Book Review:
The Creative Habit, Learn It and Use It for Life, by Twyla Tharp
By: Lama Iskandarani
“Creativity is not a gift from the gods”, says Twyla Tharp. It is the result of effort and preparation, and it 's within reach of anyone who puts in the effort to nourish it. All it takes is the commitment to make creativity a habit, an essential part of your life. Twyla, the author of this book, has been working in the creative field for over 35 years, so it’s not surprising that she has accumulated so much knowledge along this fruitful journey. She’s one of the nation’s greatest dance choreographers and dancers, and she’s been remarkably successful at it. She believes that creativity is not necessarily just a God-given gift that only
The elimination of distractions, even the ones inside of us, like fears and self-doubt, is imperative to sustain a healthy creative mind.
3. Your Creative DNA Tharp claims that everyone has “creative DNA”, a combination of our key experiences and natural born skills, that add up to diverse sources for creativity for each person. It shows up in different ways, and notably in the distance from which one looks at the world; do you pay attention to detail or to the bigger picture? If you get to know your creative DNA better, then you can have a clearer understanding about the story that you are trying to tell the world. To help define this “Creative DNA”, the author suggests a “Creative biography” exercise which includes 33 questions.
4. Harness your memory In this particular chapter, I read a wonderful quote that says “the metaphor is the soul of art”, which links art to
The best failures are the discrete ones which occur in the privacy of your creative little space. What is so pleasant about these is that the more you fail in private, the less you fail in public, and the best part is that they can incite great ideas in the future. The point is that failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
12. The Long Run It wasn’t until she was 58 that Tharp finally felt like “a choreography expert”. All of these little habits and techniques presented throughout this book add up to something bigger. They add up to the day-to-day workflow of a creative person. It is in the repetition of all of these rituals, that a person can go on being more creative day after day. However, like any long term goal, there is no substitution for doing the work, and it necessitates more than just repetition of the habits. It requires dedication and commitment and perseverance. Achieving mastery takes time. Be patient. Never give
Shaughnessy, M. F., & Wakefield, J. F. (2003). Creativity: Assessment. In N. Piotrowski & T. Irons-Georges (Eds.), Magill's encyclopedia of social science:Psychology (pp. 459-463). Pasadena, CA: Salem Press. Van Hoose, W.H. (1980).
Sporre, Dennis J. The Creative Impulse: An Introduction to the Arts. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 310-378.
That exact statement makes me or any reader feel that failure doesn’t always have to be perceived to be negative. Failure can improve personal growth. We are always scared out the outcome failure will bring, but that is the silver lining for our personal growth. If we concentrate more on the effort we put into a certain task, we can grow by the steps we take along the way. Anyone can succeed, no matter their
... social dance. Many people in today’s society enjoy social; dancing. Chapter eleven dance concert, properly planning and establishing a dance concert is of the utmost importance. The partnership with the lighting designer usually takes priority over all other factors. One of the most important issues concerning customers has to do with mobility. The dancer must be able to move comfortably in the costume. The task of producing a dance concert is an overwhelming and tiring one. Chapter twelve dance in education and career in dance, many dance educators present the argument that teaching and learning dance as an art form is obviously absent from the American student education. There has always been and always will be people who have a love, desire, and passion to instruct and learn the art of dance, will ensure an important place for dance in higher education.
Shaughnessy, M. F., & Wakefield, J. F. (2003). Creativity: Assessment. In N. Piotrowski & T. Irons-Georges (Eds.), Magill's encyclopedia of social science:Psychology (pp. 459-463). Pasadena, CA: Salem Press.
With the scheduling of their parents, they have no opportunity to let their minds wander without guidelines. Moreover, the structure put in place has taken away the opportunity for children to develop their own interests outside of what others tell them. Furthermore, they are given countless opportunities to develop their knowledge without room for creativity, and hence become a shallow adult. She argues that creativity leads to the great artists, authors, and composers. Consequently, Quindlen’s argument is that scheduling has stunted children’s creative
Twyla Tharp, an American dancer and choreographer, was born on July 1, 1941 in Portland, Oregon. When Twyla was a child her and her parents moved to Southern California and the family opened a drive-in movie theater the Twyla worked at from the age of eight. Twyla began taking piano lessons at the age of two and dance lessons at the age of four. Twyla’s mother wanted her daughter to be accomplished in many fields so she enrolled her daughter in various arts and other classes such as French, German, and shorthand. Soon after beginning her dance lessons Twyla developed a deep interest in all the types of dance available to her. Twyla attended Pacific High School in San Bernardino, California and studied at the Vera Lynn school of Dance. After High school Twyla left home to attend Pomona College and later transferred to Bernard College in New York City where she studied art history. Twyla later found she had an intense passion in dance so she took dance classes off campus and began to study at the American Ballet Theater School where she studied with many great dancers and...
In this notable Ted Talk video "Do schools kill creativity?", Sir Ken Robinson discusses how public education systems demolish creativity because they believe it is essential to the academic growth and success of students. Robinson created a broad arrange of arguments to persuade the viewers to take action on this highly ignored issue, and he primarily focuses on how important creativity is. There are classes within schools that help utilize creativity, but they are not taken seriously by adults in society. Therefore, the value of creative knowledge decreases. Robinson uses an unusual combination of pathos and ethos to make an enjoyable dispute for implementing an education system that nurtures rather than eats away at creativity.
I was always a creative child; it was something I just could not not be. Back then I didn’t know how to be ‘normal.’ While the other children wrote their essays about their mothers and pets or their best friends, I wrote about becoming birds or about ducks building robots. Truly. I suppose I could blame it on my parents – my father for trying to teach me how to read when I was too young and my mother for reading The Hobbit by JRR Tolkein to me as my bedtime story – but I know, truthfully, that it wasn’t their fault. It is no one’s fault, for I do not see my strange imagination as a terrible, abnormal thing. I do know that no one in particular influenced my creativity when I was younger, but I remember being obsessive about certain stories. I remember when I got my first computer – a 16-color piece of, well, garbage that barely ran. But even though it was so old and primitive, it opened new doors for my imagination, and I spent my childhood either playing games about knights and dragons or running around outside and acting out my own unscripted scenari...
In conclusion to some up this essay the term ‘creativity’ will always cause a debate in the educational system as. There will always be difficulty defining it as many use the term too loosely to have a definitive meaning. It requires risk taking, it is difficult to portray creativity when schools are so obsessed with right or wrong answers for ways of doing things. Society teaches us the risks are bad because the government and its policies interfere with our own choices and decisions.
Howard Gardner has studied many creative masters within the context of his theory of the three core elements of creativity. These include the relation between the child and the adult creator, the relation between the creator and others, and the relation between the creator and his or her work. Karen Horney’s childhood and adult life have been reflected in much of her work. She was born in 1885, the end of the Victorian era. Horney’s father was a “God-fearing fundamentalist who strongly believed that women were inferior to men and were the source of all evil in the world” (Hergenhahn & Olson...
There is a magnitude of research put behind trying to find the link between creativity and...
Herein lies the problem. The children that we are educated are and will be faced with new challenges that current education systems all over the world have been failing to meet. It would seem that structures of mass domain education suppress the innately imprinted creativity found in every living person and widely known specialist on the subject, Sir Ken Robinson, goes as far as saying that we are, “educating people out of their creativity” (Giang, 2013). But if the school system is to make adjustments to explore and cultivate creativity more how are they to do so without losing total structure? Robinson acknowledges this by saying that, “in every creative approach some of the things we’re looking for are hard, if not impossible to quantify. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t matter.”
It’s best for people to experience failures to learn from them and never repeat them. The definition of failure would be “the lack of success.” Failures could range on how important they are. Some failures could be major and only affect a person in a small way. Some failures could affect a person on how the person views life or how the person lives it. An example of a small failure could be to check the milk expires to avoid drinking it. A person could of accidentally drank the rotten milk and then learned from that point on to check the expiration date instead of just drinking it. That failure wouldn’t be as important as other
Failure is not merely the reciprocal of success; moreover, it is the shadow of success waiting for the correct path of light to grow and unveil itself. Instead of being melancholy about failing, we should take our failure as an advantage to do the correct thing and succeed. After all, as said by Ellen Degeneres, “It’s failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.” I, along with the billions of other people on this planet, have failed many times in life. However, there are certain failures that can teach us a value so powerful that it can outpower the most preached teachings or morals.