“the creative habit”

Right now, I’m reading “The Creative Habit” by dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp. Tearing through it, actually, would be more accurate. Gobbling it like a pig. So much so that I’ve forced myself to slow down, start over. I’ve become a little obsessed lately with this kind of thing. The creative process. Mine. Others’. Anyone’s. The whole gamut. Picking up this book was totally knee-jerk on my part. I have huge respect for Twyla Tharp’s work, but I think it was the title that did it and, again, because I’m gobbling up anything about this topic right now. Suu-EEE!!

So I’ve started the book over, as I said, and there’s so much I’d like to share from it. If you’re interested in the creative process, where it comes from, how to access it, call it forth, whatever, I think you’ll like what I post from the book. Some of it will be straight excerpts. Some of it will be exercises or quizzes. Which sounds lame, I know, but they’re fascinating to me. Beyond that, I just really like the way she writes, the way she analyzes the process, how she cuts through to the heart of things. She’s a smart dame, she is. She approaches the creative process with an almost clinical eye and I’m just really INTO her whole groove right now.

So the context for this first excerpt: In this particular chapter, she’s been talking about people’s creative DNA as she calls it. How each person is hard-wired for their art, their creative process, differently. She talks, for instance, about how some artists see the world through a wide lens — say, someone like Ansel Adams who uses this grand, sweeping scope. Others use a kind of mid-lens, a middle distance. She uses the example of choreographer Jerome Robbins and talks about how his point of view was right there on the stage, observational. In West Side Story, for example. Sharks watch Jets. Jets watch Sharks. Boys watch girls. Girls watch boys. That’s how the dances are choreographed, with that observational middle distance. Other artists see the world in close-up. The tight shot. Someone like Raymond Chandler with his razor-sharp detail that basically crams us into his character’s skulls, as in the opening from The Big Sleep:

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. It was everything the well-dressed detective ought to be. I was calling on four million bucks.

So the whole wide lens/mid lens/tight lens metaphor is just one of the ways she describes this concept of creative DNA. She goes on to apply this whole idea to the way she works and so here’s the excerpt — finally:

If one set of polarities defines my creative DNA, it is the way I find myself pulled between involvement and detachment. I shuttle back and forth from one extreme to the other, with no rest in between. And I apply it to everything.

With my dancers, for example. I have an annoying need for proof of their allegiance to me and my projects. So I’m always running through a mental checklist to see if their work habits are as exacting as mine, searching with forensic intensity for evidence of their commitment. Do they show up on time for rehearsal? Are they warmed up? Does their energy flag when rehearsals break down or are they committed to pushing forward? Are they bringing ideas to the party or waiting for me to provide everything? These are my personal pop quizzes to gauge other people’s investment. I don’t want them merely involved. I’m looking for insane commitment.

I’m no less strict with myself. I’m always taking temperature readings of my commitment to a project and pushing myself to be more committed than anyone else. At its extreme, I put myself at the center of a piece, even as a dancer, trying on the roles.

When I’ve learned all I can at the core of a piece, I pull back and become the Queen of Detachment. I move so far back that I become a surrogate for the audience. I see the work the way they will see it. New, fresh, objectively. In the theater, I frequently go to the back and watch the dancers rehearse. If I could watch from farther away, from outside the theater in the street, I would. That’s how much detachment I need from my work in order to understand it.

…….

For the longest time, I thought this dichotomy of involvement versus detachment was merely a template for my work habits. Immerse yourself in the details of the work. Commit yourself to mastering every aspect. At the same time, step back to see if the work scans, if it’s intelligible to an unwashed audience. Don’t get so involved that you lose what you’re trying to say. This was the yin and yang of my work life: Dive in. Step back. Dive in. Step back.

It was how I saw the world — like being nearsighted rather than having 20/20 vision. I was stuck with it.

I’m a total cow to interrupt here, but I love this next bit. Mooo.

And then one day, reading Carl Kerenyi’s Dionysos, I discovered a broader context for these divisions. Involvement and detachment explained how I worked, but they didn’t explain why I produced the work I did. It had always irked me that my dances shied away from telling a story, and when I tried my hand at a narrative-driven dance, the result was weak or unfocused. Why was that? Why was I better at one than the other. And answer came from the ancient Greeks, who had two words, zoe and bios, to distinguish the two competing natures I felt within myself.

Zoe and bios both mean life in Greek, but they are not synonymous. Zoe, wrote Kerenyi, refers to ‘life in general, without characterization.’ Bios characterizes a specific life, the outlines that distinguish one living thing from another. Bios is the Greek root for biography, zoe for zoology.

I cannot overstate what a profound distinction this was. Suddenly, two states of experience were made plain to me.

Zoe is like seeing Earth from space. You get the sense of life on the rotating globe, but without a sense of the individual lives being lived on the planet. Bios involves swooping down from space from the perch of a high-powered spy satellite, closing in on the scene, and seeing the details. Bios distinguishes between one life and another. Zoe refers to the aggregate.

Bios accommodates the notion of death, that each life has a beginning, middle and end, that each life contains a story. Zoe, wrote, Kerenyi, ‘does not admit of the experience of its own destruction: it is experienced without end, as infinite life.’

I realize that these are just words. But they articulated a distinction that made my entire creative output clearer. Applying it to two of my choreographic heroes, Robbins and George Balanchine, I could appreciate in a new way the difference between these two men.

Balanchine was the essence of zoe. Most of his ballets are beautiful plotless structures that mirror the music rather than interpret it. They do not need language to explain themselves, nor do they try to tell a story. Their content is the essence of life, not the details of living. Balanchine’s steps and gestures are not specific — for example, a man miming the act of pulling out an imaginary chair for a woman or, more tritely, putting hands to heart to express love. People think his dances are abstract at first — where’s the story? what’s the plot? But their zoe qualities reveal themselves with powerful results. Balanchine’s gestures and steps pluck chords in us that we cannot easily name. Yet they resonate. They seem familiar. That’s the genius of Balanchine. In his movement he created a grammar that expressed congruencies between the natural world and our emotional world. Three women unbundle their long hair at the end of Serenade and we feel something, without attaching a name to it, because there is a common structure between the dancers’ gestures and some gesture we remember that moved us.

Robbins, on the other hand, was pure bios — and brilliant at it. When he created a dance, he was always accumulating details about the roles — from what the characters would wear to whom they were sleeping with –and out of these details of life he would construct an engaging narrative. This is why he had such a crowd-pleasing career in the theater. (This is a giant gift. Mike Nichols tells a story about getting the musical Annie ready for Broadway. A scene that was supposed to be funny was failing to get a laugh, no matter what Nichols tried. He asked Robbins to watch the scene with his practiced eye. Afterward, Nichols asked him how to fix the scene. Robbins surveyed the stage and pointed to a white towel hanging at the back of the set. ‘That towel should be yellow,’ he said. ‘That’s it?’ thought Nichols. ‘That makes the scene work?’ But he made the change and the scene got a laugh every night thereafter.)

As a man of bios, a master of details, he could tell a story that had, as a subtext, what Balanchine made a text of — namely, life.

One approach was not more valid than the other. The two men simply entered their work through different doors.

But I could see that everything I did was a duel between the warring impulses of bios and zoe in me. On the one hand, there was my ability to create dances about a life force. On the other, there was my occasional urge to break away from this and create dances that tell a specific story. The first kind of dances came naturally to me, the latter required more of an effort. In my heart I am a woman more of zoe than bios.

I suspect many people never get a handle on their creative identity this way. They take their urges, their biases, their work habits for granted. But a little self-knowledge goes a long way. If you understand the strands of your creative DNA, you begin to see how they mutate into common threads in your work. You begin to see the ‘story’ that you’re trying to tell; why you do the things you do (both positive and self-destructive); where you are strong and where you are weak; how you see the world and function in it.