s so painful it almost guarantees that you won’t make those mistakes again. Also, you have nothing to lose; you’ve hit bottom, and the only place to go is up. A fiasco compels you to change dramatically. The golfer Bobby Jones said, “I never learned anything from a match I won.” He respected defeat and he profited from it.

  Failure creates an interesting tug of war between forgetting and remembering. It’s vital to be able to forget the pain of failure while retaining the lessons from it. I’ve always found it easier to put something that wasn’t very successful behind me than to move on to something new after an effort that was acclaimed. After a certifiable success, I always think, “I could lose this,” and so I cling to it. (For this reason, Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski banned his teams from calling themselves the “defending national champions,” because he felt this made them think defensively. Also, he argued that you only defend something that can be taken away from you, and your past successes will always be yours no matter what.) A part of me hates to let go of success and move on. After a certifiable failure, however, I can’t wait to move on. I’m thinking, “Get back to work. Fix it. Do it different and better the next time.”

  That’s the tug of war. You have to forget the failure to get it behind you, but at the same time you have to remember the reasons for it. People accommodate this duality in their own ways. I know one writer who frames all his rejection letters and hangs them up in the guest bathroom for every visitor to see. He scoffs at failure. I know an actress who does the same with her most vicious reviews, mocking those who mock her. That which to anyone else is a loss is to the artist a gain.

  My heroes in The Odyssey are the older warriors who have been through many wars. They don’t hide their scars, they wear them proudly as a kind of armor. When you fail—whether your short film induces yawns or your photographs inspire people to say “That’s nice” (ouch!) or your novel is trashed in a journal of opinion that matters to you—the best thing to do is acknowledge your battle scars and gird yourself for the next round. Tell yourself, “This is a deep wound. But it’s going to heal and I will remember this wound. When I go back into the fray it will serve me well.”

  To get the full benefit of failure you have to understand the reasons for it.

  First, there’s a failure of skill. You have an idea in mind but not the requisite skills to pull it off. This is the cruelest, crudest, most predictable form of failure. Your reach exceeds your grasp. In my case, it might involve having an insufficient vocabulary of movement, or not recognizing how the audience will read a particular gesture or move. It’s no different for a composer trying to write a fugue without skill in counterpoint, or a writer constructing dialogue with a tin ear for how his characters speak. There’s only one solution to this type of failure: Get to work. Develop the skills you need.

  Then there’s a failure of concept. You have a weak idea that doesn’t hold up under your daily ministrations. You torment the idea, and instead of growing it shrivels up. It could be a bad story idea, bad subject matter, bad casting, bad partners, bad timing. You scramble in the beginning to mask this fundamental error, hoping that maybe through guile and trickery you can redeem the work. But it catches up with you. Sows’ ears tend to remain sows’ ears. Get out while the getting’s good.

  A third kind of failure is one of judgment. You leave something in the piece that should have been discarded, left on the cutting room floor. Perhaps you let your guard down for a moment and suspended your usual good judgment. Maybe you let someone else’s judgment substitute for yours. Maybe you didn’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings. The only way to avoid this mistake is to remember at all times that you’re the one who’ll be judged by the final product. The actor whose scene you want to cut isn’t responsible for the whole film; you are. The friend who tells you she likes the five-page description of a squirrel in the park doesn’t have her name on the book jacket; you do. It’s a hard mistake to avoid when you’re starting out, but the sooner you demonstrate good judgment, the sooner people will give you the clout to exercise it.

  I don’t mess up this way anymore; I’m willing to be regarded as a tyrant to keep my vision intact. I’ve auditioned 900 dancers in order to hire 4 of them. It takes a certain steeliness of character and an intense dislike of failure to tell 896 people that they are somehow lacking in your eyes. But I don’t care if I torture casting agents and scouts and staff; if they send me 100 consecutive dancers who almost intrigue me, but not quite, I’ll tell them, “Get me more. Get me different.” I’ll say I’m sorry for being so ornery, but I’m not really apologizing. Neither should you when it’s your judgment on the line.

  The worst is failure of nerve. You have everything going for you except the guts to support your idea and explore the concept fully. The corrosive thought that you will look foolish holds you back from telling the truth. I wish I had a cure for this. All I have is the certainty of experience that looking foolish is good for you. It nourishes the spirit. You appreciate this more and more over the years as the need to not look foolish fades with youth. (Remember the centenarian who when asked about the best part of living such a long life replied, “No more peer pressure.”)

  There’s failure through repetition. As a choreographer, I’m constantly forced to revisit my past. Repertory is the bread and butter of a choreographer. You have to repeat yourself to make a living. Painters don’t have to get up in the morning and repaint Starry Night on commission in order to afford a new canvas; Saul Bellow doesn’t have to retype Henderson the Rain King in o
rder to get people to read his latest book. But choreographers create a dance, teach it to dancers in rehearsal, watch it being performed, and if it’s a success, get to teach it to new dancers so it can be performed again and again and again. It’s wonderful that audiences love my old works and want to keep seeing them, but after a while I feel like Bruce Springsteen must when his fans demand to hear “Born to Run” at every concert.

  Repetition is a problem if it forces us to cling to our past successes. Constant reminders of the things that worked inhibit us from trying something bold and new. We lose sight of the fact that we weren’t searching for a formula when we first did something great; we were in unexplored territory, following our instincts and passions wherever they might lead us. It’s only when we look back that we see a path, and it’s only there because we blazed it.

  After his success with Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney’s next huge hit was the cartoon short of “The Three Little Pigs,” which became a national phenomenon in 1933. It was billed above the main feature on most theater marquees. Its hit song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” became a Depression-era anthem.

  Disney’s film distributor, United Artists, urged him to cash in on the success of “The Three Little Pigs” with other pig-related cartoons. He resisted at first but was finally persuaded by his brother Roy. None of the three follow-ups—“The Big Bad Wolf,” “Three Little Wolves,” and “The Practical Pig”—succeeded like the original, leading Walt Disney to conclude, “You can’t top pigs with pigs.” Once Disney realized that you cannot repeat your successes in the entertainment business, he was free to push the envelope with his first full-length animated feature, the classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

  Finally, and most profoundly, there is failure that comes from denial. Creating anything new and fresh is a brazen, presumptuous act. You’re assuming that the world cares about what you have to say. You can’t afford to be paralyzed by the familiar fears of: What if no one shows up? What if no one likes it? What if I don’t measure up? What if they laugh? So you become adept at slipping into denial mode. Anything less and you might never get out of bed in the morning.

  But the same mechanism that protects you from your worst fears can blind you to reality. Denial becomes a liability when you see that something is not working and you refuse to deal with it. You tell yourself “I’ll fix it later,” or you convince yourself that you can get away with it, that your audience won’t notice the weak spots. This is bad denial. You won’t get very far relying on your audience’s ignorance.

  Change—changing the work and how we work—is the unpleasant task of dealing with that which we have been denying. It is probably the biggest test in the creative process, demanding not only an admission that you’ve made a mistake but that you know how to fix it. It requires you to challenge a status quo of your own making.

  The process that led Movin’ Out to its Broadway success demonstrates so many different types of failure and correction that it’s a perfect case study in the art of change. Let’s take a look at how many things can go wrong even when you know the pitfalls going in, and how to turn around something as unwieldy as a multimillion-dollar theatrical enterprise.

  I’ve already explained how I conceived the idea of a dance show set to the songs of Billy Joel, and the research and preparation that went into its creation. But that is just a small part of the story.

  Mounting an expensive Broadway musical is usually an obstacle course of blind alleys, logjams, and political intrigues. Miraculously, we avoided all that up front. I had the idea, I secured Billy’s blessing, and I quickly found enough seed money from a major Broadway producer to hire dancers and a band. A few months later, in October 2001, on a spacious midtown Manhattan soundstage, I unveiled a stripped-down version of the show for Billy, the producers, would-be investors, and friends. No costumes, no set, no lights, not even a name for the show (it was referred to as The Thoel Project); just sixteen dancers and ten musicians performing on a bare studio floor. The audience loved it, and within hours the show was fully invested with an $8.5 million budget.

  It went so smoothly I had to pinch myself.

  The show continued on that smooth path for the next few months as I auditioned more dancers; hired set, costume, and lighting designers; and assembled the production staff. Rehearsals went swiftly, sets were built, schedules came together, and soon we had an out-of-town opening at the Shubert Theater in Chicago set for July 2002, with a Broadway premiere to follow in October. For the longest time, the biggest headache was deciding what to title the show. Just about every phrase from a Billy Joel song was suggested (with the possible exception of For the Longest Time) before we settled on Movin’ Out. It was a period of high-efficiency productivity. The choreography was coming together (a lot of it having been developed for the workshop production), but there were seeds of doubt already present about some aspects of the show, and the logic of the schedule kept us from looking at a few basic problems (see denial, above).

  Our show bore little resemblance to the standard musical. There were no characters on stage breaking from dialogue into song. The action wasn’t in the songs, it was in the dancing.

  But the realities of the marketplace demanded that we call what we were presenting “a musical.” When you’re charging Broadway theater prices and trying to fill Broadway-sized houses, it makes the money people nervous to call what you’re putting up onstage “dance,” or, worse, “full-length ballet,” even if you can work the word rock into the billing. So “a musical” is how we described the show that we first presented in front of a paying audience in Chicago.

  There’s a long tradition in the American musical theater of trying out Broadway-bound shows in towns like Chicago, Boston, New Haven, and Philadelphia. You do this to smooth out the production kinks, to let the performers find their legs, and to fix anything that doesn’t work for the audience. With so much at stake, in an age when a poor opening night review in the New York Times can doom a show from the outset, little is left to chance.

  I knew the balance between the songs and the staging was still a bit rough, but I hoped the show was strong enough that audiences wouldn’t notice (see, again, denial). Particularly in some of the early numbers, I was letting Billy’s songs tell the story instead of making the dance do it (see judgment, above). Billy’s songs create wonderful characters, but there’s no continuity from one to another—there was never supposed to be. Anthony, for example, in the song “Movin’ Out” doesn’t interact with Brenda from “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” Yet in my story they do. I needed to tell my story and not worry about the story being told in the songs. We had recruited a fabulous band and a terrific pair of singers to perform the music. We knew the audience’s love of Billy’s songs would be a big part of its attraction to the show. We had, we felt, a team that was far better than any conventional musical could possibly present: better singers, and vastly better dancers, than any singer/dancer/actors could be. What we didn’t have, however, was a conventional musical, and that was what the audience was expecting.

  My worries were confirmed with the first week of preview performances in Chicago. The difficulties were there right from the beginning. They began with the beginning. We knew that the biggest name in the selling of this show was Billy Joel. So to get the audience primed for what was to come, we spotlighted the band on stage. Then we moved the band up and back (thanks to some very expensive hydraulics) and brought the dancers onto the stage. This confused the audience. They didn’t know whether to look at the band or the dancers. They felt they were missing something. At a musical, you follow the person who’s singing, right? Almost all musicals begin with an overture, but you don’t see the overture; the orchestra’s in the pit, and the audience knows it’s not a part of the action. In this case, how were they supposed to know that? It took a couple of numbers for the audience to understand who was who, and that’s too long. A crucial connection between audience and stage had been missed. That connection is th
e reason people love theater in the first place. They caught up with it eventually, but we weren’t making it easy for them.

  For one of the few times in my life, I sat in the theater each night and paid as much attention to the audience as I did to the performers onstage. What I saw was simple and clear: They were miserable and confused after Act One, but standing and cheering at the end of Act Two. Act Two was working. Act One was not.

  One night I went outside and crossed the street to the restaurant where some of the audience goes during intermission. I overheard one waiter tell a couple, “Don’t worry. The second act is much better.” When the waiters in town know the problem and you don’t do something about it, that’s denial.

  It wasn’t possible to make major changes before the opening night in Chicago, and the resulting reviews were not kind, to say the least. The critics praised the dancers and they loved Act Two, but they thought Act One was confusing. They used words that had never been attached to my work before, words like “mess” and “risible.” The show was in trouble.

  My old friend Jennifer Tipton had flown in from New York for the opening. We had breakfast the next morning with the reviews in front of us. A Broadway veteran of thirty years, she didn’t try to console me. She said, “You know they’re right.”

  I nodded my head. “Yes, I know.” This was, as the clichés have it, the first step toward a solution. Denial was no longer an option.

  The next day, a Monday, I had to face a cast and crew that was bruised, tired, and worried. To compound the trauma, a New York newspaper had decided to reprint one of the scathing reviews, breaking the long tradition of letting Broadway-bound shows work out their kinks out of town in private. Publishing out-of-town reviews before a single New York performance was simply not done. This set off a public debate between the theater world and the press. Movin’ Out had become news for all the wrong reasons. People, it seemed, were gunning for us.