Assignment for 6/12/09
Click on comment, and write a short greeting to Ms. Chan and Mr. McLaughlin. Make sure you include your first name.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Summer Reading and Writing Assignment 2 for Senior Dance Project
Chapter 5
before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box
Excerpt from The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
Everyone has his or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at Office Depot for transferring files.
I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me.
The box documents the active research on every project. For a Maurice Sendak project, the box is filled with notes from Sendak, snippets of William Blake poetry, toys that talk back to you. I'm sure this is the sort of stuff that most people store on shelves or in files. I prefer a box.
There are separate boxes for everything I've ever done. If you want a glimpse into how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes.
The box makes me feel organized, that I have my act together even when I don't know where I'm going yet.
It also represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I've started work.
The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I've back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it's there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.
Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn't write it down and put it in a safe place. I don't worry about that because I know where to find it. It's all in the box.
I like cardboard file boxes for a bunch of reasons, all willfully idiosyncratic. The shelving in my work area at home, which holds my audio equipment, hundreds of music CDs, and piles of musical scores, is not mere heavy-gauge industrial shelving; it's scaffolding equipment, strong enough for painters to stand on when they're working on the exterior of a house. In other words, the shelves are built for hard work. That's a personal aesthetic choice. I want everything around me, from my dancers to my dances to my shelves, to be strong and built to last.
The file boxes reflect the same practicality. They're easy to buy, and they're cheap. (I don't need to spend a thousand dollars on an exquisite cherry cabinet that fills up in a week.) They're one hundred percent functional; they do exactly what I want them to do: hold stuff. I can write on them to identify their contents (you wouldn't do that with a thousand-dollar cherry file cabinet). I can move them around (which is also hard to do with a heavy wood filing system). When one box fills up, I can easily unfold and construct another. And when I'm done with the box, I can ship it away, out of sight, out of mind, so I can move on to the next project, the next box.
Easily acquired. Inexpensive. Perfectly functional. Portable. Identifiable. Disposable. Eternal enough.
Those are my criteria for the perfect storage system. And I've found the answer in a simple file box.
It's not the only answer, of course. Maurice Sendak has a room that's the equivalent of my boxes, a working studio that contains a huge unit with flat pullout drawers in which he keeps sketches, reference materials, notes, articles. He works on several projects at a time, and he likes to keep the overlap- ping materials out of sight when he's tackling anyone of them. Other people rely on carefully arranged index cards. The more technological among us put it all on a computer. There's no single correct system. Anything can work, so long as it lets you store and retrieve your ideas-and never lose them. It doesn't have to be complicated. I know one magazine editor who hoards newspaper and magazine clippings. A good chunk of his day is spent with scissors in hand clipping stories, photographs, and illustrations. After he clips, he opens a file drawer and deposits the clippings on a pile of other clippings. Then he closes the drawer, letting them accumulate in the drawer's cool darkness. He doesn't think about them much, but he knows they are there if needed, which happens whenever a colleague wanders into his office desperate for a good idea. He'll open the drawer again, haul out its contents on his desk, and say, "Let's see what we've got here." Host and guest then leaf through the clippings together. Without fail, an intriguing headline or phrase or photo of someone will beget a thought that in turn suggests a story idea-and the guest will depart, slightly less desperate and infinitely more inspired. The drawer, in effect, contains the editor's pre-ideas-those intriguing little tickles at the corners of your brain that tell you when something is interesting to you without your quite knowing why. Bringing them out reminds him of what he was thinking when he put them there in the first place.
I also like the simplicity of a box. There's a purpose here, and it has a lot to do with efficiency. A writer with a good storage and retrieval system can write faster. He isn't spending a lot of time looking things up, scouring his papers, and patrolling other rooms at home wondering where he left that perfect quote. It's in the box.
A perfect archive also gives you more material to call on, to use as a spark for invention. Beethoven, despite his unruly reputation and wild romantic image, was well organized. He saved everything in a series of notebooks that were organized according to the level of development of the idea. He had notebooks for rough ideas, notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas, almost as if he was pre-aware of an idea's early, middle, and late stages.
For anyone who reads music, the sketchbooks literally record the progress of his invention. He would scribble his rough, unformed ideas in his pocket notebook and then leave them there, unused, in a state of suspension, but at least captured with pencil on paper. A few months later, in a bigger, more permanent notebook, you can find him picking up that idea again, but he's not just copying the musical idea into another book. You can see him developing it, tormenting it, improving it in the new notebook. He might take an original three-note motif and push it to its next stage by dropping one of the notes a half tone and doubling it. Then he'd let the idea sit there for another six months. It would reappear in a third notebook, again not copied but further improved, perhaps inverted this time and ready to be used in a piano sonata.
He never puts the ideas back exactly the same. He always moves them for- ward, and by doing so, he re-energizes them.
The notebooks are remarkable for many reasons. Beethoven was a volatile and restless personality, always demanding a change of scene. In the thirty-two years he lived in and around Vienna, he never bought a home and moved more than forty times. I suspect that's why he needed the elaborate system of note- books. With all the turmoil in his personal life, the notebooks anchored the one part of his life that mattered: composing: As long as he had his ideas captured on paper, his creativity would never waver. In fact, it got stronger.
That’s the true value of the box: It contained your inspirations without confining your creativity. Le me explain how.
In the summer of 2000 I had an idea: to make a Broadway musical, all dancing, to the songs of Billy Joel. I have always believed in Billy's music. I've been listening to his songs since he started recording. I also felt in my bones that he wrote great dancing music. At the same time, I had just started a new company of six marvelous dancers, so good, in fact, that I was dying to showcase them in something big and ambitious. A two-hour dance extravaganza to all the hits of a major American pop idol fit the bill.
Only trouble was, I didn't know Billy Joel. I had never met him. I didn't know if he was an egomaniac or a bored rock star or a cool guy open to something new. On the evidence of his songs, which were literate and told great stories, he seemed like a down-to-earth good guy. That was his reputation. I got his phone number and called him up. I said, "1 have a project in mind and I would like to show you something." The "something" I had in mind was a twenty-minute videotape of choreography I had prepared to some of his music.
(The tape was a critical piece of preparation, and vital to selling the idea to the two people who could make or break the project. The first person was me: I had to see that Billy's music could "dance." The tape was visual evidence of something I felt. The second person, of course, was Billy. That's why I called him the moment I was sure. I have learned over the years that you should never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one. The usual routine for selling an idea is you set up a first meeting to explain it and then a second meeting to show it. I didn't want to leave anything to chance. Who knew if I would ever get a second meeting? When busy people are involved, a lot of things can happen to foul up even well intentioned plans, so I decided to go for it all in one shot and invested my time and money into producing and editing the twenty-minute tape.)
When Billy came to my home on Manhattan's Upper West Side, I mentioned that I had a little trouble figuring out both from his songs and the surname Joel whether he was Jewish, Irish, or Italian. He said, "My family is Jewish, I grew up in an Italian neighborhood, and every girl who broke my heart was Irish."
I said, "Okay, I get it now. Come and look"-and I pulled him over to my video console.
I showed him some dancing to his newest compositions-solo piano music from his classical Fantasies and Delusions album-because I assumed he would be most engaged by his most recent material. He loved the dancing. Then I switched to his rock hits such as "Uptown Girl" and "Big Shot." He said, "1 didn't know my stuff could look so good." End of tape.
I think he was flattered by it all, so I pressed on. I asked him, "Whatever happened to Brenda and Eddie from the song 'Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’?"
He said he had never thought about it.
"Well, that's the point," I said. "1 want to do a show using your songs to tell a story. I don't know what it is yet. But first, I need your permission."
He said, "Okay, you have it."
"I'm also going to need access to your entire song catalog."
He said, "Fine."
That was it. It was one of those rare moments: an instant deal. We shook hands and he left.
That's the moment I started my Billy Joel box for the show Movin' Out.
First in: my precious twenty-minute tape.
Next in: two blue index cards. I believe in starting each project with a stated goal. Sometimes the goal is nothing more than a personal mantra such as "keep it simple" or "something perfect" or "economy" to remind me of what I was thinking at the beginning if and when I lose my way. I write it down on a slip of paper and it's the first thing that goes into the box.
In this case, I had two goals. The first was "tell a story." I felt that getting a handle on narrative in dance was my next big challenge, plus I wanted to find out what happened to Brenda and Eddie, the "popular steadies." The second was "make dance pay for the dancers." I've always been resentful of the fact that some of the so-called elite art forms can't survive on their own without sponsor- ship and subsidies. It bothers me that dance companies around the world are not-for-profit organizations and that dancers, who are as devoted and disciplined as any NFL or NBA superstar, are at the low end of the entertainment industry's income scale. I wanted this Broadway-bound project not only to elevate serious dance in the commercial arena but also to pay the dancers well. So I wrote my goals for the project, "tell a story" and "make dance pay," on two blue index cards and watched them float to the bottom of the Joel box. Along with the tape, they were the first items in the box and they sit there as I write this, covered by months of research, like an anchor keeping me connected to my original impulse. ("When you're up to your ass in alligators," says a friend from Florida, "it's easy to forget that your objective was to drain the swamp.")
No matter what system you use, I recommend having a goal and putting it in writing. I read once that people who write down their New Year's resolutions have a greater chance of achieving them than people who don't. This is the sort of factoid that is probably apocryphal but, like many urban legends, sounds as though it should be true.
Into the box went all my research. A few days after we met, Billy sent his complete CDs. I listened to them in chronological order over the weekend, and by Monday I had the first hints of a story line running through my head. It was the opening line of Homer's Iliad: "Sing to me muse of the rage of Achilles." Billy was my Homer figure, the poet reciting an epic poem. The story would be set to twenty-seven Billy Joel songs about five kids from Long Island, from their high school days in 1965 through the Vietnam War and ending in 1984. The main characters-Eddie, Brenda, Tony, James, and Judy-could all be found in Billy's songs. I studied Billy's music videos for clues and meaning lurking in the songs. I watched tapes of his live performances through the years. I looked at TV dance shows from the era-such as Shindig and Soul Train-to refresh my memory of the dance styles back then. I screened Billy's lectures to hear what he thought of his songs. All these items went into the box. Because the show's story line included a pivotal section about the Vietnam War, I went to New York's Museum of Television and Radio to watch news footage, refreshing my memory of what we were told during the war. Then I watched the movies about the Vietnam War, from The Deer Hunter to Platoon to Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. All into the box, along with seminal books from the time period (for example, Michael Herr's Dispatches) and interesting period films (such as Saturday Night Fever and even one I worked on, Hair). I went back farther to study The Wild Ones and Rebel Without a Cause to get a feel for an older character in our show who'd wear a black leather jacket and motorcycle boots. All in the box. From another box, abandoned and buried, I dug out old research for an unrealized film project based on David Rabe's In the Boom Boom Room to develop ideas for a female character.
In the box you'll also find my notebooks containing all the clips and images and scrawls to myself that I file away to jog my memory: photos of Billy from the early seventies to the mid-eighties; news clippings from the period helping me formulate a visual style; song lists, from first cut to final cut, and the notes passed between music director Stuart Malina and me about why a song should or shouldn't be in the show. For example, there's an elaborate set of notes on a beautiful ballad from an early part of Billy's career, "She's Got a Way About Her," that is full of innocence and sweetness. But in my notes you can see the song morphing into something harsher, eventually becoming two simultaneous sleazy bar scenes, one in Vietnam, the other back home. I felt obliged to run this by Billy, warning him, "This is going to destroy the song." But he wasn't worried. "Go for it," he said.
Also in the box is a green beret that belonged to a military adviser I consulted for the show. He gave me some worthwhile information for the night patrol sequence, about how the men signaled to each other down the line, because the thickness of the jungle made it impossible to see more than one man along in the fanned-out formation. The signals were quite elementary (pointing to one's eyes means "look," fist lifted at a right angle means "stop," hand out flat pushing down means "get down"); we could have invented something equivalent for the scene, but real details created authenticity. Just seeing the beret in the box energizes me, reminding me how important it was to the man who gave it to me.
There are tchotchkes in the box as well, all of which link me to some essential aspect of the project. A pair of earrings and a macramé vest that started me thinking about costumes. Books about psychedelic light events that I might share with the lighting designer. Photographs of other production concepts that I could use to discuss space and detail with Santo Loquasto, my longtime production designer. There are research Polaroids from a reconnaissance trip to half a dozen village greens in Long Island where Billy Joel grew up. All of this helped me imagine the characters in their time and space when I started work in my pristine white studio in Manhattan. Eventually, the material for this show filled up twelve boxes.
That's how a box is like soil to me. It's basic, earthy, elemental. It's home. It's what I can always go back to when I need to regroup and keep my bearings. Knowing that the box is always there gives me the freedom to venture out, be bold, dare to fall flat on my face. Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box.
Now, let me tell you what a box isn't.
The box is not a substitute for creating. The box doesn't compose or write a poem or create a dance step. The box is the raw index of your preparation. It is the repository creative potential, but it is not that potential realized.
When a journalist gets a story assignment, he doesn't immediately sit down and knock out a finished piece. He has a routine, which is common to all good journalists. First, he reads all the background material he can get his hands on. Then he talks to people to verify old information, unearth new information, and pullout lively quotes (which he knows are the lifeblood of solid reporting). He jots all this down in his notes. Filling up the notebook can take hours or months, depending on the journalist's deadline. But only when his research and reporting are done and his notebook is full does he write the story. If his reporting is good, the writing will reflect that. It will come out clearly and quickly. If the re- porting is shoddy, the writing will be, too. It will be torture to get the words out.
My box is like the journalist's notes. It's the "reporting" routine I follow be- fore creating a piece. If the quality of a journalist's work is a direct function of how much background material he sifted through, how many people he talked to, how many times he went back to his sources to challenge or check up on their statements - that is, how diligent and clever he was in assembling his research - then the quality of my creative output is also a function of how diligent and clever I've been in filling up my boxes.
It's one thing to tell you that my Movin' Out box has dozens of videotapes of Billy Joel performances and music videos. That's obvious; if you're working with E'" the man's music, you ought to know how that music has been treated visually in the past. That's the bare minimum in research. It's also basic research to review relevant films from the era. But I'm not sure everyone would log time reviewing U .5. Army training films from the Vietnam era. That's the mildly over-the-top re- search that tells me I'm prepared-and arms me with confidence when I get down to the real work of creating.
Sadly, some people never get beyond the box stage in their creative life. We all know people who have announced that they've started work on a project - say, a book - but some time passes, and when you politely ask how it's going, they tell you that they're still researching. Weeks, months, years pass and they produce nothing. They have tons of research but it's never enough to nudge them toward the actual process of writing the book. I'm not sure what's going on here. Maybe they're researching in the wrong places. Maybe they like the comfort zone of research as opposed to the hard work of writing. Maybe they're just taking procrastination to a new extreme. All I know for sure is that they are trapped in the box.
My solution for them: This isn't working. Free yourself. Get out of this box.
Put it away for another day and start a new box. But do so with the faith that nothing is lost, that you haven't put in all this effort for naught. Everything you've done is in the box. You can always come back to it.
There's one final benefit to the box: It gives you a chance to look back. A lot of people don't appreciate this. When they're done with a project, they're relieved. They're ready for a break and then they want to move forward to the next idea. But the box gives you the opportunity to reflect on your performance. Dig down through the boxes archaeologically and you'll see a project's beginnings. This can be instructive. How did you do? Did you get to your goal? Did you improve on it? Did it change along the way? Could you have done it all more efficiently?
I find the box is most useful at three critical stages: when you're getting going, when you're lost, and after you've finished (that's when you can look back and see the directions you didn't take, the ideas that intrigued you but didn't fit this time around and might be the start of your next box).
Above all, learn to respect your box's strange and disorderly ways. As a repository of half-baked inspirations and unformed aids, the box can seem to be a haphazard tool while you're filling it. But when you want to go back and make sense of your path, every step is there to be found, and the order emerges if only in hindsight. Your box is proof that you have prepared well. If you want to know how any creative project will turn out, your box's contents are as good a predictor of success or failure as anything I know.
Assignment connecting to Chapter 5:
· Take one of the 3 ideas you described in the scratching assignment, and create a box for 1 of the 3 ideas that you are most likely to pursue when we begin Senior Dance Project class.
· Click on comment and give us a list of content inside your box.
· On your first day of class, you will actually bring in the box with the content you described.
before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box
Excerpt from The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
Everyone has his or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at Office Depot for transferring files.
I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me.
The box documents the active research on every project. For a Maurice Sendak project, the box is filled with notes from Sendak, snippets of William Blake poetry, toys that talk back to you. I'm sure this is the sort of stuff that most people store on shelves or in files. I prefer a box.
There are separate boxes for everything I've ever done. If you want a glimpse into how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes.
The box makes me feel organized, that I have my act together even when I don't know where I'm going yet.
It also represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I've started work.
The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I've back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it's there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.
Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn't write it down and put it in a safe place. I don't worry about that because I know where to find it. It's all in the box.
I like cardboard file boxes for a bunch of reasons, all willfully idiosyncratic. The shelving in my work area at home, which holds my audio equipment, hundreds of music CDs, and piles of musical scores, is not mere heavy-gauge industrial shelving; it's scaffolding equipment, strong enough for painters to stand on when they're working on the exterior of a house. In other words, the shelves are built for hard work. That's a personal aesthetic choice. I want everything around me, from my dancers to my dances to my shelves, to be strong and built to last.
The file boxes reflect the same practicality. They're easy to buy, and they're cheap. (I don't need to spend a thousand dollars on an exquisite cherry cabinet that fills up in a week.) They're one hundred percent functional; they do exactly what I want them to do: hold stuff. I can write on them to identify their contents (you wouldn't do that with a thousand-dollar cherry file cabinet). I can move them around (which is also hard to do with a heavy wood filing system). When one box fills up, I can easily unfold and construct another. And when I'm done with the box, I can ship it away, out of sight, out of mind, so I can move on to the next project, the next box.
Easily acquired. Inexpensive. Perfectly functional. Portable. Identifiable. Disposable. Eternal enough.
Those are my criteria for the perfect storage system. And I've found the answer in a simple file box.
It's not the only answer, of course. Maurice Sendak has a room that's the equivalent of my boxes, a working studio that contains a huge unit with flat pullout drawers in which he keeps sketches, reference materials, notes, articles. He works on several projects at a time, and he likes to keep the overlap- ping materials out of sight when he's tackling anyone of them. Other people rely on carefully arranged index cards. The more technological among us put it all on a computer. There's no single correct system. Anything can work, so long as it lets you store and retrieve your ideas-and never lose them. It doesn't have to be complicated. I know one magazine editor who hoards newspaper and magazine clippings. A good chunk of his day is spent with scissors in hand clipping stories, photographs, and illustrations. After he clips, he opens a file drawer and deposits the clippings on a pile of other clippings. Then he closes the drawer, letting them accumulate in the drawer's cool darkness. He doesn't think about them much, but he knows they are there if needed, which happens whenever a colleague wanders into his office desperate for a good idea. He'll open the drawer again, haul out its contents on his desk, and say, "Let's see what we've got here." Host and guest then leaf through the clippings together. Without fail, an intriguing headline or phrase or photo of someone will beget a thought that in turn suggests a story idea-and the guest will depart, slightly less desperate and infinitely more inspired. The drawer, in effect, contains the editor's pre-ideas-those intriguing little tickles at the corners of your brain that tell you when something is interesting to you without your quite knowing why. Bringing them out reminds him of what he was thinking when he put them there in the first place.
I also like the simplicity of a box. There's a purpose here, and it has a lot to do with efficiency. A writer with a good storage and retrieval system can write faster. He isn't spending a lot of time looking things up, scouring his papers, and patrolling other rooms at home wondering where he left that perfect quote. It's in the box.
A perfect archive also gives you more material to call on, to use as a spark for invention. Beethoven, despite his unruly reputation and wild romantic image, was well organized. He saved everything in a series of notebooks that were organized according to the level of development of the idea. He had notebooks for rough ideas, notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas, almost as if he was pre-aware of an idea's early, middle, and late stages.
For anyone who reads music, the sketchbooks literally record the progress of his invention. He would scribble his rough, unformed ideas in his pocket notebook and then leave them there, unused, in a state of suspension, but at least captured with pencil on paper. A few months later, in a bigger, more permanent notebook, you can find him picking up that idea again, but he's not just copying the musical idea into another book. You can see him developing it, tormenting it, improving it in the new notebook. He might take an original three-note motif and push it to its next stage by dropping one of the notes a half tone and doubling it. Then he'd let the idea sit there for another six months. It would reappear in a third notebook, again not copied but further improved, perhaps inverted this time and ready to be used in a piano sonata.
He never puts the ideas back exactly the same. He always moves them for- ward, and by doing so, he re-energizes them.
The notebooks are remarkable for many reasons. Beethoven was a volatile and restless personality, always demanding a change of scene. In the thirty-two years he lived in and around Vienna, he never bought a home and moved more than forty times. I suspect that's why he needed the elaborate system of note- books. With all the turmoil in his personal life, the notebooks anchored the one part of his life that mattered: composing: As long as he had his ideas captured on paper, his creativity would never waver. In fact, it got stronger.
That’s the true value of the box: It contained your inspirations without confining your creativity. Le me explain how.
In the summer of 2000 I had an idea: to make a Broadway musical, all dancing, to the songs of Billy Joel. I have always believed in Billy's music. I've been listening to his songs since he started recording. I also felt in my bones that he wrote great dancing music. At the same time, I had just started a new company of six marvelous dancers, so good, in fact, that I was dying to showcase them in something big and ambitious. A two-hour dance extravaganza to all the hits of a major American pop idol fit the bill.
Only trouble was, I didn't know Billy Joel. I had never met him. I didn't know if he was an egomaniac or a bored rock star or a cool guy open to something new. On the evidence of his songs, which were literate and told great stories, he seemed like a down-to-earth good guy. That was his reputation. I got his phone number and called him up. I said, "1 have a project in mind and I would like to show you something." The "something" I had in mind was a twenty-minute videotape of choreography I had prepared to some of his music.
(The tape was a critical piece of preparation, and vital to selling the idea to the two people who could make or break the project. The first person was me: I had to see that Billy's music could "dance." The tape was visual evidence of something I felt. The second person, of course, was Billy. That's why I called him the moment I was sure. I have learned over the years that you should never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one. The usual routine for selling an idea is you set up a first meeting to explain it and then a second meeting to show it. I didn't want to leave anything to chance. Who knew if I would ever get a second meeting? When busy people are involved, a lot of things can happen to foul up even well intentioned plans, so I decided to go for it all in one shot and invested my time and money into producing and editing the twenty-minute tape.)
When Billy came to my home on Manhattan's Upper West Side, I mentioned that I had a little trouble figuring out both from his songs and the surname Joel whether he was Jewish, Irish, or Italian. He said, "My family is Jewish, I grew up in an Italian neighborhood, and every girl who broke my heart was Irish."
I said, "Okay, I get it now. Come and look"-and I pulled him over to my video console.
I showed him some dancing to his newest compositions-solo piano music from his classical Fantasies and Delusions album-because I assumed he would be most engaged by his most recent material. He loved the dancing. Then I switched to his rock hits such as "Uptown Girl" and "Big Shot." He said, "1 didn't know my stuff could look so good." End of tape.
I think he was flattered by it all, so I pressed on. I asked him, "Whatever happened to Brenda and Eddie from the song 'Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’?"
He said he had never thought about it.
"Well, that's the point," I said. "1 want to do a show using your songs to tell a story. I don't know what it is yet. But first, I need your permission."
He said, "Okay, you have it."
"I'm also going to need access to your entire song catalog."
He said, "Fine."
That was it. It was one of those rare moments: an instant deal. We shook hands and he left.
That's the moment I started my Billy Joel box for the show Movin' Out.
First in: my precious twenty-minute tape.
Next in: two blue index cards. I believe in starting each project with a stated goal. Sometimes the goal is nothing more than a personal mantra such as "keep it simple" or "something perfect" or "economy" to remind me of what I was thinking at the beginning if and when I lose my way. I write it down on a slip of paper and it's the first thing that goes into the box.
In this case, I had two goals. The first was "tell a story." I felt that getting a handle on narrative in dance was my next big challenge, plus I wanted to find out what happened to Brenda and Eddie, the "popular steadies." The second was "make dance pay for the dancers." I've always been resentful of the fact that some of the so-called elite art forms can't survive on their own without sponsor- ship and subsidies. It bothers me that dance companies around the world are not-for-profit organizations and that dancers, who are as devoted and disciplined as any NFL or NBA superstar, are at the low end of the entertainment industry's income scale. I wanted this Broadway-bound project not only to elevate serious dance in the commercial arena but also to pay the dancers well. So I wrote my goals for the project, "tell a story" and "make dance pay," on two blue index cards and watched them float to the bottom of the Joel box. Along with the tape, they were the first items in the box and they sit there as I write this, covered by months of research, like an anchor keeping me connected to my original impulse. ("When you're up to your ass in alligators," says a friend from Florida, "it's easy to forget that your objective was to drain the swamp.")
No matter what system you use, I recommend having a goal and putting it in writing. I read once that people who write down their New Year's resolutions have a greater chance of achieving them than people who don't. This is the sort of factoid that is probably apocryphal but, like many urban legends, sounds as though it should be true.
Into the box went all my research. A few days after we met, Billy sent his complete CDs. I listened to them in chronological order over the weekend, and by Monday I had the first hints of a story line running through my head. It was the opening line of Homer's Iliad: "Sing to me muse of the rage of Achilles." Billy was my Homer figure, the poet reciting an epic poem. The story would be set to twenty-seven Billy Joel songs about five kids from Long Island, from their high school days in 1965 through the Vietnam War and ending in 1984. The main characters-Eddie, Brenda, Tony, James, and Judy-could all be found in Billy's songs. I studied Billy's music videos for clues and meaning lurking in the songs. I watched tapes of his live performances through the years. I looked at TV dance shows from the era-such as Shindig and Soul Train-to refresh my memory of the dance styles back then. I screened Billy's lectures to hear what he thought of his songs. All these items went into the box. Because the show's story line included a pivotal section about the Vietnam War, I went to New York's Museum of Television and Radio to watch news footage, refreshing my memory of what we were told during the war. Then I watched the movies about the Vietnam War, from The Deer Hunter to Platoon to Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. All into the box, along with seminal books from the time period (for example, Michael Herr's Dispatches) and interesting period films (such as Saturday Night Fever and even one I worked on, Hair). I went back farther to study The Wild Ones and Rebel Without a Cause to get a feel for an older character in our show who'd wear a black leather jacket and motorcycle boots. All in the box. From another box, abandoned and buried, I dug out old research for an unrealized film project based on David Rabe's In the Boom Boom Room to develop ideas for a female character.
In the box you'll also find my notebooks containing all the clips and images and scrawls to myself that I file away to jog my memory: photos of Billy from the early seventies to the mid-eighties; news clippings from the period helping me formulate a visual style; song lists, from first cut to final cut, and the notes passed between music director Stuart Malina and me about why a song should or shouldn't be in the show. For example, there's an elaborate set of notes on a beautiful ballad from an early part of Billy's career, "She's Got a Way About Her," that is full of innocence and sweetness. But in my notes you can see the song morphing into something harsher, eventually becoming two simultaneous sleazy bar scenes, one in Vietnam, the other back home. I felt obliged to run this by Billy, warning him, "This is going to destroy the song." But he wasn't worried. "Go for it," he said.
Also in the box is a green beret that belonged to a military adviser I consulted for the show. He gave me some worthwhile information for the night patrol sequence, about how the men signaled to each other down the line, because the thickness of the jungle made it impossible to see more than one man along in the fanned-out formation. The signals were quite elementary (pointing to one's eyes means "look," fist lifted at a right angle means "stop," hand out flat pushing down means "get down"); we could have invented something equivalent for the scene, but real details created authenticity. Just seeing the beret in the box energizes me, reminding me how important it was to the man who gave it to me.
There are tchotchkes in the box as well, all of which link me to some essential aspect of the project. A pair of earrings and a macramé vest that started me thinking about costumes. Books about psychedelic light events that I might share with the lighting designer. Photographs of other production concepts that I could use to discuss space and detail with Santo Loquasto, my longtime production designer. There are research Polaroids from a reconnaissance trip to half a dozen village greens in Long Island where Billy Joel grew up. All of this helped me imagine the characters in their time and space when I started work in my pristine white studio in Manhattan. Eventually, the material for this show filled up twelve boxes.
That's how a box is like soil to me. It's basic, earthy, elemental. It's home. It's what I can always go back to when I need to regroup and keep my bearings. Knowing that the box is always there gives me the freedom to venture out, be bold, dare to fall flat on my face. Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box.
Now, let me tell you what a box isn't.
The box is not a substitute for creating. The box doesn't compose or write a poem or create a dance step. The box is the raw index of your preparation. It is the repository creative potential, but it is not that potential realized.
When a journalist gets a story assignment, he doesn't immediately sit down and knock out a finished piece. He has a routine, which is common to all good journalists. First, he reads all the background material he can get his hands on. Then he talks to people to verify old information, unearth new information, and pullout lively quotes (which he knows are the lifeblood of solid reporting). He jots all this down in his notes. Filling up the notebook can take hours or months, depending on the journalist's deadline. But only when his research and reporting are done and his notebook is full does he write the story. If his reporting is good, the writing will reflect that. It will come out clearly and quickly. If the re- porting is shoddy, the writing will be, too. It will be torture to get the words out.
My box is like the journalist's notes. It's the "reporting" routine I follow be- fore creating a piece. If the quality of a journalist's work is a direct function of how much background material he sifted through, how many people he talked to, how many times he went back to his sources to challenge or check up on their statements - that is, how diligent and clever he was in assembling his research - then the quality of my creative output is also a function of how diligent and clever I've been in filling up my boxes.
It's one thing to tell you that my Movin' Out box has dozens of videotapes of Billy Joel performances and music videos. That's obvious; if you're working with E'" the man's music, you ought to know how that music has been treated visually in the past. That's the bare minimum in research. It's also basic research to review relevant films from the era. But I'm not sure everyone would log time reviewing U .5. Army training films from the Vietnam era. That's the mildly over-the-top re- search that tells me I'm prepared-and arms me with confidence when I get down to the real work of creating.
Sadly, some people never get beyond the box stage in their creative life. We all know people who have announced that they've started work on a project - say, a book - but some time passes, and when you politely ask how it's going, they tell you that they're still researching. Weeks, months, years pass and they produce nothing. They have tons of research but it's never enough to nudge them toward the actual process of writing the book. I'm not sure what's going on here. Maybe they're researching in the wrong places. Maybe they like the comfort zone of research as opposed to the hard work of writing. Maybe they're just taking procrastination to a new extreme. All I know for sure is that they are trapped in the box.
My solution for them: This isn't working. Free yourself. Get out of this box.
Put it away for another day and start a new box. But do so with the faith that nothing is lost, that you haven't put in all this effort for naught. Everything you've done is in the box. You can always come back to it.
There's one final benefit to the box: It gives you a chance to look back. A lot of people don't appreciate this. When they're done with a project, they're relieved. They're ready for a break and then they want to move forward to the next idea. But the box gives you the opportunity to reflect on your performance. Dig down through the boxes archaeologically and you'll see a project's beginnings. This can be instructive. How did you do? Did you get to your goal? Did you improve on it? Did it change along the way? Could you have done it all more efficiently?
I find the box is most useful at three critical stages: when you're getting going, when you're lost, and after you've finished (that's when you can look back and see the directions you didn't take, the ideas that intrigued you but didn't fit this time around and might be the start of your next box).
Above all, learn to respect your box's strange and disorderly ways. As a repository of half-baked inspirations and unformed aids, the box can seem to be a haphazard tool while you're filling it. But when you want to go back and make sense of your path, every step is there to be found, and the order emerges if only in hindsight. Your box is proof that you have prepared well. If you want to know how any creative project will turn out, your box's contents are as good a predictor of success or failure as anything I know.
Assignment connecting to Chapter 5:
· Take one of the 3 ideas you described in the scratching assignment, and create a box for 1 of the 3 ideas that you are most likely to pursue when we begin Senior Dance Project class.
· Click on comment and give us a list of content inside your box.
· On your first day of class, you will actually bring in the box with the content you described.
Summer Reading and Writing Assignment 1 for Senior Dance Project
Chapter 6 Scratching
Excerpt from The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight. There is nothing yet to research. For me, these moments are not pretty. I look like a desperate woman, tortured by the simple message thumping away in my head: "You need an idea." It's not enough for me to walk into a studio and start dancing, hoping that something good will come of my aimless cavorting on the studio floor. Creativity doesn't generally work that way for me. (The rare times when it has stand out like April blizzards.) You can't just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun - paint into a painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.
Even though I look desperate, I don't feel desperate, because I have a habitual routine to keep me going.
I call it scratching. You know how you scratch away at a lottery ticket to see if you've won? That's what I'm doing when I begin a piece. I'm digging through everything to find something. It's like clawing at the side of a mountain to get a toehold, a grip, some sort of traction to keep moving upward and onward.
Scratching takes many shapes. A fashion designer is scratching when he visits vintage clothing stores, studies music videos, and parks himself at a sidewalk cafe to see what the pedestrians are wearing.
A film director is scratching when she grabs a flight to Rome, trusting that she will get her next big idea in that inspiring city. The act of changing your environment is the scratch.
An architect is scratching when he walks through a rock quarry, studying the algebraic connections of fallen rocks or the surface of a rock wall, or the sweeping space of the quarry itself. We see rocks; the architect sees space and feels texture and assesses building materials. All this sensory input may yield an idea.
You can scratch through books. I once walked into the office of a four-star Manhattan chef and his assistant as they were scouring through an enormous pile of international cookbooks, none of them in English as far as I could tell, obviously looking for menu ideas. They had a dazed, sheepish look in their eyes- dazed because I had interrupted them as they were zoning out in their pursuit of a good idea, sheepish because no one likes to be caught in the act of scratching.
Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it's an essential part of creativity. It's primal, and very private. It's a way of saying to the gods, "Oh, don't mind me, I'll just wander around in these back hallways. .." and then grabbing that piece of fire and running like hell.
I'm often asked, "Where do you get your ideas?" This happens to anyone who is willing to stand in front of an audience and talk about his or her work. The short answer is: everywhere. It's like asking "Where do you find the air you breathe?" Ideas are all around you.
I hesitate to wax eloquent about the omnipresence of ideas and how every- thing we need to make something out of nothing-tell a story, design a building, hum a melody-already resides within us in our experience, memories, taste, judgment, critical demeanor, humanity, purpose, and humor. I hesitate because it is so blindingly obvious. If I'm going to be a cheerleader for the creative urge, let it be for something other than the oft-repeated notion that ideas are everywhere.
What people are really asking, I suspect, is not "Where do you get your ideas?" but "How do you get them?"
To answer that, you first have to appreciate what an idea is.
Ideas take on many forms. There are good ideas and bad ideas. Big ideas and little ideas.
A good idea is one that turns you on rather than shuts you off. It keeps generating more ideas and they improve on one another. A bad idea closes doors instead of opening them. It's confining and restrictive. The line between good and bad ideas is very thin. A bad idea in the hands of the right person can easily be tweaked into a good idea.
I like the following exchange between the movie producer Art Linson and the writer David Mamet, as Linson recorded it in his book of Hollywood tales, What Just Happened?:
The first rule of producing is to find a writer with an idea, or get an idea and find a writer. Since David Mamet and I had done The Untouchables together we'd developed a good professional working relationship: You get me a lot of money, I get you a good script.
I placed the call: "Hi, Dave. "
"What s the shot ? " he asked.
"1 got a new deal. I'm looking for you to write a new script. "
“ Fine."
"There'll be lots of money. "
"Good. Let's do it."
"It's not that easy."
"Why?"
"Because if you don't tell me what it's about I can't get you the money. "
"Fine. What do you want it to be about?"
"1 don't know, that's why I'm calling you. "
" I understand."
"Dave, how about an adventure movie?"
" Fine."
"Something castable. Two guys, maybe. "
"Fine."
"C'mon, Dave, I need more to go on. "
"O.K. ...How 'bout two guys and a bear?"
"It's a start."
In Hollywood, an adventure movie with two guys doesn't quite qualify as an idea. Two guys and a bear does. It adheres to the unshakable rule that you don't have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas. Like all good ideas, it kept moving forward, eventually evolving into the movie The Edge with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin.
The difference between good and bad ideas is a lot like E. M. Forster's distinction between narrative and plot. Plot is "The queen died; the king died." Narrative is "The queen died; the king died of a broken heart." One man's bear is another's brokenhearted king. That is all you need to know about good ideas and bad.
The more useful comparison involves big ideas and little ideas.
You (and by "you" I mean both you and me, dear reader) don't scratch for big ideas. They come upon you mysteriously, unbidden, sometimes unwelcome (especially when they become impossible to execute). There is always an ulterior motive behind a big idea, usually that you want to catch people's attention, or make a pile of money, or both. Big ideas are self-contained and self-defining projects. I get them once or twice a year whenever I start to fret about the impermanence of my craft and want to make something enduring. I want people to remember I was here.
For me, a big idea is thinking I can film, preserve, and archive all my dances and calling it the "Decades" project. A big idea is waking up one day and telling myself I want to make a Broadway musical to the songs of Billy Joel. They are big ideas because they take up a lot of space in my mind, and if I commit to them, they will be all-consuming. They are big ideas because, in and of themselves, they are meaningless, little more than a goal or a dream; they cease to exist if I fail to follow up on them with the steady string of small ideas that make each a reality. For the musical, if I can't figure out a way to speak to Billy Joel and get his cooperation, if I can't select the right songs, if I can't construct a recognizable story line to tie the songs together, if I can't create the dance steps and find the best dancers and persuade people with money to back the show, and so on and so on with thousands of other daily sparks and imaginings and choices. ..then the big idea quickly shrivels and evaporates into nothing.
That is why you scratch for little ideas. Without the little ideas, there are no big ideas.
Scratching is what you do when you can't wait for the thunderbolt to hit you. As Freud said, "When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it." How is that different from a movie producer calling up a gifted writer and prodding him to suggest a plot line of "two men and a bear"? If you go halfway, you double your chances of getting a toehold on an idea.
Remember this when you're struggling for a big idea. You're much better off scratching for a small one.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes an experience he had teaching rhetoric to college students in Bozeman, Montana. One girl, a serious and disciplined student often described by her teachers as lacking creativity, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. Pirsig opined that this was rather broad, and suggested that she narrow it to the town of Bozeman. When the paper came due, she arrived empty-handed and very upset, explaining that she'd tried but that she couldn't think of anything to say.
Pirsig next advised that she narrow it further to the main street of Bozeman. Again, she came in without an essay and in obvious distress. This time,
he told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick. " :
Her eyes, behind the thick-Iensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street, " she said, "and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. "
When you're in scratching mode, the tiniest microcell of an idea will get you going. Musicians know this because compositions rarely come to them whole and complete. They call their morsels of inspiration lines or riffs or hooks or licks. That's what they look for when they scratch for an idea.
It's the same for me. A dance doesn't hit me whole and complete. Inspiration comes in molecules of movement, sometimes in nanoseconds. A quick combination of three steps is an idea. A turn of the foot coupled with an arm gesture is an idea. A new way of collapsing to the floor is an idea. A man grabbing a woman above the elbow is an idea. A quick combination of five steps leading into a jump is practically a mega-idea-enough to keep me going for hours.
When I'm scratching I'm improvising. Like a jazz musician jamming for an hour to find a few interesting notes, a choreographer looks for interesting movement. I didn't start out knowing this; it came to me over time, as I realized that I would never get to the essential core of movement and dance through a cerebral process. I could prepare, order, organize, structure, and edit my creativity in my head, but I couldn't think my way into a dance. To generate ideas, I had to move. It's the same if you're a painter: You can't imagine the work, you can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas-when you actually do something physical.
Here's how I learned to improvise: I played some music in the studio and I started to move. It sounds obvious, but I wonder how many people, whatever their medium, appreciate the gift of improvisation. It's your one opportunity in life to be completely free, with no responsibilities and no consequences. You don't have to be good or great or even interesting. It's you alone, with no one watching or judging. If anything comes of it, you decide whether the world gets to see it. In essence, you are giving yourself permission to daydream during working hours.
I suppose this is no different from a songwriter noodling around at the key- board waiting for a corpuscle of music to emerge and engage the ear, or a painter dashing off sketches right and left until one pleases the eye. That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action. I just do it and I consider the results, the consequences, and the truth (if any) later in repose. That's an incredible place to be. If you're privileged enough to be able to do that for forty-five minutes a few days a week, you have been given some- thing wonderful.
There was one big problem with my improvisation: I couldn't see the results. A painter has those sketches littering the floor to look at later. A writer can read what's been written. A composer can jot down the notes that enticed his ear. I didn't have a way to capture my improvising when I started out (this was the 1960s, before the invention of portable video). It bothered me that I was wasting a lot of good movement in the studio. So I trained myself, through muscle memory, to remember my improvised steps. I called it going into "capture mode." Then I realized that I was defeating the purpose of improvisation, because once I asked my mind to retain, it was no longer free to improvise without inhibition. They were opposed activities, freezing me in place. The act of retaining defeated the purpose of scratching, which was to stop my conscious mind and mental filters from blocking my creative impulses.
I want to be clear here. When I talk about turning off the conscious mind and mental filters, I am not talking about meditating or mining the subconscious. Scratching is real and tangible. It bloodies your fingernails. The key is not to block yourself; you have to leave yourself open to everything. When he needed an idea, Thomas Edison liked to sit in a "thinking chair" holding a metal ball bearing in each palm, with his hands closed. On the floor, directly under his hands, were two metal pie pans. Edison would close his eyes and allow his body to relax. Some- where between consciousness and dreaming his hands would relax and open with- out effort, letting the ball bearing fall noisily into the pie pans. That's when he would wake up and write down whatever idea was in his head at that moment. It was his way of coming up with ideas without his conscious mind censoring them.
The Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn says that ideas can be acted upon ~ in four ways. First, you must generate the idea, usually from memory or experience or activity. Then you have to retain it-that is, hold it steady in your mind and keep it from disappearing. Then you have to inspect it-study it and make inferences about it. Finally, you have to be able to transform it-alter it in some way to suit your higher purposes.
Some people are good at some of these but not all four. They can generate an idea, but they can't hold on to it or transform it. My problem was that I was generating a lot of ideas, but generating was at odds with my need to retain, inspect, and transform. That's when I discovered the video camera, which is the technical heart of much of my scratching. When I improvise in a studio, alone or with other dancers, I always have a video camera getting everything on tape, so I can review it later. For me, scratching for ideas became a technical scheme of improvising (generating ideas), getting them on tape (retaining), watching the tapes later on (inspecting), and finding a way to use them in a dance (transforming).
There are as many ways to scratch for ideas as there are ideas:
The most common is reading. If you're like me, reading is your first line of defense against an empty head. It's how you learned as a child. It's how you absorb difficult information. It's how you keep your mind disciplined. If you monitor your reading assiduously, it's even how you grade your brain's conditioning; like an athlete in training, the more you read, the more mentally fit you feel. It doesn't matter if it's a book, magazine, newspaper, billboard, instruction manual, or cereal box-reading generates ideas, because you're literally filling your head with ideas and letting your imagination filter them for something useful. If I stopped reading, I'd stop thinking. It's that simple.
For a certain type of artist, particularly storytellers and songwriters, everyday conversation is scratching. If you listen, you will hear ideas. I always liked Paul McCartney's explanation of how he and John Lennon wrote "Eight Days a Week." McCartney Was in a chauffeur-driven car on his way to Lennon's suburban home to work with him. He asked the driver, "How've you been?" "Working hard," said the driver, "working eight days a week." McCartney had never heard the phrase before and mentioned it to Lennon as they sat down to work. "Right," said Lennon, and instantly launched into "Ooh, I need your lovin' ..." They wrote the song on the spot.
You can scratch for ideas by enjoying other people's handiwork, whether it's in a museum or a theater or an exhibition. When his operettas began to lose the public's favor, W. S. Gilbert, the wordsmithing half of Gilbert and Sullivan, grew desperate for a bold reinvention of the form-or at least a good idea. He got it by attending a London exhibition of Japanese culture. This gave Gilbert the idea for The Mikado, inspired his partner Arthur Sullivan to compose his greatest score, and linked into a wave of Japanophilia rolling through Europe. All because of a visit to an exhibition.
You can also scratch in the footsteps of your mentors and heroes, using their paradigms as a starting Point for ideas. But you have to be careful. When I was beginning, I would sometimes find myself solving problems in exactly the same way that teachers such as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham solved them. I would catch myself and say, "Wait a minute. That's how Martha or Merce would do it. We can't have that." Scratching among the paradigms is a dangerous habit if it turns you into an imitator rather than a creator.
You can scratch amid nature. Mozart and Beethoven, for example, were ardent bird lovers. They would get musical motifs from listening to birds. Bird songs don't do the same for me. I would have to see a bird move-how it waddles, how it stays close to its center, how it flies-to spark an idea. But an actor might get an idea about character by studying the carriage of a bird. A painter would study the bird's coloring.
Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature-all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you'll find out how big a prize you’ve won
The tricky part about scratching, however, is that you can’t stop with one idea. Henry James said that genius is the act of perceiving similarity among disparate things.. In the empty room you're trying to connect the dots, linking A to B to C to maybe come up with H. Scratching is a means to identifying A, and if you can get to A, you've got a grip on the slippery rock wall. You've got purchase. You can move on to B, which is mandatory. You cannot stop with one idea. You don't really have a workable idea until you combine two ideas.
It's a simple dynamic. If you want to see it dramatized, watch Mike Nichols's 1988 film Working Girl. It is ostensibly a Manhattan fairy tale about a lower- middle-class woman (played by Melanie Griffith) trying to climb out of the secretarial pool at an investment bank and win her prince charming (Harrison Ford). But it's infinitely more interesting if you see it as a movie about creativity. This "working girl" knows how to scratch. She gets ideas everywhere. She reads a gossip item about a radio disc jockey. She also sees a business magazine piece about a conglomerate on the prowl for acquisitions, and an item about its founder's daughter getting married. She puts the ideas together and tries to broker a deal for the conglomerate to acquire a radio network. At the end, she's challenged to describe how she came up with the plan for the acquisition. It's a telling scene. She has just been fired. On her way out of the building, with all her files and personal items packed in a box (a box just like mine!), she gets a chance to explain her thought process to the mogul:
See ? This is Forbes. It's just your basic article about how you were looking to expand into broadcasting. Right? Okay now. The same day-I'll never forget this-I'm reading Page Six of the New York Post and there's this item on Bobby Stein, the radio talk show guy who does all those gross jokes about Ethiopia and the Betty Ford Center. Well, anyway, he's hosting this charity auction that night. Real bluebloods and won't that be funny? Now I turn the page to Suzy who does the society stuff and there's this picture of your daughter-see, nice picture-and she's helping to organize the charity ball. So I started to think: Trask, Radio, Trask, Radio. ...So now here we are.
He's impressed and hires her on the spot. Forget the fairy-tale plot; as a demonstration of how to link A to B and come up with C, Working Girl is a primer in the art of scratching.
Actually, in business it's perfectly legitimate to use the ideas you've scratched for without worrying about transforming them into something new. A talent agent I know was meeting with an opera singer to discuss ways to enlarge her career and broaden her appeal to the popular market. The diva mentioned that she would like to see some of the famous arias she'd recorded appear in films and on movie sound tracks, so millions of people would be exposed to her voice. A worthy objective. The executive had an idea for her: He showed her how the songwriter Burt Bacharach had produced a 4-CD limited edition of all the different singers who have recorded his hits over the years. He stamped out one thousand copies of this private anthology and sent them to music executives and producers around the world. Bacharach's objective was to get producers thinking of him when they were looking for tunes for their recording artists and sound tracks. The agent suggested the same for the diva: print up a private anthology of her best arias for the wider music community beyond the opera world. The agent was quite pleased with himself when he told me this useful idea. To my eye, he had taken A (Bacharach's idea) and B (the diva's desire to broaden her market) and come up with A (do the same as Bacharach). It was smart and practical, and it was probably the right answer. He'd done his homework. He hadn't done anything particularly creative, but then that wasn't his goal.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking this sort of connective thinking in business. It's smart and practical. U se what worked before and adapt it to your situation. With profits, paychecks, and promotions at stake, it's only natural to try to reduce the risk by relying on what's already worked. We've all been in meetings to deal with a problem. Everyone is stumped until someone remembers how another group solved the same problem. Everyone nods with relief. "Great idea," says the boss. "Let's do that." And moves on. That's legitimate connective thinking in business.
But an artist cannot do that. People don't want to see you copying someone else (in fact, if you do, they take special delight in figuring out who or what you have copied). Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guar- anteed to please. Artists have bigger goals. If being an artist means pushing the envelope, you don't want to stuff your material in someone else's envelope. You don't want to know the envelope has been invented. You want to find that out on your own.
Scratching is a wildly unruly process. But a few rules can make it a bit more manageable.
Be in Shape.
Scratching takes longer when you're rusty. Just as an athlete performs better if he's in top shape, ideas will come to you more quickly if you've been putting in the time at your chosen craft. If it's my first day back after a long layoff, I'm prepared to write off a whole week of work; I know much of it will be worthless, but I have to go through that process to get my mind and body back into shape. When my conditioning is right, I can feel productive in two or three minutes. You may already know this. Whatever your medium, if you've been away from it for a few weeks, the first days are going to be clumsy and fruitless. But things get easier as the rust falls away. The ideas come more smoothly. The hands on the instrument, the fingers at the keyboard, the eye at the easel respond in sync to the urgings of your mind and heart. You are fit and gleaming. You can't wait to attack your work.
Scratch in the Best Places.
When I'm searching for music for a dance, I go immediately to the best com- posers: Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn. I listen to all their music because I want to educate my ear and, more important, I want to find their best music. You only go around once in this life, so I'm not interested in creating dances to their minor works.
I'm ruthless about this. I look at scratching in the best places as if I were working at a tailor's table. You've got the bolt of fabric, the tracing paper pat- terns, the pins to attach the pattern to the fabric, the scissors to cut the fabric, and the thread to stitch it all together. But the key is the fabric. The better the fabric, the more likely you will do your best work. That's why finding a great piece of music is key to making a great dance. The better the music, the better the dance. My objective is not to screw it up.
Sculptors know that half their job is selecting the best stone to work with. It's all in the material. If they get the best material, they are over the hump. Directors say the same thing about casting: If you've got the best people, it's hard to go wrong. That's the way I feel about scratching among the masters. It makes it so much easier to get home.
You should do the same. If you read for inspiration, read the top-drawer writ- ers, and read their masterworks first. If you get your inspiration from art, look at the masters. If it's movies, focus on directors in the pantheon of greats. Scratch among the best and you will automatically raise the quality of ideas you uncover.
Never Scratch the Same Place Twice.
An integral part of Ulysses S. Grant's battle strategy was to never go back over the same terrain-you might meet the enemy pursuing you. More important, you gain no new information if you retrace your steps over already familiar land. Grant was always scouting new routes over new ground. That works for me, too, with scratching. I improvise in new rooms, turn on different music, change my reading habits, all in an effort to fight off old habits and shake myself up. If you scratch the same way all the time, you'll end up in the same place with the same old ideas.
Maintain the White Hot Pitch.
You've been there when a boss throws a temper tantrum in a meeting. Every- one in the room goes "Uh oh! The boss is mad. We better shape up." The tantrum, judiciously applied, is a great wake-up call to get people to do some- thing. It's the same for you when you're alone and scratching for an idea. Throw a tantrum at yourself. Anger is a cheap adrenaline rush, but when you're going nowhere and can't get started, it will do.
Scratching is not about control and repose. It's about unleashing furious mindless energy and watching it bounce off everything in your path. The hope is that a spark will fly from all that contact and combustion-and it usually does.
I liken this mindless high-energy state to lifting deadweight off the ground. There is a moment when you've bent your knees, grabbed the bar, and are about to neutralize the massive gravity of this object. At that moment your mind is blank. You are all impulse and intention. You cannot think about the weight. You just have to lift it.
It's the same with scratching. When you're scratching for an idea, you don't need to think ahead. You have to trust the unconscious rush and let it hurtle for- ward unedited and unencumbered. Let it be awful and awkward and wrong. You can fix the results later, but you won't generate the ideas at all if you cool down the white hot pitch.
Scratching is where creativity begins. It is the moment where your ideas first take flight and begin to defy gravity. If you try to rein it in, you'll never know how high you can go.
Writing Prompt for Scratching:
· During the idyllic months of summer 2009, scratch for 3 good ideas that you might want to explore as the theme for your senior piece.
· Click on comment and write down these 3 ideas and elaborate on these ideas and also share how you come up with these ideas.
· Make sure you include your first name.
Excerpt from The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight. There is nothing yet to research. For me, these moments are not pretty. I look like a desperate woman, tortured by the simple message thumping away in my head: "You need an idea." It's not enough for me to walk into a studio and start dancing, hoping that something good will come of my aimless cavorting on the studio floor. Creativity doesn't generally work that way for me. (The rare times when it has stand out like April blizzards.) You can't just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun - paint into a painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.
Even though I look desperate, I don't feel desperate, because I have a habitual routine to keep me going.
I call it scratching. You know how you scratch away at a lottery ticket to see if you've won? That's what I'm doing when I begin a piece. I'm digging through everything to find something. It's like clawing at the side of a mountain to get a toehold, a grip, some sort of traction to keep moving upward and onward.
Scratching takes many shapes. A fashion designer is scratching when he visits vintage clothing stores, studies music videos, and parks himself at a sidewalk cafe to see what the pedestrians are wearing.
A film director is scratching when she grabs a flight to Rome, trusting that she will get her next big idea in that inspiring city. The act of changing your environment is the scratch.
An architect is scratching when he walks through a rock quarry, studying the algebraic connections of fallen rocks or the surface of a rock wall, or the sweeping space of the quarry itself. We see rocks; the architect sees space and feels texture and assesses building materials. All this sensory input may yield an idea.
You can scratch through books. I once walked into the office of a four-star Manhattan chef and his assistant as they were scouring through an enormous pile of international cookbooks, none of them in English as far as I could tell, obviously looking for menu ideas. They had a dazed, sheepish look in their eyes- dazed because I had interrupted them as they were zoning out in their pursuit of a good idea, sheepish because no one likes to be caught in the act of scratching.
Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it's an essential part of creativity. It's primal, and very private. It's a way of saying to the gods, "Oh, don't mind me, I'll just wander around in these back hallways. .." and then grabbing that piece of fire and running like hell.
I'm often asked, "Where do you get your ideas?" This happens to anyone who is willing to stand in front of an audience and talk about his or her work. The short answer is: everywhere. It's like asking "Where do you find the air you breathe?" Ideas are all around you.
I hesitate to wax eloquent about the omnipresence of ideas and how every- thing we need to make something out of nothing-tell a story, design a building, hum a melody-already resides within us in our experience, memories, taste, judgment, critical demeanor, humanity, purpose, and humor. I hesitate because it is so blindingly obvious. If I'm going to be a cheerleader for the creative urge, let it be for something other than the oft-repeated notion that ideas are everywhere.
What people are really asking, I suspect, is not "Where do you get your ideas?" but "How do you get them?"
To answer that, you first have to appreciate what an idea is.
Ideas take on many forms. There are good ideas and bad ideas. Big ideas and little ideas.
A good idea is one that turns you on rather than shuts you off. It keeps generating more ideas and they improve on one another. A bad idea closes doors instead of opening them. It's confining and restrictive. The line between good and bad ideas is very thin. A bad idea in the hands of the right person can easily be tweaked into a good idea.
I like the following exchange between the movie producer Art Linson and the writer David Mamet, as Linson recorded it in his book of Hollywood tales, What Just Happened?:
The first rule of producing is to find a writer with an idea, or get an idea and find a writer. Since David Mamet and I had done The Untouchables together we'd developed a good professional working relationship: You get me a lot of money, I get you a good script.
I placed the call: "Hi, Dave. "
"What s the shot ? " he asked.
"1 got a new deal. I'm looking for you to write a new script. "
“ Fine."
"There'll be lots of money. "
"Good. Let's do it."
"It's not that easy."
"Why?"
"Because if you don't tell me what it's about I can't get you the money. "
"Fine. What do you want it to be about?"
"1 don't know, that's why I'm calling you. "
" I understand."
"Dave, how about an adventure movie?"
" Fine."
"Something castable. Two guys, maybe. "
"Fine."
"C'mon, Dave, I need more to go on. "
"O.K. ...How 'bout two guys and a bear?"
"It's a start."
In Hollywood, an adventure movie with two guys doesn't quite qualify as an idea. Two guys and a bear does. It adheres to the unshakable rule that you don't have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas. Like all good ideas, it kept moving forward, eventually evolving into the movie The Edge with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin.
The difference between good and bad ideas is a lot like E. M. Forster's distinction between narrative and plot. Plot is "The queen died; the king died." Narrative is "The queen died; the king died of a broken heart." One man's bear is another's brokenhearted king. That is all you need to know about good ideas and bad.
The more useful comparison involves big ideas and little ideas.
You (and by "you" I mean both you and me, dear reader) don't scratch for big ideas. They come upon you mysteriously, unbidden, sometimes unwelcome (especially when they become impossible to execute). There is always an ulterior motive behind a big idea, usually that you want to catch people's attention, or make a pile of money, or both. Big ideas are self-contained and self-defining projects. I get them once or twice a year whenever I start to fret about the impermanence of my craft and want to make something enduring. I want people to remember I was here.
For me, a big idea is thinking I can film, preserve, and archive all my dances and calling it the "Decades" project. A big idea is waking up one day and telling myself I want to make a Broadway musical to the songs of Billy Joel. They are big ideas because they take up a lot of space in my mind, and if I commit to them, they will be all-consuming. They are big ideas because, in and of themselves, they are meaningless, little more than a goal or a dream; they cease to exist if I fail to follow up on them with the steady string of small ideas that make each a reality. For the musical, if I can't figure out a way to speak to Billy Joel and get his cooperation, if I can't select the right songs, if I can't construct a recognizable story line to tie the songs together, if I can't create the dance steps and find the best dancers and persuade people with money to back the show, and so on and so on with thousands of other daily sparks and imaginings and choices. ..then the big idea quickly shrivels and evaporates into nothing.
That is why you scratch for little ideas. Without the little ideas, there are no big ideas.
Scratching is what you do when you can't wait for the thunderbolt to hit you. As Freud said, "When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it." How is that different from a movie producer calling up a gifted writer and prodding him to suggest a plot line of "two men and a bear"? If you go halfway, you double your chances of getting a toehold on an idea.
Remember this when you're struggling for a big idea. You're much better off scratching for a small one.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes an experience he had teaching rhetoric to college students in Bozeman, Montana. One girl, a serious and disciplined student often described by her teachers as lacking creativity, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. Pirsig opined that this was rather broad, and suggested that she narrow it to the town of Bozeman. When the paper came due, she arrived empty-handed and very upset, explaining that she'd tried but that she couldn't think of anything to say.
Pirsig next advised that she narrow it further to the main street of Bozeman. Again, she came in without an essay and in obvious distress. This time,
he told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick. " :
Her eyes, behind the thick-Iensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street, " she said, "and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. "
When you're in scratching mode, the tiniest microcell of an idea will get you going. Musicians know this because compositions rarely come to them whole and complete. They call their morsels of inspiration lines or riffs or hooks or licks. That's what they look for when they scratch for an idea.
It's the same for me. A dance doesn't hit me whole and complete. Inspiration comes in molecules of movement, sometimes in nanoseconds. A quick combination of three steps is an idea. A turn of the foot coupled with an arm gesture is an idea. A new way of collapsing to the floor is an idea. A man grabbing a woman above the elbow is an idea. A quick combination of five steps leading into a jump is practically a mega-idea-enough to keep me going for hours.
When I'm scratching I'm improvising. Like a jazz musician jamming for an hour to find a few interesting notes, a choreographer looks for interesting movement. I didn't start out knowing this; it came to me over time, as I realized that I would never get to the essential core of movement and dance through a cerebral process. I could prepare, order, organize, structure, and edit my creativity in my head, but I couldn't think my way into a dance. To generate ideas, I had to move. It's the same if you're a painter: You can't imagine the work, you can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas-when you actually do something physical.
Here's how I learned to improvise: I played some music in the studio and I started to move. It sounds obvious, but I wonder how many people, whatever their medium, appreciate the gift of improvisation. It's your one opportunity in life to be completely free, with no responsibilities and no consequences. You don't have to be good or great or even interesting. It's you alone, with no one watching or judging. If anything comes of it, you decide whether the world gets to see it. In essence, you are giving yourself permission to daydream during working hours.
I suppose this is no different from a songwriter noodling around at the key- board waiting for a corpuscle of music to emerge and engage the ear, or a painter dashing off sketches right and left until one pleases the eye. That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action. I just do it and I consider the results, the consequences, and the truth (if any) later in repose. That's an incredible place to be. If you're privileged enough to be able to do that for forty-five minutes a few days a week, you have been given some- thing wonderful.
There was one big problem with my improvisation: I couldn't see the results. A painter has those sketches littering the floor to look at later. A writer can read what's been written. A composer can jot down the notes that enticed his ear. I didn't have a way to capture my improvising when I started out (this was the 1960s, before the invention of portable video). It bothered me that I was wasting a lot of good movement in the studio. So I trained myself, through muscle memory, to remember my improvised steps. I called it going into "capture mode." Then I realized that I was defeating the purpose of improvisation, because once I asked my mind to retain, it was no longer free to improvise without inhibition. They were opposed activities, freezing me in place. The act of retaining defeated the purpose of scratching, which was to stop my conscious mind and mental filters from blocking my creative impulses.
I want to be clear here. When I talk about turning off the conscious mind and mental filters, I am not talking about meditating or mining the subconscious. Scratching is real and tangible. It bloodies your fingernails. The key is not to block yourself; you have to leave yourself open to everything. When he needed an idea, Thomas Edison liked to sit in a "thinking chair" holding a metal ball bearing in each palm, with his hands closed. On the floor, directly under his hands, were two metal pie pans. Edison would close his eyes and allow his body to relax. Some- where between consciousness and dreaming his hands would relax and open with- out effort, letting the ball bearing fall noisily into the pie pans. That's when he would wake up and write down whatever idea was in his head at that moment. It was his way of coming up with ideas without his conscious mind censoring them.
The Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn says that ideas can be acted upon ~ in four ways. First, you must generate the idea, usually from memory or experience or activity. Then you have to retain it-that is, hold it steady in your mind and keep it from disappearing. Then you have to inspect it-study it and make inferences about it. Finally, you have to be able to transform it-alter it in some way to suit your higher purposes.
Some people are good at some of these but not all four. They can generate an idea, but they can't hold on to it or transform it. My problem was that I was generating a lot of ideas, but generating was at odds with my need to retain, inspect, and transform. That's when I discovered the video camera, which is the technical heart of much of my scratching. When I improvise in a studio, alone or with other dancers, I always have a video camera getting everything on tape, so I can review it later. For me, scratching for ideas became a technical scheme of improvising (generating ideas), getting them on tape (retaining), watching the tapes later on (inspecting), and finding a way to use them in a dance (transforming).
There are as many ways to scratch for ideas as there are ideas:
The most common is reading. If you're like me, reading is your first line of defense against an empty head. It's how you learned as a child. It's how you absorb difficult information. It's how you keep your mind disciplined. If you monitor your reading assiduously, it's even how you grade your brain's conditioning; like an athlete in training, the more you read, the more mentally fit you feel. It doesn't matter if it's a book, magazine, newspaper, billboard, instruction manual, or cereal box-reading generates ideas, because you're literally filling your head with ideas and letting your imagination filter them for something useful. If I stopped reading, I'd stop thinking. It's that simple.
For a certain type of artist, particularly storytellers and songwriters, everyday conversation is scratching. If you listen, you will hear ideas. I always liked Paul McCartney's explanation of how he and John Lennon wrote "Eight Days a Week." McCartney Was in a chauffeur-driven car on his way to Lennon's suburban home to work with him. He asked the driver, "How've you been?" "Working hard," said the driver, "working eight days a week." McCartney had never heard the phrase before and mentioned it to Lennon as they sat down to work. "Right," said Lennon, and instantly launched into "Ooh, I need your lovin' ..." They wrote the song on the spot.
You can scratch for ideas by enjoying other people's handiwork, whether it's in a museum or a theater or an exhibition. When his operettas began to lose the public's favor, W. S. Gilbert, the wordsmithing half of Gilbert and Sullivan, grew desperate for a bold reinvention of the form-or at least a good idea. He got it by attending a London exhibition of Japanese culture. This gave Gilbert the idea for The Mikado, inspired his partner Arthur Sullivan to compose his greatest score, and linked into a wave of Japanophilia rolling through Europe. All because of a visit to an exhibition.
You can also scratch in the footsteps of your mentors and heroes, using their paradigms as a starting Point for ideas. But you have to be careful. When I was beginning, I would sometimes find myself solving problems in exactly the same way that teachers such as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham solved them. I would catch myself and say, "Wait a minute. That's how Martha or Merce would do it. We can't have that." Scratching among the paradigms is a dangerous habit if it turns you into an imitator rather than a creator.
You can scratch amid nature. Mozart and Beethoven, for example, were ardent bird lovers. They would get musical motifs from listening to birds. Bird songs don't do the same for me. I would have to see a bird move-how it waddles, how it stays close to its center, how it flies-to spark an idea. But an actor might get an idea about character by studying the carriage of a bird. A painter would study the bird's coloring.
Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature-all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you'll find out how big a prize you’ve won
The tricky part about scratching, however, is that you can’t stop with one idea. Henry James said that genius is the act of perceiving similarity among disparate things.. In the empty room you're trying to connect the dots, linking A to B to C to maybe come up with H. Scratching is a means to identifying A, and if you can get to A, you've got a grip on the slippery rock wall. You've got purchase. You can move on to B, which is mandatory. You cannot stop with one idea. You don't really have a workable idea until you combine two ideas.
It's a simple dynamic. If you want to see it dramatized, watch Mike Nichols's 1988 film Working Girl. It is ostensibly a Manhattan fairy tale about a lower- middle-class woman (played by Melanie Griffith) trying to climb out of the secretarial pool at an investment bank and win her prince charming (Harrison Ford). But it's infinitely more interesting if you see it as a movie about creativity. This "working girl" knows how to scratch. She gets ideas everywhere. She reads a gossip item about a radio disc jockey. She also sees a business magazine piece about a conglomerate on the prowl for acquisitions, and an item about its founder's daughter getting married. She puts the ideas together and tries to broker a deal for the conglomerate to acquire a radio network. At the end, she's challenged to describe how she came up with the plan for the acquisition. It's a telling scene. She has just been fired. On her way out of the building, with all her files and personal items packed in a box (a box just like mine!), she gets a chance to explain her thought process to the mogul:
See ? This is Forbes. It's just your basic article about how you were looking to expand into broadcasting. Right? Okay now. The same day-I'll never forget this-I'm reading Page Six of the New York Post and there's this item on Bobby Stein, the radio talk show guy who does all those gross jokes about Ethiopia and the Betty Ford Center. Well, anyway, he's hosting this charity auction that night. Real bluebloods and won't that be funny? Now I turn the page to Suzy who does the society stuff and there's this picture of your daughter-see, nice picture-and she's helping to organize the charity ball. So I started to think: Trask, Radio, Trask, Radio. ...So now here we are.
He's impressed and hires her on the spot. Forget the fairy-tale plot; as a demonstration of how to link A to B and come up with C, Working Girl is a primer in the art of scratching.
Actually, in business it's perfectly legitimate to use the ideas you've scratched for without worrying about transforming them into something new. A talent agent I know was meeting with an opera singer to discuss ways to enlarge her career and broaden her appeal to the popular market. The diva mentioned that she would like to see some of the famous arias she'd recorded appear in films and on movie sound tracks, so millions of people would be exposed to her voice. A worthy objective. The executive had an idea for her: He showed her how the songwriter Burt Bacharach had produced a 4-CD limited edition of all the different singers who have recorded his hits over the years. He stamped out one thousand copies of this private anthology and sent them to music executives and producers around the world. Bacharach's objective was to get producers thinking of him when they were looking for tunes for their recording artists and sound tracks. The agent suggested the same for the diva: print up a private anthology of her best arias for the wider music community beyond the opera world. The agent was quite pleased with himself when he told me this useful idea. To my eye, he had taken A (Bacharach's idea) and B (the diva's desire to broaden her market) and come up with A (do the same as Bacharach). It was smart and practical, and it was probably the right answer. He'd done his homework. He hadn't done anything particularly creative, but then that wasn't his goal.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking this sort of connective thinking in business. It's smart and practical. U se what worked before and adapt it to your situation. With profits, paychecks, and promotions at stake, it's only natural to try to reduce the risk by relying on what's already worked. We've all been in meetings to deal with a problem. Everyone is stumped until someone remembers how another group solved the same problem. Everyone nods with relief. "Great idea," says the boss. "Let's do that." And moves on. That's legitimate connective thinking in business.
But an artist cannot do that. People don't want to see you copying someone else (in fact, if you do, they take special delight in figuring out who or what you have copied). Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guar- anteed to please. Artists have bigger goals. If being an artist means pushing the envelope, you don't want to stuff your material in someone else's envelope. You don't want to know the envelope has been invented. You want to find that out on your own.
Scratching is a wildly unruly process. But a few rules can make it a bit more manageable.
Be in Shape.
Scratching takes longer when you're rusty. Just as an athlete performs better if he's in top shape, ideas will come to you more quickly if you've been putting in the time at your chosen craft. If it's my first day back after a long layoff, I'm prepared to write off a whole week of work; I know much of it will be worthless, but I have to go through that process to get my mind and body back into shape. When my conditioning is right, I can feel productive in two or three minutes. You may already know this. Whatever your medium, if you've been away from it for a few weeks, the first days are going to be clumsy and fruitless. But things get easier as the rust falls away. The ideas come more smoothly. The hands on the instrument, the fingers at the keyboard, the eye at the easel respond in sync to the urgings of your mind and heart. You are fit and gleaming. You can't wait to attack your work.
Scratch in the Best Places.
When I'm searching for music for a dance, I go immediately to the best com- posers: Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn. I listen to all their music because I want to educate my ear and, more important, I want to find their best music. You only go around once in this life, so I'm not interested in creating dances to their minor works.
I'm ruthless about this. I look at scratching in the best places as if I were working at a tailor's table. You've got the bolt of fabric, the tracing paper pat- terns, the pins to attach the pattern to the fabric, the scissors to cut the fabric, and the thread to stitch it all together. But the key is the fabric. The better the fabric, the more likely you will do your best work. That's why finding a great piece of music is key to making a great dance. The better the music, the better the dance. My objective is not to screw it up.
Sculptors know that half their job is selecting the best stone to work with. It's all in the material. If they get the best material, they are over the hump. Directors say the same thing about casting: If you've got the best people, it's hard to go wrong. That's the way I feel about scratching among the masters. It makes it so much easier to get home.
You should do the same. If you read for inspiration, read the top-drawer writ- ers, and read their masterworks first. If you get your inspiration from art, look at the masters. If it's movies, focus on directors in the pantheon of greats. Scratch among the best and you will automatically raise the quality of ideas you uncover.
Never Scratch the Same Place Twice.
An integral part of Ulysses S. Grant's battle strategy was to never go back over the same terrain-you might meet the enemy pursuing you. More important, you gain no new information if you retrace your steps over already familiar land. Grant was always scouting new routes over new ground. That works for me, too, with scratching. I improvise in new rooms, turn on different music, change my reading habits, all in an effort to fight off old habits and shake myself up. If you scratch the same way all the time, you'll end up in the same place with the same old ideas.
Maintain the White Hot Pitch.
You've been there when a boss throws a temper tantrum in a meeting. Every- one in the room goes "Uh oh! The boss is mad. We better shape up." The tantrum, judiciously applied, is a great wake-up call to get people to do some- thing. It's the same for you when you're alone and scratching for an idea. Throw a tantrum at yourself. Anger is a cheap adrenaline rush, but when you're going nowhere and can't get started, it will do.
Scratching is not about control and repose. It's about unleashing furious mindless energy and watching it bounce off everything in your path. The hope is that a spark will fly from all that contact and combustion-and it usually does.
I liken this mindless high-energy state to lifting deadweight off the ground. There is a moment when you've bent your knees, grabbed the bar, and are about to neutralize the massive gravity of this object. At that moment your mind is blank. You are all impulse and intention. You cannot think about the weight. You just have to lift it.
It's the same with scratching. When you're scratching for an idea, you don't need to think ahead. You have to trust the unconscious rush and let it hurtle for- ward unedited and unencumbered. Let it be awful and awkward and wrong. You can fix the results later, but you won't generate the ideas at all if you cool down the white hot pitch.
Scratching is where creativity begins. It is the moment where your ideas first take flight and begin to defy gravity. If you try to rein it in, you'll never know how high you can go.
Writing Prompt for Scratching:
· During the idyllic months of summer 2009, scratch for 3 good ideas that you might want to explore as the theme for your senior piece.
· Click on comment and write down these 3 ideas and elaborate on these ideas and also share how you come up with these ideas.
· Make sure you include your first name.
Summer Assignment for Senior Dance Project 1
Narrative writing assignment:
Summer of 2009, you experience something really _________ (eye-opening, fun and exciting, sad, embarrassing, memorable.......or any adjective of your choice and fill the blank). Share this experience with your class by writing a paragraph with the most vivid and action packed language that you can think of.
Summer of 2009, you experience something really _________ (eye-opening, fun and exciting, sad, embarrassing, memorable.......or any adjective of your choice and fill the blank). Share this experience with your class by writing a paragraph with the most vivid and action packed language that you can think of.
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