Twyla tharp autobiography of malcolm

When faced with impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond? Impending success — relief at first, but then unease. Every success raises the bar of acceptable achievement for me. Impending failure — complete horror at first, but ultimately relief. Thinking you might ever exist without making mistakes is a suffocating delusion. When you work do you love the process or the result?

When I was an academic I loved the result, but often found the process torturous. Now I write more creatively, I love the process but rarely like the result. At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp? As soon as I start typing. Every idea is perfect until I begin destroying it in the transition to a tangible product.

What is your idea of mastery? The truth is simply that more thought and practice are required, but only once a certain level of achievement has been reached can you have the luxury of seeing that. Which of your answers would you most like to change? The one about responding to hostility, laziness, indifference, etc.

Twyla tharp autobiography of malcolm

One that sidesteps the entrenched views of the world in pursuit of better arguments to have. This book sounds like something that would be very valuable for me to read. I have lots of ideas about how I want to be more creative but often block myself by not getting started and giving up before I have a chance to begin. I enjoyed your answers that you shared and was thinking of how I would answer some of the same questions.

I think that often times in life our best times are our worst times! I love your answer about instant crusading zeal — my reaction is always to laugh hollowly and turn my back. This is fabulous and I found your answers so insightful. I feel the same way at times. This sounds like a great book—a good thing for artists to take a really unflinching look at the creative process.

It resolved my money ambivalence very pleasingly — turns out, my notion of having enough money to be comfortable was exactly right. This is an interesting set of questions! I liked your answer about rivals too. Who needs them? Will they buy you Christmas presents? And those were the issues that we went after. And we worked with a great deal of rigor.

Which is to say, we were very, very dedicated. We worked six days a week, we worked at least six hours every day. We did not perform much at all. It was really about the experience of learning and exploring and growing, for five years. Twyla Tharp: In those days, male dancers, as they are still today, were a rarer breed than women. Martha Graham also began her first company as all women.

Modern dance in this country, in any case, is generally laid at the doorstep of female creators: Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey. The next generation were men, but they spun-off from that generation of women. Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, all came from the women because it was a primarily female force.

I decided that we should not, in a way, pollute the experiment. Plus which, obviously men and women bond very differently. And at that time we wanted to begin very simply. We used no costumes, we used no music, we had no partnering. We wanted just to explore movement in time and space. And then after five years, the first man was introduced.

But our partnering, for example, evolved in an entirely different way than it would have had we had men from the beginning. Just in terms of counterbalances and how I support myself against him. The rewards of dancing, myself, are very different from choreographing. The rewards of extending your discipline and incorporating whole new elements.

But the reward that I felt for doing a piece called The Fugue in will never be surpassed. Because I knew then what an accomplishment it was and how far I had come in order to be able to make counterpoint, which is what that represented. How to link two lines in relationship to one another, so that they were bound, and reinforced one another.

Twyla Tharp: Yes. I would say that for the first five years I pretty much seized things. From that piece, he had the breadth of vision to see that what I was doing could be translated to what his dancers understood. I already knew this, because I had been studying classical ballet for a long time. Bob saw that what I did had a very strong balletic base to it, and he asked me to make a piece for his company.

That took a real leap of faith on his part. This is what is ordinarily called a break, because it certainly is what introduced me into the commercial world. From Hair I was able to begin working in pictures and to extend my career into television. Your email address will not be published. Skip to Content Categories: Archives. More to Discover.

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Please see your browser settings for this feature. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Now, in her own words, Twyla Tharp offers a rare and provocative glimpse into the mind and heart behind her famously deadpan face. Much more than a dance book, Push Comes to Shove is the story of a woman coming to terms with herself as daughter, wife and lover, mother, artist.

A child of Indiana Quaker country, Twyla Tharp was traumatically uprooted to California when her stage-ambitious mother built a drive-in movie theater. Soon Twyla was studying piano, violin, flamenco, drums, French, baton twirling, tap, classical ballet But it was in adolescence - tangling with a rattlesnake in the California desert and observing overheated couples in the backs of cars - that she began to learn the powers of the body and the erotic mysteries of dance.