Creativity is an act of defiance.
Interpretation
Creativity challenges the norms and pushes boundaries.
Twyla Tharp's quote suggests that creativity is not just a form of expression, but a rebellion against convention and the status quo. It emphasizes that to create is to assert one's individuality and resist conformity, highlighting the power of creative thought in shaping new ideas and perspectives.
In practice
During a keynote speech about innovation in technology, this quote can inspire attendees to think outside the box.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.
I was very influenced by movies; I was very influenced by a world that had a sense of dream.
Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
I don't like records that are the same from beginning to end, that are too styled and slick. Everything is so designed and airbrushed and Botoxed, it makes us think, 'Oh, everybody's perfect except me. Everything's smooth except me.' But nothing is smooth.
If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.
To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.
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