Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.
Interpretation
Creativity thrives on the material around us, but requires preparation to harness that potential.
In this quote, Twyla Tharp emphasizes the importance of recognizing the creative potential in everything around us. She highlights that while all experiences and materials can contribute to one's creativity, without proper preparation and the ability to fully engage with them, these elements may go unnoticed and unutilized.
In practice
In an art workshop, to inspire students to embrace all forms of creative input.
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.
Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.
It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.
That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art.
Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them.
My personal aesthetic is to be affected directly by everything about what you're seeing... I don't mind being dashed on the rocks... My most base act of defiance is to live a long time and still rock.
The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.
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