Twyla Tharp - The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together

Also by Twyla Tharp
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
Push Comes to Shove: An Autobiography

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tharp, Twyla.
The Collaborative Habit / Twyla Tharp.
p. cm.
1. Partnership. 2. Cooperativeness. 3. Teams in the workplace.
4. Artistic collaboration. 5. Tharp, Twyla. I. Title.
HD69.S8T45 2009
650.13dc2 2009033501

ISBN 978-1-4165-7650-1
ISBN 978-1-4165-9191-7 (ebook)

To my son, Jesse Alexander Huot. A collaboration better by the day.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labor.
Ecclesiastes 4:9

CHAPTER 1 What It Is, Why It Matters, Why Its the Future
Collaboration is the buzzword of this millennium. For some of us, its a superior way of working; for almost all of us, its inevitable.

CHAPTER 2 Collaboration Is Second Nature
As Children, we learn to work together. As adults, we discover the benefits of collaboration.

CHAPTER 3 Partnerships Challenge and Change Us
Collaborations between people with seemingly vast differences can yield powerful and original results.

CHAPTER 4 Working with a Remote Collaborator
Thanks to technology, we no longer need to be in the same room to work together. But we do need more flexibility and a willingness to adjust to change.

CHAPTER 5 Collaborating with an Institution
Collaborating with an institution has special problems: infrastructure, middlemen, a deeply ingrained culture.

CHAPTER 6 Collaborating with a Community
The old view of the audience as an assembly of passive spectators no longer makes sense.

CHAPTER 7 Collaborating with Friends
The desire to work with people we know and like is a strong one. Its also fraught with peril.

CHAPTER 8 Flight School: Before Your Next Collaboration
Collaboration shows us how to learn from the past, seize the present, and anticipate the future.

THE COLLABORATIVE HABIT

Jerome Robbins and Twyla Tharp

Im a choreographer who makes dances that are performed on stages around the world. Its just as accurate to say Im a career collaborator. That is, I identify problems, organize them, and solve them by working with others. Many of the stories Ill be telling involve the world of dance, but you dont have to know anything about dance to get the point. Work is work.

I define collaboration as people working togethersometimes by choice, sometimes not. Sometimes we collaborate to jump-start creativity; other times the focus is simply on getting things done. In each case, people in a good collaboration accomplish more than the groups most talented members could achieve on their own.

Heres a classic example of someone who identified a problem and worked with others to solve it. The year was 1962. The problem was a new play, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The collaborator was Jerome Robbins, the choreographer and director who later became my good friend and coworker.

As A Funny Thing was completing its pre-Broadway tour, no one was laughing. Not Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the music and lyrics. Not veteran director George Abbott. Certainly not producer Hal Prince and the plays backers.

And, most important of all, not the audience.

At the Washington previews, just three weeks before the New York opening, audiences were fleeing the theater. By the time the curtain came down, the theater was often only half full.

And yet, on paper, A Funny Thing should have been a huge hitthe creative team couldnt have been more distinguished.

What was wrong? No one knew.

What to do? That they knew.

When a show has script trouble, its common for the producers to bring in a play doctor. In business, hed be called a consultant. Id call him a collaboratorsomeone who works with others to solve a problem.

The doctor they called in was Jerome Robbins, who came to Washington from Los Angeles, where he had just collected an Academy Award for West Side Story. He watched a performanceand by intermission, not only had he analyzed the problem, he had a solution.

A Funny Thing, Robbins said, was a farce inspired by the comedies of Plautus, a Roman playwright. But Plautus lived from 254 to 184 before Christ. How many theatergoers knew who he was? Or what kind of plays he wrote? And, most of all, who knew what kind of play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was supposed to be?

Jerome Robbins offered simple, commonsense advice: Its a comedy. Tell them that.

Sondheim quickly wrote an opening number called Comedy TonightSomething convulsive / Something repulsive / Something for everyone: a comedy tonight!and once ticket buyers knew what they were supposed to do, they laughed. The New York reviews were cheers for an uninhibited romp, and A Funny Thing played 964 performances on Broadway before going off to Hollywood and becoming a hit movie.

Clearly, its a good idea to tell people what to expect.

Heres what you can expect from this book: a field guide to a lot of the issues that surface when you are working in a collaborative environment. Ill explain why collaboration is important to meand, Ill bet, to you. Ill show you how to recognize good candidates to work with and how you build a successful collaborationand Ill share what it feels like to be trapped in a dysfunctional one. And, finally, although this isnt a book that promises to help you find love or deepen your romantic life, I suspect that some of what you may learn from these pages can help you in your personal relationships. In each case, because collaboration isnt an airy concept but a practice thats found in our daily reality, Ill be light on ideas and heavy on stories.

Time to plant the fields? Everybody pitched in and got it done. Harvesttime? The community raced to get the crops in before the rains came. Where were those crops stored? In barns built by teams of neighbors.

In the cities, the same spirit applied. Anonymous craftsmen spent their lives building cathedrals that wouldnt be completed for generations. Michelangelo is celebrated for the Sistine Chapel; in fact, he supervised a dozen unacknowledged assistants. Even one of the greatest composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, chose to deflect credit for his compositions, writing at the bottom of each of his pieces SDG, for