I just finished reading two books today. The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, and Growing Young by Ashley Montagu. Here’s a bit of the echoing conversation:
Montagu (the anthropologist) on dance: “We need to realize that the experience of dancing constitutes something more than a body in motion, that it is in fact much the same rhythm that makes poetry possible, indeed, all art possible-as well as the cosmic play of the thinker’s imagination, the art which is intermingled with the finest and deepest springs of life. There is a release and a replenishment of psychic energy that laves one in with an oceanic feeling of freedom from which all constraint has fallen away, in which the free play of the emotions in disciplined response to music has its way…It would be difficult to think of any activity of greater therapeutic value.”
Tharp (the choreographer) on human beings: “I believe we all have strands of creative code hard-wired into our imaginations. These strands are as solidly imprinted in us as the genetic code that determines our height and eye color, except they govern our creative impulses….If you understand the strands of your creative DNA, you begin to see how they mutate into common threads in your work. You begin to see the “story” that you’re trying to tell; why you do the things you do (both positive and self-destructive); where you are strong and where you are weak (which prevents a lot of false starts), and how you see the world and function in it.”
Montagu on learning: “The child who learns to love will love to learn.”
Tharp on growing up: “…every young person grows up with an overwhelming sense of possibility, and how life, in some ways is just a series of incidents in which that possibility is either enlarged or smacked out of you.”
Montagu on growing young: “We must understand that we are designed to grow as children, not into what we misconceive adults to be.”