by Twyla Tharp
The only problem: Mozart died young, at age thirty-five. His chart is impressive, but it feels unfinished, cut short. Who’s to say how long and how far he would have continued. Although there are some who feel Mozart was tapped out when he died, I am not one of them. I think he was on the verge of a major church appointment that would have provided him with the resources and opportunity to create great liturgical music, but we’ll never know.
The other problem with this type of analysis is that it turns everyone into a statistic. Applying algorithms to creativity is like biochemists trying to formulate the chemistry of love. It takes some of the romance out of the enterprise. The best that can be said of a chart like this is that it measures devotion to craft. The chart tells you nothing about quality, about whether Mozart’s last piece is an improvement on the first, or whether the two are linked. It charts activity and persistence, not artistic growth.
But let’s not knock devotion to craft. There is no long run without devotion, commitment, persistence.
My heroes are the artists whose bodies of work are consistently surprising, consistently fresh: Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Dostoyevsky, Yeats, Cézanne, Kurosawa, Balanchine. They all had stunning early triumphs, and they kept getting better through their middle and later years.
The Dostoyevsky who wrote The House of the Dead in 1860 is the same writer who wrote Crime and Punishment in his middle years and The Brothers Karamazov in his later years. But he is a vastly different and more profound writer in his later years. He continued to grow.
The pattern is even more obvious with Beethoven, whose musical output divides neatly into early, middle, and late periods, each with a distinct style, each representing an advancement of the form. No one who studies his thirty-two piano sonatas or his sixteen string quartets can miss this.
It’s equally obvious with Verdi, who had more than his share of masterworks before surprising the world with the ineffable Falstaff at age eighty-one. That he was still growing in his ninth decade makes the arc of Verdi’s creative output in his early, middle, and late periods stand out in sharper relief. When a man turns out a masterpiece long after his peers and rivals have died, you see anew everything that came before: the continuity, the progression in the arc. The same can be said of Cézanne or Matisse or Yeats. Their later work astonishes profoundly and means more because of how it shows their development from their earlier efforts.
These are giants and masters. You surely have your own pantheon of heroes who learned and grew as they pursued their chosen paths. Regardless of how poorly we compare to their talent and quality, we can still emulate them; they prove that there’s no reason our creativity must dry up as we age.
True, for some the will and desire fade because they have enough money or are facing poor health or feel they’ve said it all. (I think here of Rossini bursting onto the scene at age twenty-four with The Barber of Seville, then abandoning opera thirteen years later after the hysterical acclaim for his William Tell; he lived another thirty-nine years and wrote piano pieces and songs, but not another opera. Or Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet who stopped writing before age twenty, just halfway into the course of his life.)
Some people find their curiosity shutting down as they age, losing their taste for the new and settling in to reread their favorite books and listen to the music of their youth. And it’s certainly possible to get distracted by family obligations. But there’s nothing necessary or inevitable about it. We can fight the lockdown of our curiosity. We can sign up for the long run even if we might not cover the course as elegantly as our heroes.
As we age, it’s hard to recapture the recklessness of youth, when new ideas flew off us like light from a pinwheel sparkler. But we more than compensate for this with the ideas we do generate, and with our hard-earned wisdom about how to capture and, more importantly, connect those ideas. When I was young I understood very little about the value of a spine to a piece; I wasted time and energy by moving blindly in many directions, when a clearer understanding of spine would have kept me on the path I wanted. I’ve learned so much more about my own preferences. I know that my best work comes out of my creative DNA that seeks to reconcile the competing forces of zoe and bios. I’ve grown more efficient in my efforts; I’ve seen enough dead ends to know when an enticing trail will get me nowhere. And I’ve learned to see continuity in all I do.
The dance critic Arlene Croce said to me, “The curtain goes up once on your dance and comes down once.” She meant that what I do is all of a piece, that no matter how many individual dances I create, each will be one more movement in a very long dance.
If you want to hear this kind of continuity in its clearest developmental form, listen to the Beatles in chronological order. No one was more popular, more universally admired, more commercially successful—and no other group was reinventing itself so consistently yet identifiably. From the sunny optimism of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to the sagging resignation of “Let It Be” you get a complete creative arc of 13 albums and 163 songs recorded in eight whirlwind years from 1963 to 1971. Each collection is complete yet foreshadows the songs to come. Beatles 65 suggests Rubber Soul which suggests Revolver which foreshadows Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour and The White Album and Abbey Road. The Beatles ended when they had to end, and they never got back together, which would have muddied the waters. Their music is the most easily discernible creative arc of my lifetime.
If you find, in your own work, that ideas you didn’t have room for at a particular time nonetheless lingered and arose later, you are coming close to an ideal creative state, one where creativity becomes a self-perpetuating habit. You are linking your art. Everything in your life feeds into your work, and the work feeds into more work.
Happily, this ideal creative state is not a random event, not a stroke of luck or coincidence. It is within your grasp. You can construct it and control it.
When I look back on my best work, it was inevitably created in what I call The Bubble. I eliminated every distraction, sacrificed almost everything that gave me pleasure, placed myself in a single-minded isolation chamber, and structured my life so that everything was not only feeding the work but subordinated to it. It is not a particularly sociable way to operate. It’s actively anti-social. On the other hand, it is pro-creative.
I used to think I was alone in the extremity of my views until I read David Remnick’s admiring New Yorker profile of Philip Roth in May 2000. Roth, sixty-eight years old at the time, was a model of late-life rejuvenation, having produced in his sixties four remarkable novels in a row: American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, Sabbath’s Theater, and The Human Stain. The story explored how and why this happened.
Roth immerses himself in a creative bubble. He lives alone in the country. He works seven days a week, waking early and walking to a two-room studio fifty yards from his house. He stays in the studio all day, writes Remnick, and into the evening:
Nothing gets in. In the late afternoons, he takes long walks, often trying to figure out connections and solve problems in the novel that’s possessing him.
“I live alone, there’s no one else to be responsible for or to, or to spend time with,” Roth said. “My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening after dinner, I don’t have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don’t have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back out and I work for two or three more hours. If I wake up at two in the morning—this happens rarely, but it sometimes happens—and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can’t sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I’m on call. I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency. And I’m the emergency.
Roth had pared his life down to the minimum number of moving parts. Near his desk
he kept two small signs, one reading “Stay Put,” the other “No Optional Striving”—reminders to avoid the temptation of anything other than the five essentials: food, writing, exercise, sleep, and solitude.
It might sound like a grim, deprived life, except for the fact that Roth was happy and in a state of fulfilled glory. His unilateral mission, which he likened to the hunkering down of a soldier with a barracks life, put his craft and imagination on permanent duty:
“It’s a wonderful experience,” Roth said. “That act of passionate and minute memory is what binds your days together—days, weeks, months—and living with that is my greatest pleasure. I think for any novelist it has to be the greatest pleasure, that’s why you’re doing it—to make the daily connections. I do it by living a very austere life.”
To me, Roth’s bubble didn’t sound grim or misguided or misanthropic. He had ideas that needed expressing. A monastic life was his recipe for handling those ideas.
Being in the bubble does not have to mean exiling yourself from people and the world. It is more a state of mind, a willingness to subtract anything that disconnects you from your work. It doesn’t have to be antisocial. Richard Avedon has lived in his own kind of bubble for much of his creative life. His bubble happens to be a large studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, swarming with assistants. Avedon himself is a singularly social creature—very outgoing, caring, and observant of other people, devoted to close friends, and blessed with great social skills. It is quite probable that, with the exception of heads of state and talk-show hosts, he has met more notable people than anyone on earth. And yet Avedon’s studio has all the elements of the bubble ideal. It is cloistered, self-contained, and free of distractions, allowing him to work in populated solitude. His secret: He has the camera and the charisma to lure the world into his bubble. And in that bubble, familiar to him yet open to unfamiliar visitations, he prepares, he remembers, he focuses, he connects, and he refines and grows his art.
There are no rules. Bubbles can exist amid chaos. They can be mobile: There’s nothing more hectic than a rock band on tour, but the confining schedule of planes, limos, hotels, backstage, and onstage becomes a bubble of sorts over the course of several months—and a touring songwriter, cut off from home, will often come back with a pile of new songs for the next disk. It wasn’t intentional; the bubble made him do it.
I realize that not all of us have the resources to achieve the pure bubble state of self-sustaining artists like Roth and Avedon. We have families, jobs, and responsibilities that impinge on our desire to create. I hesitate to make the long run a gauntlet of all or nothing that forces us to go to monastic and hard-hearted extremes. At its worst, the bubble conjures up images of the artist toiling away in his studio, ignoring the cries of his children and the sacrifices his wife is making so he can concentrate on his creations. I don’t find that a heroic image; I much prefer the thought of J. S. Bach, a loving family man and teacher who managed to create masterpieces in every existing musical form known in his time. And when they didn’t exist, he invented them. But even within our distracted existence, we have to cultivate a version of a bubble if we want to work freely and with maximum fluency in making connections and harnessing our memory—and to maintain all this as a habit. The bubble gives you that chance. It is the ideal state where nothing is wasted, where every detail feeds your art because it has nowhere else to go.
The birds sing and you hear a tune.
The sunlight falls on the studio wall and you see a new color or pattern.
A group of people standing across the street reveals a new geometry for arranging actors onstage.
An overheard snatch of conversation inspires a line of dialogue for your script.
A photo in the newspaper suggests a new dramatic situation, and you rush to the desk to get it down on paper.
This is the bubble. Everything you see, hear, touch, and smell gets trapped within immediately. As you pursue your art over the years, accumulating skills and experiences, you respect this precious ideal state more deeply. This is why writers go off to secluded colonies, and artists work in studios away from their homes, and composers write in soundproof chambers, and academics require sabbaticals (although some would say they already live in ivory-tower bubbles). Being in the bubble does not mean being a hermit. You can function out in the world (indeed, you have to), but wherever you go the bubble goes with you. You know the cost of distractions, yet you recognize the need for balance if you are to maintain the relationships that sustain your creativity. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to come out of the bubble, and it would be nice if there were loved ones to greet you when you do.
When creativity has become your habit; when you’ve learned to manage time, resources, expectations, and the demands of others; when you understand the value and place of validation, continuity, and purity of purpose—then you’re on the way to an artist’s ultimate goal: the achievement of mastery.
The Shakers, the nineteenth-century religious community of self-sufficient craftsmen, made furniture and weavings and tools that were truly masterful. Yet they recognized that there was a fine line between mastery and arrogance; they did not want anyone to think of himself as a master, because there is only One Master. They constructed a system to keep themselves constantly inexperienced. When members of the community mastered a craft (whether it was carpentry or making brooms), the elders would switch them to another task, putting them out in the fields or in the blacksmith shop, where they’d have to start all over again. I admire their devotion to the challenge of the new, though I question their fear of mastery itself. In my experience, every time you set out to create something new, you have to prove to yourself you can still do it at least as well as, if not better than, you did it before. You can not rest on your creative laurels.
Mastery is an elusive concept. You never know when you achieve it absolutely—and it may not help you to feel you’ve attained it. (Alexander the Great wept when he had no more worlds to conquer.) We can recognize it more readily in others than we can in ourselves. We all have to discover our own definition of it. I take mine from the story of “Giotto’s O.” The fourteenth-century Italian artist, when asked to supply proof of his artistic skill for Pope Benedict XI, complied by drawing a perfect circle with a single fluent movement. Giotto was playing on an established topos, or convention, in art theory that linked consummate artistic skill with the ability to draw a circle freehand.
I was reminded of that topos when I was on tour in The Hague and went to an exhibition of Rembrandt self-portraits. An early painting, The Painter in His Studio, caught my eye. It shows Rembrandt cloaked in shadow gazing intently at an easel that dominates the foreground. As I turned the corner to another room, I was stunned by a work made forty years later, Self Portrait with Two Circles. The jump in technique between the two portraits is phenomenal. The first reveals a painter who is tentative and unsure of his beginning. You see it in the flat, lifeless brush strokes. The second shows a painter drenched in confidence. The brush strokes are thick, three-dimensional, centuries ahead of their time. They could easily be the strokes of a nineteenth-century master.
But far more striking than the development of technique was how Rembrandt portrayed his personal growth. In the first, he is small, intimidated, facing a giant canvas that he can hardly bring himself to touch. We all know that feeling when we’re starting out. In the second, he is engaging us directly, dominating the foreground, with two half circles behind him. Here was an artist’s growth made tangible. I remembered Giotto’s topos and how the closed form of the circle symbolized eternity and perfection through its association with the halos of the saints. How wise of Rembrandt, I thought, and how human to install himself between the two half circles, as if he existed between youthful and mature mastery, between painting as he found it and as he would leave it.
I suspect all of us have our own topos, our own sense of what mastery means and how close we come to achieving it. If to an artist it means
drawing a perfect circle, then to a musician it might be writing reams of variations and fugues and complex counterpoint from a single simple theme. To a storyteller it might be the ability to weave a complete story on the spot from someone else’s opening line. To a chef it’s creating an exquisite meal with whatever ingredients are at hand. To a designer, it’s making a fashion statement out of any snatch of fabric. To me, it’s creating a dance with an impossible timetable, constricted rehearsals, and restricted access to dancers. When you can create beauty and wonder from the metaphorical stone that the builder refused, you have achieved mastery.
More than anything, I associate mastery with optimism. It’s the feeling at the start of a project when I believe that my whole career has been preparation for this moment and I am saying, “Okay, let’s begin. Now I am ready.” Of course, you’re never one hundred percent ready, but that’s a part of mastery, too: It masks the insecurities and the gaps in technique and lets you believe you are capable of anything.
When it all comes together, a creative life has the nourishing power we normally associate with food, love, and faith. On Saturday, September 8, 2001, my company gave a free performance for two thousand people in the plaza that separated the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. We were the last people to perform there. Three days later, the day of the attacks, I was putting the finishing touches on a theatrical project to which I had devoted most of my year, preparing for a rehearsal in the late morning at a studio in midtown Manhattan. As the chaos of 9/11 developed, I thought about working with my dancers that day, but decided it was impossible, for so many reasons. I phoned all the dancers to check on their welfare, and I told them there was no obligation to attend rehearsal the next day. Yet they all showed up, ready for work, arriving in a shaken Manhattan, with its bridges and tunnels only just reopened, from Brooklyn, Staten Island, New Jersey, and Westchester County to the north.