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Words On Dance

San Francisco

December 8, 2009

Twyla Tharp Onstage Live

The Collaborative Habit

Book signing with Twyla Tharp after program

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Time 7:30 PM

Herbst Theatre, San Francisco

Reserved seating: $25,

Special student price $15 with valid ID

City Box Office

www.cityboxoffice.com

415 392-4400

THE COLLABORATIVE HABIT

By Twyla Tharp  

The sequel to Twyla Tharp’s acclaimed national bestseller, The Creative Habit, explores the art of working with others

 

Collaboration is two or more people working together towards a common goal in such a way that the sum of their efforts becomes more than any one individual's contribution.

In education, collaborative learning is replacing head-to-  

head competition. In business, the best leaders are no longer charismatic CEOs but team- builders who can inspire collaborative effort.  In journalism, we're discovering that the collective knowledge of the group is greater than that of any one participant. Choreographers are among the world's greatest experts in working together. Without dancers a choreographer’s work is nonexistent. (Compare that to a playwright, for example, whose work can at least be read without it being staged.)  “When I finally learned about the power and pleasure of collaboration,” says Tharp, “reaching out to others became the dominant theme of my work.”

 

Over the decades, Tharp has collaborated with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jerome Robbins, Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra, David Bryne, Elvis Costello and Milos Forman, among many other, plus thousands of dancers and nearly a hundred companies. Says Tharp: “In my last book, The Creative Habit, I wrote about the process of making new things. My aim was to take ‘creativity’ out of the artistic ghetto and inspire the widest possible range of readers --- even and especially those who have no interest in dance. The Collaborative Habit is a logical next step; it's everything I've learned from working with some of the most gifted people on the planet. And, again, I show how those lessons aren't limited to the arts --- they're the building blocks of collaboration in any field.” 

 

Good collaborators aren’t born, they’re made. Or to be precise, built, a day at a time, through practice, discipline, commitment, and passion—and most of all, through habit.  And like dancers, like intelligent people everywhere, they learn best by example. So Tharps’s book is organized around some of her best-known collaborations. Along the way, she emphasizes the lessons she learned: collaborating with new people, working with institutions, collaborating outside your expertise, working with friends, working virtually, with someone who is your opposite in personality and expertise, how to get the most out of your first meeting, and how to avoid toxic collaborations.  She illustrates her points with anecdotes and wisdom from famous collaborations in history, like the Curies, Abbott & Costello, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, and others.   The pages are full of advice, sidebars, take-away points and the specific lessons she has learned from forty years of working well with others.

 

Twyla Tharp

Twyla Tharp, one of America's greatest choreographers, began her career in 1965, and in the ensuing years has created more than 130 dances for her company as well as for the Joffrey Ballet, the New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, London's Royal Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre. Working to the music of everyone from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart to Jelly Roll Morton, Frank Sinatra, and Bruce Springsteen, she is a pioneer in melding modern dance and ballet with popular music. In film, she collaborated with Milos Forman on Hair, Ragtime, and Amadeus. For television, she directed Baryshnikov by Tharp, which won two Emmy awards. For the Broadway stage, she directed the theatrical version of Singin' in the Rain, and in 2003 won a Tony Award for Movin' Out, which she conceived, directed, and choreographed to the songs of Billy Joel. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1993, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 1997 was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives and works in New York City.

 

Book synopsis and biography provided by Simon & Schuster.