The notion that some people are simply born artistic—and that there is a profile that can help organizations identify them—is quite firmly entrenched. All the talk of genetic determination nowadays undoubtedly has a lot to do with that. But the idea that creativity is a predetermined personality trait probably appeals at a psychological level because it gives people an excuse for not innovating or initiating change themselves, reducing the problem of creativity to a recruitment challenge. Significantly, the people least likely to buy into the idea that creativity is preordained are the creative geniuses themselves. Choreographer Twyla Tharp, for one, doesn’t subscribe to any notion of effortless artistry. As someone who has changed the face of dance, she’s certainly qualified to have an opinion. The winner of a MacArthur fellowship (popularly called “the genius grant”), two Emmy awards, and a Tony award, she has written and directed television programs, created Broadway productions, and choreographed dances for the movies Hair, Ragtime, and Amadeus. Tharp, now 66, did all this while creating more than 130 dances—many of which have become classics—for her own company, the Joffrey Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, London’s Royal Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre. The author of two books, she is now in the process of simultaneously developing new ballets for the Miami City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and Pacific Northwest Ballet. At her Manhattan home, Tharp met with HBR senior editor Diane Coutu to discuss what it takes to be a choreographer. In these pages, she shares what she has learned about fostering creativity, initiating change, and firing even top-notch performers when push comes to shove. In her suffer-no-fools way, she talks about her “monomaniacal absorption” with her work and the need to be tough, even ruthless, when that work is at stake. What follows is an edited version of their conversation. In your book The Creative Habit, you speak of creativity as a very pragmatic, almost businesslike endeavor. I think “habit” makes it sound a little dull. What I’m really talking about in the book is the enjoyment of creativity, which is something that everyone can have. I don’t believe in this Romantic idea of the suffering artist; I don’t believe in suffering anything. I think everyone can be creative, but you have to prepare for it with routine. There’s no other way around it. It’s an absolute mistake to think that art is not practical—or that business cannot be creative. The best artists are extraordinarily practical. The most creative painters I know mix their own paint, grind it, put in the fixative. They make use of everything they have at their disposal. In my own work, everything is raw material. But without proper preparation—habit, if you will—I couldn’t see that raw material or know how to use it. Obviously, people are born with specific talents. In dance you see that some are better coordinated than others. I have not worked with children, but I do think that even in babies’ movements you can see that some children are more comfortable with their limbs than others are. This is not taught; this is something genetic. But I don’t like using genetics as an excuse—“I can’t do this because I don’t have that particular genetic gift.” Get over yourself. The best creativity is the result of habit and hard work. And luck, of course. I think we can all agree that the luck of the draw governs every day. Mozart was his father’s son. Leopold Mozart was a sophisticated, broad-thinking man, famous throughout Europe as a composer and teacher. Mozart’s first good fortune was to have such a father as that. You advise people who want to be creative to get busy copying. Should we be worrying about lack of originality? Of course not. What I’m trying to tell people is that they shouldn’t be held back by the great stuff other people have done. Brahms is the classic example here. He was a consummate musician, and because he was so respectful of the great composers and of Beethoven in particular, he could not get out his first symphony until he was in his mid-forties. What a waste of time was that, what a waste. And all because Brahms was totally intimidated. And you know what? There’s a kind of arrogance in that intimidation. We think that it has to do with modesty. To the contrary, it has to do with Brahms going, “Goddammit, my first symphony is not going to be better than Beethoven’s Ninth.” And excuse me, probably it’s not going to be, so why don’t you just do it and get on with things? Personally, I don’t worry about originality at all. Has anyone ever done what I’ve done before? Yeah, probably. But I’m not going to worry about it; I’m going to use it and get on with it. Personally, I don’t worry about originality at all. Has anyone ever done what I’ve done before? Yeah, probably. Real learning is not copying. That’s the wrong word. Copying is taking somebody else’s solutions. Learning is taking somebody else’s problems. Even though Braque and Picasso at a certain point in time were making canvases that were very, very close to one another, they were totally different artists, with totally different values and totally different philosophies and backgrounds and all the rest of it. Working with the same problem did not interfere in any way with their learning or contribute to any lack of originality. You thrive on change. You have often followed one dance piece by launching the next as far as possible in the opposite direction. That was a strategy of mine, a way to keep myself bouncing and not get stuck. I’m not interested in repeating my experience, successful or otherwise. You can’t allow yourself to get comfortable with what you’re comfortable with, because then that’s all you’ll want to do. Now I’m trying something different and working on three new pieces simultaneously, which is a tour de force and a new kind of challenge I have set for myself. If I weren’t comfortable with changing the way I work, these ballets would never get made. Change drives my work, and it is as important to the creative process as habit is. I may have an easier time accepting change than some businesspeople do, because the body is constantly changing and so what I can do is constantly changing. I cannot ask a dancer to do exactly what she did yesterday, let alone do it six months from now. It is going to be different. But even in other ways, I have all sorts of habits to foster change. When I look up a word in the dictionary, for example, I read the word before it and the word after it—you never know where the next good idea is going to come from. I also read somewhat transactionally. I hadn’t read Tolstoy in a very long time, so I recently picked up War and Peace. But why do you think I am reading Tolstoy? Do you think I’m reading it just for a good time? No, the guy was a great writer, and I’ve got another book I want to write. I am not a writer, so I do what I can to educate myself. Fundamental change is an endeavor, it’s a real enterprise, it’s not something that just happens. You make a choice to keep evolving and keep growing. The business literature nowadays talks a lot about the need for failure in the pursuit of excellence. Do you accept that? Of course I do. Sooner or later, all real change involves failure—but not in the sense that many people understand failure. If you do only what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won’t fail. You’ll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that’s failure by erosion. True failure is a mark of accomplishment in the sense that something new and different was tried. Ideally, the best way to fail is in private. In my office, the ratio of failure to success on the dances I create is probably something like six to one. I create about six times more material for my dances than I end up using in the final piece. But I need that unused material to get my one success. I have also sometimes failed in public, and that’s very painful. But failing, even in this way, is not useless. It can force you to get yourself together and to produce something new. In the Upper Room would never have happened without Singin’ in the Rain, which was less successful with the critics. Let history judge me in 50 years, but I think In the Upper Room is a very important piece. Over the years, you’ve often had to fire dancers because you couldn’t afford them or simply because a dancer was wrong for the part. How did you manage that? It gave me a lot of pain, as I’m sure it does everyone. My dancers were all completely passionate and committed, but I’d say, “Look, here is why you’ve got to go.” And it would be devastating for them. But very intelligent people understand that they must have a much bigger picture than just their own self-interest. Perhaps I’m unusual in that I work with extraordinary people: When I had my company, I would sometimes interview 900 dancers to hire four. I hate to say this, but I have a desire for absolute perfection; I am very demanding and never compromise until I absolutely have to. You see, when your work is at stake, you have to be willing to turn everything upside down. You don’t have a choice. It’s a terrible analogy, but when it comes to your work, you have a war to win. Men are going to die. I don’t have hard-and-fast rules for other folks, but that’s what I do. My challenge to myself has been to see how much I can accomplish in terms of building and changing what is thought of as dance in our time. If that’s my mandate, then I’m going to do everything I can to accomplish it. It’s a terrible analogy, but when it comes to your work, you have a war to win. Men are going to die. Let’s talk about mentoring. You met the late George Balanchine, artistic director of the New York City Ballet, only three times, and yet he was your “invisible mentor” for 20 years. Yes, I looked up to him for a long time because his dances showed such a good grasp of logic. But Balanchine was not really available to me. He didn’t teach open classes, so I couldn’t go that route. Still, I recognized that he was the person who knew the most about what he was doing, both structurally and musically. So I tried to learn as much as I could from him. I mentally parked him in the corner of my studio, and the insistence on thoroughness that I saw in him became my standard. I was lucky in that I realized early on that it’s better to choose your own mentors than to have them choose you. Even today, when someone asks me how to find a mentor, I tell them, “Just go to Barnes & Noble and pull down a book from a shelf—pick out a writer, pick out a thinker. Pick out somebody who can teach you something, not somebody who’s going to sit down and gossip with you. There is nothing complicated about this: Do you want somebody to hold your hand, or do you want to learn something? If you want to learn, go for it—end of story.” You’ve said repeatedly that every act of creation is an act of violence and destruction and that one of the artist’s most valuable conditions is “being pissed.” It’s not the anger per se that’s valuable; it’s the energy that can come from it. People confuse the two. Anger is not what I’m talking about when I say you should throw a tantrum at yourself to get moving. I mean something like what you see in weight training, when you have a guy lifting deadweight of 550 pounds off the ground, and he’ll get a capsule of ammonia cracked under his nose right before he lifts the weight. So there’s a rush that drives through the body and causes him to perform this amazing feat. Is this anger? That’s not the right word to describe it. Does it come from anger? Yes, but I prefer to think of it as ammonia. Do you feel you’ve had to pay a price for your commitment to your art? In the end, everybody pays a price for whatever choice he or she makes. I work all the time; that’s what I do. I don’t celebrate my successes; I rehearse. I haven’t taken a vacation in a long time. I engage in very few interpersonal relationships except for those I can learn from. A favorite concept of mine these days is the enthusiast. Enthusiasts are people with whom I can immediately connect and whom I can trust—because they’re people without limitations on their energy and their optimism and their belief that things are full of possibility. I think people who have achieved mastery in their fields are optimists and enthusiasts, and I can communicate with these people. There are maybe 10 individuals—and I wouldn’t call them closest friends—that I can take a real issue to without embarrassment. Ten’s a big number. I can engage in sociable times with these people, but ultimately, I know that I have to fall back on my own judgment. If Steve Jobs came to see you, what advice would you offer? “Hit the deck—let’s do 30 push-ups.” That’s the first thing I’d say to any businessperson: Get moving. Because one of the things I think I have to offer people is the knowledge that using your body makes your brain work better. Movement stimulates our brains in ways we don’t appreciate—a fact we’re learning more and more about from the neuroscientists. So we would start with our push-ups; there’s no excuse for not staying fit. Perhaps I will get my fingers slapped for this, but I would also advise business leaders to travel less. I don’t know how they travel the way they do and hope to still stay fit. The year I was doing Amadeus, I traveled around the globe five times. What I learned is, don’t do it. It’s almost impossible to maintain your routines, to maintain your diet, to get your sleep, to find the time to do your exercising. I suffer greatly when I travel, and so I travel less and less. So I’d tell Mr. Jobs: “Let’s dance!”
