Synopses & Reviews
In a career that has spanned four decades, choreographer Twyla Tharp has collaborated with great musicians, designers, thousands of dancers, and almost a hundred companies. She's experienced the thrill of shared achievement and has seen what happens when group efforts fizzle. Her professional life has been -- and continues to be -- one collaboration after another.
In this practical sequel to her national bestseller The Creative Habit, Tharp explains why collaboration is important to her -- and can be for you. She shows how to recognize good candidates for partnership and how to build one successfully, and analyzes dysfunctional collaborations. And although this isn't a book that promises to help you deepen your romantic life, she suggests that the lessons you learn by working together professionally can help you in your personal relationships.
These lessons about planning, listening, organizing, troubleshooting, and using your talents and those of your coworkers to the fullest are not limited to the arts; they are the building blocks of working with others, like if you're stuck in a 9-to-5 job and have an unhelpful boss.
Tharp sees collaboration as a daily practice, and her book is rich in examples from her career. Starting as a twelve-year-old teaching dance to her brothers in a small town in California and moving through her work as a fledgling choreographer in New York, she learns lessons that have enriched her collaborations with Billy Joel, Jerome Robbins, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, David Byrne, Richard Avedon, Milos Forman, Norma Kamali, and Frank Sinatra.
Among the surprising and inspiring points Tharp makes in The Collaborative Habit:
-Nothing forces change more dramatically than a new partnership.
-In a good collaboration, differences between partners mean that one plus one will always equal more than two. A good collaborator is easier to find than a good friend. If you've got a true friendship, you want to protect that. To work together is to risk it.
-Everyone who uses e-mail is a virtual collaborator.
-Getting involved with your collaborator's problems may distract you from your own, but it usually leads to disaster.
-When you have history, you have ghosts. If you're returning to an old collaboration, begin at the beginning. No evocation of old problems and old solutions.
-Tharp's conclusion: What we can learn about working creatively and in harmony can trans- form our lives, and our world.
Synopsis
The sequel to Tharp's acclaimed national bestseller, "The Creative Habit," explores the art of working with others.
Synopsis
• An important and useful skill: In education, collaborative classroom learning is replacing head-to-head competition. In business, the best leaders are team-builders who can inspire great group efforts. Tharp uses her decades of experience to explain why teamwork is a superior way of working for some of us and inevitable for almost all of us. .
• The essential lessons of group effort: Tharp takes readers through the most common varieties of collaborations, including working with a partner, with institutions and middlemen, outside your expertise, in a virtual partnership, with a friend, with someone who outranks you, plus how to deal with toxic collaborators, and much more..
• Examples from one of America’s greatest collaborators: Twyla Tharp shows how she built successful collaborations with Jerome Robbins, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Frank Sinatra, Billy Joel, Elvis Costello, David Byrne, Milos Forman, and four generations of great dancers..
About the Author
Twyla Tharp, one of America's greatest choreographers, began her career in 1965, and 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. She has won two Emmy awards for television's
Baryshnikov by Tharp, and a Tony Award for the Broadway musical
Movin' Out. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1993 and was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997. She lives and works in New York City.