You have a reputation for having risen early and gotten to the gym by 5 am for two hours, day in, after day out.
Tell us about that ritual and do you still enjoy it?
It's not a ritual and I never enjoyed it.
It's a reality and you do it because you need an instrument that You can challenge.
Just set the mechanism for the day you're going to have to do it.
It's kind of boring and it's kind of loathsome.
Could you give us a bit of insight into your inner dialogue around days when you don't want to go?
Is there a self-talk or have you learned to push aside the voice that says maybe not today?
It's simple.
If you don't work when you don't want to work, you're not going to be able to work when you do want to work.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
My guest today is Twyla Tharp.
Twyla Tharp is a world-renowned dancer and choreographer.
Her onstage and film works easily place her not just in the top 1 of all choreographers of all time, but also among the top tier of all creative artists, past and present.
I knew I wanted to host Twila on this podcast after listening to her book The Creative Habit, where she spells out how to build a schedule, habits and routines that make your best creative expressions come to life.
What I love about it is it's direct and it's action oriented.
There's nothing mystical about it.
She explains in her book how, even for people that have just one hour a day to write or sing, or draw or paint or whatever, to get the most from that time in terms of creative output.
Then, as I learned more about her, I was also super impressed that even in her 60s by the way, she's 84 now she could deadlift more than 200 pounds, which is more than twice her body weight, bench press her body weight for three clean repetitions and was taking up boxing to keep her movement and reflexes sharp.
As you'll see today, she is a phenom, and it comes by way of hard work.
She's still in the gym every single morning at 5 a.m. for two full hours.
Today we discuss how to build self-discipline in and around your creative mind.
And we discuss movement as a language.
There's this new idea emerging in neuroscience that bodily movement, then music and then speech is how humans came to communicate with each other.
We discuss that and how movement can help us process and explain our emotions and our ideas.
We also discussed Twyla's life growing up on a farm and how that shaped her mindset about work and community.
And we also talk about what it means to have and express your unique creativity and how to evolve your sense of taste.
Oh, yeah.
And we also discussed telepathy.
You'll notice the rapport between Twyla and I is very different than is typical for other Huberman Lab podcasts I've done
She is a real firecracker and we had a ton of fun exploring and challenging ideas, mostly her challenging me.
It was a true honor and pleasure to learn from such a virtuoso of the arts and, frankly, of life.
And as you'll soon learn, we can all learn a lot from Twyla.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.
And now for my discussion with Twyla Tharp.
Twyla Tharp, welcome.
Thank you.
Huge fan, huge, huge fan, and love, love, love your book.
Thank you. creative habit.
It's just an incredible book and it's taught me so much.
And I want to talk about that today, but I want to talk about a bunch of things.
Let's start with what a spine is.
I think this is such an important component of the book and this concept of a spine.
And the way I think about this is that many, many people feel they might have something inside them that they want to put into the world.
They want to access their creativity or their creative.
And there's so much information out there about how to go about that.
But this notion of a spine is really critical because it keeps us on track.
Otherwise it can be a wandering in the desert, suddenly you're swimming in the ocean.
Suddenly the phone, you get a text.
And please explain what a spine is and why this is such a vital concept for anyone that wants to create anything.
Spine means focus.
Spine means concentration.
If you think about it geometrically, spine is the center, both laterally and vertically.
So, if we're talking physically, you have a right and a left side, you have a top and you have a bottom.
And these elements are connected through the center, right?
They have to be coordinated.
You simply cannot function.
If your right side is going one way and your left side is going this other way, you're going nowhere.
So you have to move off your center.
In terms of how you organize information, there's also a center to it.
It's like okay, over here you have this and this and you can transfer what you understand from this arena to inform this side.
But it has to pass through a common point and that common point is the center.
And until you feel that or want anyone working, either physically or let's just use the word very broadly and generically artistically until you know where you are grounded, where you feel the most confident that you are what you said you're at sea.
You could be going this way, that way, unless you know how to navigate from the stars which few people do anymore you're screwed.
So when i think about a spine in a, like a scientific paper, i was taught, there can only really be one major conclusion maybe two, but one major conclusion of any paper, even though the data set probably points to 50 different things that are potentially interesting.
In terms of a podcast or a movie or a book.
It's sometimes not obvious to the reader or to the listener or to the observer what the spine is.
But my understanding is that the creator has to understand what the spine is going into it.
So could you give a couple of examples from your own work?
And maybe, if they come to mind, a couple of examples from visual arts or movies or something where it's clear to the creator what the spine is, but it might not be entirely clear to the person watching or consuming the content.
I am a great fan of Agatha Christie and Jonathan Carrick, okay?
And the reason why is because from the get-go you know there is one conclusion, but that their job is to keep you away from that conclusion for as long as possible.
Who did the crime?
Who did the crime?
Who's the killer?
Who, whatta, whatta?
What is the crime for starters?
And they'll delay as long as they can in their singular, you know, style, definite modes.
I mean, Agatha Christie has her format is practically that of a sonnet.
I'm sure you could actually count words and I've never seen a study that show along.
Okay, she's going to do red herring number one, X words in and this is where she's going to throw in the extra crime to push the tension up, to get it to go to here.
But we all know we're playing the same game.
I think that anyone who is successful in communicating to other people gains their trust, gains their confidence that you're not going to screw them.
How much do you think it's important to get into the audience's mind about what they want?
Or is the spine coming solely from the creator?
Is it about the creator's relationship to the work?
Or are you thinking about what the audience wants and what they need?
The question about audience and intention is a sort of sensitive one, because it's okay.
Are you manipulating the audience and are you there just to take advantage of them?
Or, at the other extreme of that spectrum, are you doing it because you're in an ivory tower and you're off here doing your own investigations and maybe they connect, maybe they don't, who cares, right?
Those are the two extremes, total manipulation of audience, total disregard. of audience.
And depending on who I'm working for or with, I do both.
To me it seems like it's one of the toughest things as a creator to both want to honor your audience's wishes, but you also have to have something that you want to communicate.
And we never know how things are going to land.
But for somebody who wants to create something, Maybe we could orient them toward their own spine or to the spine of the work.
Where does that start?
Well, I think that the word intention, which is so vague these days, but why are you doing this?
What is your purpose in doing it?
What's your interest?
Why do you want to do this?
What's in it for you?
Are you to learn?
Is this a contract signed?
Do you have an obligation to be successful to a producer who's investing a lot of money?
And that's a given going in.
That's going to determine a range of possibilities for you, right?
And unfortunately, the bottom line controls a lot of this issue.
At least for me, it's given if I've signed a contract to deliver a specific result.
That's what I'm doing.
It doesn't matter what I want.
It's do I get that accomplished or not.
It's, in a way, a kind of sacred bond, okay?
You honor your contracts.
On the other hand...
If I am not in a singular position of earning any money, I can do anything I want.
Or anything, not that I want, but anything that I think is important.
Okay, so how do you determine the parameters of important?
Because that helps with intention.
In the olden days, which dates as in before 19...
79.
Anything before 79 is the olden days.
In the olden days, that would include the 60s.
We did things because we wanted to change the direction the earth rotated.
End of story.
Good luck.
Tell me more about that.
It simply meant that whoever the practitioner was was completely exposed to everything.
Say you're a painter.
You're completely exposed to everything everybody is doing and you see another way of going about it, and you do that.
Everybody is plugged in to that same mechanism, and if they swerve into your area, you shift again.
You have to continuously be altering perception as an artist.
That notion does not seem so relevant these days, perhaps.
Why do you think that is?
Because you could live cheaper.
In the 60s, you could live very cheap.
Now you cannot live very cheaply as an artistic force.
You're paying bills, lots of bills.
I've long thought that the best work that people do is at the beginning, when they don't have any feedback yet and they're just being themselves.
It's hard to stay connected to that early energy of just being oneself without the notion of contracts and feedback and perception of feedback.
Do you think it's important?
I've never been of the persuasion that my understanding was the greatest when I knew nothing as when I knew more.
I've always been of the persuasion that the more you know, the bigger your challenge is.
If one looks at lives of artists, for example, Beethoven take Beethoven early work, take Beethoven late work very different, different challenges.
There is argument to be made, depending on your particular set of the coherency of the classicism of the earlier quartets as opposed to the late quartets and the total disillusion that he was able to accomplish at the end of his career, totally taking the sound world apart, that he could only actually do because he was deaf.
He had developed, during the course unfortunately, of a very long time decades the awareness that he was losing his hearing.
And by the end, he genuinely, basically was completely deaf, which forced him into his own world.
And there he looked at himself across the ages.
So in a piece, I think, of the Diabelli, which is the last thing he wrote for keyboard after the sonatas, and he actually had started the Diabelli 15 maybe even I'm forgetting my details here, but 15 years earlier than when he came back to complete it.
And he got bored with it initially because... to a younger composer, it wasn't challenging enough.
When he came back to it later, he had a humility about him that said that theme which I used to poo-poo because it's like you're kidding.
He's going, what?
And later he comes back and he says...
Right.
Not stupid, simple.
I could never have written anything that simple or that useful.
And he finished it and it's arguably the greatest set of keyboard variations in the entire repertoire which you want.
The earlier Beethoven, the Beethoven who has passed way through many different works a mass, an opera, many quartets and returns to it with this new information to look at it again.
Fascinating.
There's something about the more you know, the bigger your challenge.
Totally.
If I may, from what you just said, maybe also the bigger the opportunity.
Totally.
But the more kind of distracting it is and the harder it is to focus.
Part of that's physical, but part of it is also that there are many more options available with accomplishment if you will.
But you have to be selective about what you have available to you to work with.
In the earlier phase, you'll take what you can get.
And now if you take what you can get, you will be very wildly distracted by everything.
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Recently I listened to a conversation between my good friend Rick Rubin, who we were talking about earlier.
He's a big fan of yours.
You inspired his book, and he wanted me to tell you that.
Thank you.
And he was speaking with Gwyneth Paltrow, who's, of course, an actress and has done incredible things in health and wellness business, etc.
And she said something very interesting.
She said, people generally like to keep you where they found you.
And it's an interesting statement that I think taps into something that again, that as a creator or as a consumer of creative content feels very true, that we encounter somebody, like somebody goes to one of your dances or we see a great movie with Gary Oldman in it, or something.
You see a Basquiat for the first time and it either impacts you or it doesn't.
But if it does, there's this tendency to want to keep that person and the work they do in that place.
It's like we think we own the creator in some way and the work in this very naive and selfish way.
Do you think that that creates a real problem for anyone that's trying to put things into the world?
Because, as you stated, with time the creator gains knowledge.
You evolve your craft, but your fan base, the people that love you, they love you for something that you're not really any longer.
You're evolving.
Because somewhere over the rainbow syndrome, right, Garland always was asked for one song.
John, anyone is always asked for their hit because everyone wants to touch upon that which seems to somehow be their greatest accomplishment.
It's aggravating.
I mean obviously it's called cubbyholing and for the person doing the work.
There are artists who work serially right.
Who work in series and who make incremental changes and they kind of have, in a way, a stab at the best of all possible worlds.
But there are others who feel that, okay, you got that, I gotta go over here.
And that's because, in a way, they're right.
Because if you want to constantly be gaining the attention, you do it by change.
You don't do it by reinforcing.
That just creates a comfort zone.
And it can build a reputation.
It can build a career.
It gives you more and more of what you expect.
But for the person who's making the work, that can kind of be deadly.
Did you know Jean-Michel Basquiat?
No.
Okay.
A different generation.
I knew the painters, the downtown painters in the 60s.
Could you give me some examples of?
Oh, you want to know the famous names.
No, I don't want to know the names.
I just have a question about.
Tony Smith, Frank Stella, Motherwell.
Okay.
The reason I ask is.
Ad Reinhart.
The reason I ask is that earlier you were saying that there's a time or there was a time when a given field, everyone knew each other and what they were doing.
And I, I like Basquiat as I'm not like obsessed with them or anything.
There's a wonderful scene in the movie Basquiat with him and Benicio del Toro, or the actor playing him at Benicio del Toro, about this notion of fame.
We'll put a link to it in the caption so people can see it.
And it's just a wonderful example of how people will love you.
Then they'll hate you for how you change.
Then they'll love you for how you were.
And then, and it's, it's a hilarious and, and, um, Again, for a consumer of content, it's perhaps even more interesting than somebody who's a creative.
But the point being that nowadays I feel like there's so much stuff out there art and music and dance and Instagram puts it all on.
You know?
Smorgasbord display for us.
And it's kind of harder to know where one sits in a community of creators.
Because And so to what extent do you think that being surrounded by other creators, like visual artists or other dancers, then versus now, was or is useful?
Yeah.
The early era – also age is a factor here.
I was very young.
I was just out of college.
And I felt very much the student role.
It's a different deal now, and it's a different kind of responsibility.
And the work's going to be different.
In the early era, I went to see absolutely everything.
Now I go to see absolutely nothing.
And it is partially a matter of time.
But, more importantly, it's an awareness that you want to feel isolated in a way, because you are, and that's the truth.
So you need to operate from a truthful place.
When you talk about this plethora of information that is out there.
I do try to inform myself to some degree about different areas of culture, but I do it through a media perspective because that's how the consumer is receiving it.
The consumer is not at the individual exhibition or at the individual performance.
They're getting it through media.
So in looking at it through media, I already have – a double perspective on it.
I have the artist's perspective, but I have the journalist's.
If, for lack of a better word, we'll call it podcasting journalism.
Will we be forgiven?
Sure.
Podcasting is a weird thing.
We could talk about later what it is and what it isn't.
Okay.
We'll wait till this is off to discuss that.
Sure.
But the challenge for me becomes, okay, in all of this swirl of stuff, what do you believe?
Forget who.
You can't believe anyone.
But what?
What can you believe?
What is really grounded in a way that's productive?
And in thinking you know I've just come off a field, forgive me for diverging here for a moment two really hard years of working, a 60th anniversary tour.
That was a very big culmination of a long, long working process which put a lot on the line and which was unfortunately very successful, because success is much harder to follow than failure.
So here you sit, okay, babe, you've done it all.
Now what?
And so where do you go?
And you don't go around asking other people for the answer to your question.
One has to find a way of rerouting without abandoning who you are and what you believe, in order to just make change really.
How does that work?
So it's an extremely attenuated place to be.
Not many people make it this far.
Not many people are looking at their 61st year of work.
Right.
So that's like, okay, so show us.
Well, maybe I don't want to.
Maybe I will.
Who knows?
You said that coming off of a success is much more challenging than coming off of a failure.
I think that will surprise a number of people, because people – myself included probably feel like when you do well, you get the confidence that you can do well again.
There's that also.
Whereas when you fail, you're like, ugh.
You can do that again too.
Do you tell your dancers that?
No, because my dancers don't fail.
That's why I work with dancers who want to work as hard as I do.
Let's talk more about that process.
In your book, you talked about failure being critical, failing a lot, a lot in private.
Yeah.
That had a big impact on me.
I think that this notion of making lots and lots of failures and mistakes is Yeah.
When you're working, you don't know if it's a failure or not.
You only know if it's useful.
You know if it's exciting.
You know if it generates a next question.
That's useful.
You don't know if it's good or bad.
Let's go back to your dancers and how you put them through the paces, so to speak, because I think it also frames up this notion of rituals very nicely.
For the uninformed like myself, give us an example of of your day and a day in the studio, the top contour of that.
It depends on where you are in this wonderful word called process.
If you are at the beginning, it's all more fluid.
And while the one key ingredient I have always found to doing work is you've got to be able to do a schedule,
You've got to be able to tell people what time they're coming and what shoes to bring.
OK, that's already actually made a lot of choices for you.
And that's that I think is a good thing.
I mean, there's no point in just saying oh, we'll work whenever you get here and you know, bring whatever.
Whatever is not my favorite word.
So choices get made and a schedule gets done.
And ordinarily, again, it depends on what the project is.
But if it's, let's just give as much range here as possible.
If it's me making a new piece, I will set a schedule.
Dancers come in.
They will have done class themselves.
They will come warm.
Okay, that is not a part of my day.
I have my own work to do in preparing for that rehearsal, but in in also maintaining my own physical instrument to the degree that i can, because the more i can bring into the studio, the more i can give them and the more i can expect them to bring in.
So i have a tandem path going on here with the dancers.
And we meet up.
We join and I usually will come with a certain preset sense of where we're going with this thing and then see how it actually works in real time and real space, which is a very useful and tough mistress and eliminates a lot of fantasy very quickly.
Who decides who gets to work with you?
I do.
Well, that's actually not true.
In a way, they do.
The dancers that I work with.
I obviously audition, but I also screen from the perspective of who wants to work with me.
Who's going to come and say, yeah, I'll go through that wall.
Is that what we're doing?
I'll go through the wall.
And you want to know that you have that in the room.
You're not going to ask them to go through the wall all the time.
But you know, if it seemed like it was an approach that was going to be useful, you've got to know that that commitment is really solid.
And that's best indicated by their desire.
Not you're finding them totally appropriate, but their desire is.
Are most dancers living with the understanding that it's going to be very, very long hours and probably very little pay for a while?
For sure very little pay and forever.
Wild world.
Crazy.
Crazy and, to my way of thinking, not acceptable, because you know I'm all in favor of the folks who do the work and the training to accomplish physically and I don't make a clear distinction between either folks who are in business or athletes.
To me it is all the same enterprise, but dancers have nowhere near the possibility of earning a living that a great athlete has not even sort of kind of in the ballpark, not even in the parking lot, not even on the highway to the ball game.
How did this happen and why does it continue?
It raises interesting questions at how we support the arts or don't support the arts.
I think.
Are we taking over your show for the next two and a half years?
If we must you know this conversation, no doubt we'll draw some additional attention to dance, but the the larger issue of of you know, people being able to make it in the arts as not just as a as a luxury, but as a like, critical piece of culture and life.
I mean, i love beautiful things, i love beautiful dogs.
Most, all dogs are beautiful um, even the bulldogs, uh.
But I love beautiful things and it enriches life in more ways than just feeling delighted.
I think there's immense carryover from the arts to other areas of culture.
And so we could make an economic argument about that.
But it's part of the reason you're here.
But just sort of return to this business of ritual.
Can I interrupt you before you go there?
Because I'd like to take up two things.
One is the notion of the reality being that when we do a successful performance, I measure it by did that audience leave in a better frame of mind than it came in with?
In other words, we provide a service.
And we provide a service that gives them a sense of optimism.
Yea, verily I might even go to joy to the belief that they too occupy this body that does these phenomenal things.
And thank you Lord.
That's a service.
I think dancers should be paid more for that service and that it needs to be acknowledged.
The other point that I want to bring up is you've used it twice now.
I didn't stop you the first word.
Beauty, what is this?
It could be something I see or hear that it stirs some set of emotions in me that carries forward.
And what you just said a moment ago about the audience leaves in a different state.
I mean it's – the word that came to mind was like it's like really great therapy.
But in some sense it's better than that, because I was also thinking that perhaps in the top ten of all my favorite memories are several live performances that I – which I was the observer.
It's like those things really stick with us.
And I think they change us in meaningful ways, especially when we're in the audience with other people, not just watching on a screen.
They can be transformative, for sure.
And in a live audience becomes of course a whole other thing about costs and expenditures, but that it confirms that not only do you feel a new righteousness for yourself by a performance, but that you sense others do as well.
And that creates a community bonding.
And, you know, okay, football games, you know, everybody is very rowdy about it.
Most performances people are not.
But that doesn't mean that it still doesn't take that hold of people who are experiencing the same thing in real time.
We tend to dismiss that which is familiar.
And that sense of... is actually not all that familiar, but it feels very intimate, and it is.
But it actually is quite rare.
And the rarer a piece of art and I will call a performance a piece of art is, the more value it has.
And the more that is compensated for culturally and economically.
There should be a price point on beauty.
Let's put it that way.
Well, there is for everything else.
Well, I know.
Yeah.
There is a price point for beauty in terms of people could say well, the sunrise is free and the sunrise is beautiful, but seeing it in certain locations costs a lot more money than seeing it in other locations.
That's for sure.
Right.
And that brings up another thing, because in a way it's a kind of horrible thinking to go.
Yeah, it's a privilege.
You know what?
You can't pay me.
You can't buy me.
I don't have a price.
And that, I'm sure, is one of the things in great dancers, who are certainly not paid, as I've said before, and I'll say at least 300000 times more commensurate with a great athlete.
That is probably one, and I've never, actually I've never brought it up directly with a great dancer.
How much is it your own sense of independence and liberty? that makes you the artist that you are.
I think the name that most people probably associate with dance is probably Baryshnikov.
If they don't know much about dance, they know that name or it's familiar to them.
What was it about Mikhail Baryshnikov that sort of had him break through the common consciousness that way?
First of all, Misha Moore these days actually is remembered by younger generations from his later cultural input, ie
Sex and the City, than he is as a classical ballet artist, all right?
Let's just start there.
Because he showed up in Sex and the City as a character.
Yes.
Show business is a funny thing.
And that's how he is often recognized by younger audiences, younger people.
You know, folk.
What was he in the beginning?
He was... Actually, there was a cellist, then there was Nureyev, and then Misha.
Politically, he came across the line.
It was Russia-America.
He chose America.
He's our hero.
Plus which, he was gorgeous.
He's unquestionably, in my opinion, in that era, the possessor of a technique that was a culmination of the 20th century and that will never be matched.
And to see him work at the bar or to see him in the absolute interior realm of what the classical ballet was, was an unbelievable privilege.
But not many people saw that.
Not many people saw him at the bar, which is where you build your chops.
He also was capable of taking those chops and expanding on them, breaking through their boundaries, trying it this way, do it that way, but utilizing the power that he had from that simple classical base to take it outward.
Lots of inventiveness in that regard.
And the guy was gorgeous.
What can I tell you?
His looks made a difference.
But what does that mean?
It means a wide-ranging interest that you feel includes you as you, the spectator.
You feel he's including you. in his wideness of vision.
Where does that come from?
From the intellect, from his musicality, from his training, from his personality, from his cultural breeding Latvian.
And it is a singular commodification one of my favorite words that drives people up the walls when I use that word in relation to the arts of performing.
But he was very, very...
Very astute in many different areas, starting from an athletic ability through to a poetic sensibility.
It's interesting you said that because he was attractive that people felt that they were a part of it in a way that was not typical.
We all want to be godly.
We all want to be a part of the sublime.
Few can give us that.
So when they say you know artists or I include dancers I'm just broadly speaking.
Artists are like portals.
Is that what you mean?
I would accept that.
Years ago, I went to a Philip Glass concert at UC Berkeley.
I'll be honest.
I didn't understand it.
I left there in a different state, mostly of confusion that people were willing to pay for that.
I'm sorry if I'm insulting any Philip Glass fans, but this is my podcast.
I'm going to be very direct.
I was told I maybe hadn't seen the right Philip Glass concert.
I was very confused.
Why?
You know, I'm not a musician.
I'm not...
But when I like something, I know I like it and I tend to really like it.
But it's rare for me to encounter something that's like – it just felt like – it felt extremely experimental at every part of it.
And I couldn't tell whether or not people were telling themselves that they liked it because it was him or whether they really liked it.
What year is this that you went to this concert?
Gosh, this must have been 2008, 2007, 2008.
That's very late.
Okay, so Phil obviously has been working since the 60s and I've done one major collaboration with Phil and one recent collaboration.
And in the beginning, the audience for Minimalism—
Reich, Reilly, Glass, came gradually.
And so when the initial piece called In the Upper Room was done, it had a power and a force that involved also discovery.
Now the later piece, which is called Slactide fills a known commodity and was addressed slightly differently rather than I mean, you know it's percussive.
The lyric element has been reduced, okay, and You're a sensitive soul.
You think of the word beauty.
And that does not mean total elimination.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
It means inclusion.
And so the later Glass work was done in conjunction with a Chicago percussion group called Third Coast, who Phil's worked with a lot and who he trusts to do iterations, if you will, on the work.
And we iterated with a flute.
Flutes don't do this, flutes do this.
So we put a stream on top of that.
That's in the music.
I mean, iterations are a study in and of themselves, right.
What makes something different from, and yet still the same as?
Good luck with that one.
Uh, but that that was the different range, i dare say.
If you go and look at because third coast is produced a recording of this work you listen to slacktide And then tell me your response to Glass.
But basically minimalism took the lyric element and reduced it to just the temporal passage in time.
What's interesting, because of all the concerts I've seen, this one still sticks with me as like a stimulus to learn more.
Because one thing that I'm totally fascinated by and perplexed by is that, with the exception of comedy, the more one learns about something the artists, what went into the art, the dance, what went into it typically, the more one likes that piece or that genre.
Like the more I learn about something, then I can listen to it with a different ear.
I can watch it with a different eye.
Comedy is the exception.
If it's not funny, learning about the origins of the joke don't make it any funnier.
Learning about the comedian doesn't make it funnier.
It sort of just falls further and further.
See, I think that's true of your other art forms too.
I think you're confusing, forgive me, knowledge with instinct.
I mean instinctively you're responding to the humor, but instinctively a piece of art.
It can reach you but you can be baffled by it.
But we don't like confusion, so we might call that something we should learn about before we can acknowledge liking it.
That's one of the things that is, I think, really difficult and something I think a lot about, which is not only protecting but refining instinct.
Tell me more about that.
I know.
It's fascinating, isn't it?
I can't tell you about it because I could be writing a book.
Oh well, Rick Rubin, who I feel, even though you haven't met yet, you share a certain kinship with talks about taste all the time, about this.
You know a sense of taste and trusting your own sense of taste as a consumer and as a creator is so key.
That's why I brought up the Philip Glass thing, because I'm not writing off Glass on the basis of one concert.
But I...
I didn't walk out of there thinking like, maybe I'm an idiot.
Maybe I didn't get it.
I thought, and I didn't think they're all idiots.
I just thought, I guess I'm just different because everyone else here seems to really love this.
And this is like, I just, it doesn't hit me right.
It's like, uh, I don't like sardines, never liked sardines.
You give me a hundred sardines.
I'm going to hate them a hundred times more than the first sardine.
I promise.
Cause I've eaten a hundred sardines.
It's just, but I don't care that I don't like sardines.
I just, I'm over it.
I was over it from the first sardine.
Right.
Phil's on the cusp of the avant-garde.
The avant-garde is a smug place to be and can be very aggravating and can also be not that bright and very indulgent.
There might have been some sense of that to it.
The avant-garde can confuse itself with originality and vice versa.
Do you think it's important for dancers to be classically trained before they get into other forms?
To be classically trained, absolutely.
You want to be a musician and not understand the circle of fifths, the harmonies of construction of all music.
No.
Ballet is a format for the human body moving in space that has evolved over many centuries and has got a head start on us.
And if you want to learn about how you move, you might as well try and jump a little further forward by studying ballet.
I don't care.
Ultimately, if your arabesque, which is one leg behind, one leg under, right?
If your arabesque is aligned in a perfectly classical manner, unless it's a perfectly classical ballet, but I do care.
You have that gear and you can reference it in terms of where's the leg going to move from and does it get to that point.
Can it stop right on its center or not?
That's what ballet can do.
If there's a proper way for a movement to be done, The limb, every element within the limb, has to move from point A to point B in a certain trajectory.
And people come in different sizes and shapes.
And you've got multiple dancers on stage.
How do you reconcile that?
You don't.
And the word is properly, properly.
What is proper?
I had the experience of working with the Kirov in St.
Petersburg.
And I went to their school and the children are lined up and they are exact replicas and they have a huge selection mechanism throughout the country for picking those 10 or 12 kids that are going to be in there, of whatever age.
And I saw one group of little boys, less than eight years old.
There were probably eight or nine of them in their little black shorts, their little white shirts.
And I just came in briefly and they were being, you know, as they do.
It's a part of the tradition and it's wonderful being very respectful.
And it was like oh, come in and you will sit here and they will continue, and then we're getting moved to the next class.
And one little boy came out and said, no, no, no, we want to do more.
So we went back.
And they started jumping out of sequence because the ballet class is very carefully constructed to warm up the body and also to develop the training.
So you're working both laterally and in depth in every technique class.
They went out of sequence so the boys could jump, which is usually not done until the very end of class.
And this little guy had real what we call ballon.
He could go up and he could like, for a moment, it seems like he's able to suspend.
He knew he had that.
He could fly.
And he knew I wouldn't see that at the bar, so he wanted to butt.
He was what we call pronated.
His feet were hyperextended to the outside, so he's not going straight up through the metatarsal.
He's going up through the outside of the leg.
And, you know, I pulled the teacher out and I said, you know, that kid's phenomenally talented.
And he said, yeah, we know.
And I said, but he's pronated.
He said, we know that too, but we have eight other ones.
Like we, if he doesn't figure that out, he's out and we'll bring in another one.
And this can be the difference between a child who grows into an adult with a career and a life and one who's lost.
So parents are very protective of trying to get this opportunity for their kids and it's heartbreaking.
And the way they are trained is they are wrenched into these positions.
And I saw in an older class of young girls, an arabesque, and one leg was not slightly behind.
The teacher came and literally pinned the leg behind with one arm and drew the shoulder out this way, literally pushed her and then released her.
And that's how they teach.
You think that's going to happen in America?
I don't think so.
And that's what it takes to create a line of people who at the bar hit exactly the same arabesque.
It's both a thing of extraordinary beauty and a thing of incredible lack of choice, because that arabesque is going to be set for life in that one angular demarcation, right.
And you know, heaven knows, here in the west we like to encourage all kinds of wanderings around, which is hard to get through the head of a child who's been trained in this way to stay within those parameters.
And it says something also obviously, about the political situation right, those kids don't have a lot of choice, they toe the line.
So is the goal to get that uniformity?
Absolutely.
And it's I mean for a person who works sometimes to what's called unison.
There are times when you want I don't do it that often it's a lot of work and I don't like what it says about democracy.
But if you need to have unison, you want unison.
And that means an exact agreement on time and space, right?
Now your other question about what about different body types and so forth?
I can accommodate that because I can gain my unison from the center.
What we're talking about at the ballet here.
It gains it from the periphery, from the exterior point, from the broad reach.
I'll accept my broad reach is not going to be actually in uniform.
But my center is going to be, and I'll make that, it's a compromise of sorts.
It's not really a compromise.
It's an agreement.
I'll make that definition because I want them to work from an interior purpose and the visuals of it are your problem.
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I'm going to ask a couple of questions in the frame of biology.
Okay.
That I think I'm hoping you might find interesting, but you certainly have the information that I'm seeking here.
First off, you may know this, but if you don't, there's a great Nobel Prize winning physiologist.
His name was Sherrington and he said the final common path is movement.
That, basically the movement of an organism, especially mammals, is really what the nervous system is constructed for.
And more modern theories are that movement came and dance came, then song, then language.
But that movement is the foundation of everything.
As it relates to evolution of a species, finding mates, finding food.
Can I interrupt you?
Please.
It is even more basic because movement is the first thing we're going to do.
And you don't make any sound until you can move parts of you.
You don't feed yourself until you can move that hand.
You don't write anything, language, music, or nada without movement.
Why do we therefore stick movement way down here under the bottom of our cultural heap as somehow shameful or what?
What is it with the aspect of dance that makes it a less kind of revered format than sculpture or painting or music?
A secondary handmaiden to the arts, really?
Well, I certainly appreciate movement.
And I know that and I like to think that people's obsession with athleticism in some sense reflects that too.
Totally.
I've been wanting to ask you this question for a very long time, since I heard your book, even though it's not about the creative process.
And here goes.
I'm going to keep this as brief as possible, just to give the raw materials for your response.
So the motor neurons, the neurons that control movement, they control movement of the trunk.
They control movement of the fine digits of the fingers, that are, the fingers, the digits as we call them in science right.
Nerd speak.
The wrists, everything.
So we say from proximal to distal, like from center out.
There's this incredible thing that's been discovered over the last 20 years or so, which is that The molecular identities of the neurons that control the movement of my trunk and your trunk forward and back and side to side are exactly the same as the neurons that control undulation in a fish.
The neurons that control the movement of the proximal limbs, like the upper arms and the thighs, are molecularly identical to the neurons that exist to control fin movement in fish, and that what evolved was progressively more and more motor neurons, so that we, as old world primates, can manipulate the fine digits like so.
Okay, so that's fine.
That just tells you that there's this kind of primitive to more evolved structure of neurons that control movement from center out.
What's fascinating to me is that, while I'm sure there are people who can move their trunk at very high frequency undulate very high frequency that's a hard thing to do.
That generally has to be learned.
Like I can move my trunk slowly from side to side, but it's hard to move it very fast from side to side.
But I can move my fingers very fast.
And so there's basically a frequency map from the center out on the body.
So now, when I look at the way people move, I think because I'm a neuroscientist and I have this knowledge in my head like they're communicating frequency.
And frequency in The visual in photon space gives you very interesting.
You know we have wavelength.
We have also frequency.
In sound, you have low and high pitches, low to high pitch.
And in other domains, you also have this.
And so to me, first of all, I'd love your thoughts on this.
I'm not asking for validation of a theory.
This is just is what it is.
I didn't come up with this.
But I wonder whether or not consciously or unconsciously, when you've choreographed dance, whether or not you're making music with movement in a way that maps on to this idea of a frequency map from center out.
Maybe, in part, no.
Sweetness, my love.
Did we not discuss already, much earlier, the importance and specificity of center?
Now what you're saying about the different rates of the tendrils, the neurons, the cellular Yeah, the neurons that control the trunk versus the upper arms, versus the digits.
Yeah, this has got more choice, can make more choice than this can make.
Do I think about the parts of the body as sometimes?
In other words, the legs can be working at one rate of speed, say half-time of what the arm is doing.
And they'll be on the same metronomic base, but they'll be operating at a different speed.
Certainly I would think of that.
When I think about power, that sometimes you can isolate through the center and there will be like a huge impact from the top, but that the lower body will be fluid sometimes.
I mean, I've ripped off Tai Chi forever.
It's okay.
So we're doing Tai Chi and suddenly we're going, and then we're back into it, right?
So it's just like a jolt goes through it and I suppose that's a change in – your neurological construct.
I mean, what interests me in what you're saying is a part of the nightmare of my life, which is dance has difficulty.
And one of the reasons it has difficulty in being registered by many people in our culture is that it doesn't have easy access to being documented and recorded in the way that music does or language does.
What you're saying I've argued for many years should be a way of documenting movement that people could read, and then they could read the dance, and then they would feel grounded in that tradition and understanding of that tradition.
They could study that tradition.
That's not now possible.
I'd like to talk about the creative process a bit in a way that perhaps people can structure some of their own creative pursuits.
At what point do you know the spine?
The beginning and the end.
Okay.
Okay.
What do I mean?
In the beginning, you hope for it and you have a little taste of it, or you wouldn't be able to.
I wouldn't be able to start without the tiniest little indication.
There's something there that's actually going to hook it and that's going to allow me to start building, and This is where process becomes very reassuring.
You start building the wall.
You're just mixing the mortar and putting the brick in, mixing the mortar and putting the brick.
And the wall grows and it develops all of this stuff happening.
And you're just doing the mortar and the brick.
And it's very not menacing and extraordinarily rewarding in the place you want to live.
But you can't because you've got to finish the work and let it go.
A dismal moment.
Maybe we put this into example.
Let's say I want to write a short story.
I realize you're a choreographer, not a writing instructor.
And then you say, well, someone says that they want to write stories or books.
So what's the spine?
The first thing is what's the idea?
The first thing is where is the story?
I mean, some writers have to know the end before they can start at the beginning.
Others want nothing to do with the end until they've at least reached the middle, because they want the work to find itself.
That all is.
You know, that's a part of the privilege of being a writer and the pain of being a writer.
But the construct of starting, sometimes it's simply habit and discipline.
And you are going to go in and you are going to start at, let's say, 645 every morning and you're going to give yourself.
You've only got an hour and a half, okay.
I'm not talking about you're a professional writer.
I'm talking about.
You're a person who maybe wants to become a professional writer, but who's got at least one other job and maybe two and probably a kid to deal with.
An hour and a half is a lot of time in that life.
So you've got to start with something.
And either there's an idea that you really are energized by, or just you know, you start writing something, get something on the page and bit by bit it becomes a habit, and maybe that habit evolves and maybe it doesn't, and maybe you give it up and maybe you find that you.
Then you get an idea, you find something you keep returning to and it pulls you it, it hypnotizes you, it makes you want to follow it, see where it will go, to see how it will develop, and And then at a certain point it's done.
It's played out.
Maybe you can guide that so that it becomes more exciting and you learn how to build as you're going along.
And you learn how to direct it so that it's going to get to either a surprising end, where it has to end, and the reader is going to say I should have seen that.
Or you're going to say, I should have seen that.
Or you're going to go, no way.
You're a liar.
I'm not going to buy this book.
But the showing up at 6.45 consistently is the bricklaying that's essential.
Yeah, because it allows you to think that you could be a writer.
Sort of living into a delusion that could be a reality.
Could be.
Yeah.
And maybe it's not a delusion, because maybe what you start to write immediately is a very interesting sentence or two.
Some days.
Some days.
Yeah, you can't expect a good time every day.
You might want to quote me on that.
You have a reputation for having risen early and gotten to the gym by 5 am for two hours eating three hard-boiled eggs, post-workout day in after day out, for a very long time.
Tell us about that ritual, and do you still enjoy it?
It's not a ritual, and I never enjoyed it.
It's a reality, and you do it because you need an instrument that you can challenge.
And in order to challenge something, you've got to know how it stands.
I mean, I could challenge you wouldn't want me to the centering of this, but I can only do it if it's already grounded.
Then I can try to throw it off.
You can't just throw things off.
They've got to be set before you can throw them off, right?
So that is you just set the mechanism for the day you're going to have to do it.
It's kind of boring and it's kind of loathsome.
I would rather go to the gym than brush my teeth, I'll tell you that.
Could you give us a bit of insight into your inner dialogue around days when you don't want to go?
Is there a self-talk or have you learned to push aside the voice that says maybe not today?
Yeah, no, no, no, no.
It's simple.
If you don't work when you don't want to work, you're not going to be able to work when you do want to work.
End of story.
Were you always like this?
What do you mean, like this?
I didn't mean that in that sense.
And you know I didn't.
I don't.
You know I didn't.
You know I didn't.
I meant have you always been this disciplined and had this discipline, clear view of the necessity for hard work?
My mother was an extraordinary force in anybody's life.
She happened to be in mine.
Okay.
I was trained as a very young child to practice. whether anything, everything had to be practiced.
It had to be scheduled to be practiced.
And time is limited and you don't waste it.
And you work very hard and you try to maximize that period of time because otherwise you're being wasteful.
And while I said I'm from San Bernardino, I am, but I'm not.
I am from the Midwest.
I was born in Indiana and left when I was eight.
But up until that point I had the extraordinary good fortune of being on my grandparents' farm for long stretches of time without my parents.
And these farms were in Amish territory and the family's Quaker.
And the land was the land, period.
There was no electricity.
There were no phones.
There was plant the seed, grow the seed, kill the hogs.
Ring the chicken's neck and you work or you don't eat.
Yeah, the Midwest sensibility is something to behold.
I have a lot of friends in the Midwest.
There's a real decency out there in terms of how people communicate with one another.
They do and don't know.
And there's a real thing to farmers.
At Stanford, when I was a postdoc, there was a MD-PhD student in the laboratory.
She had grown up on a mushroom farm not the psilocybin mushrooms, the kind you eat and don't hallucinate on a mushroom farm in rural Pennsylvania.
And her work ethic and this is at Stanford School of Medicine where people are very driven, not just on average, but her work ethic was unbelievable.
And her, cheerfulness about it was also unbelievable.
It was spectacular.
The delight, in fact.
Yeah.
She had a bike accident on, a few people will know who this is.
She had a horrible bike accident on campus, knocked out all her teeth.
Someone stepped out in front of her.
She was back in the laboratory with falsies in and working, I think within like 48 hours.
This would have put anyone else out for a much longer time.
I haven't kept up with her, but I'm sure that she's a spectacular physician scientist, wherever she is.
But there's really something to the farming piece.
It is communal and it is the sense that, while these farms are very isolated I mean, you know, 100-acre plots that are divided by tree barriers from one another that somebody has your back all the time.
I still have my grandmother's quilting frames and when established it required eight women, four to a side and the quilt gets done.
And then you make eight of them and each one gets a quilt.
And you know that to do the big job, the barn that's got to get up, you have to utilize forces outside yourself in order to accomplish this and that you owe.
You owe.
And you want to, it's not an obligation, it's a sharing.
And you understand okay, I'm getting that barn.
I owe services here for seven more barns, or whatever.
This is an excellent thing.
And I do try to think of dance that way.
And I do think a well-made dance is a good community.
It's society as it ought to be.
It works the way we should work together.
You mentioned Quaker.
I've been to a couple of Quaker meetings.
Silent meetings?
Yeah, every once in a while someone would stand up and say something.
I had a friend who was there's a Quaker house near where I used to live when I was finishing my master's and I got became friendly with a guy outside cause we would drink coffee the same coffee shop and chat.
And he was like, you should come to a meeting.
You might find it interesting.
And I, I knew I was in the, a benevolent place when I walked in.
Because you know, in Berkeley California, if somebody says hey, you should come to a meeting, and you're like you don't know what you're getting into right.
But they had a picture of the Quaker Oats guy on the wall as a joke.
I knew I like, okay, they can poke some fun at themselves.
So yeah, someone would stand up every once in a while, say something, there was some reflection.
And then at the end, everyone kind of like said goodbye and took off.
It was interesting.
Yeah, those in those days for me were Wednesday evenings and they were silent meetings and there would be meetings where no one had anything to say.
They were silent meetings, and simply...
You can help me out here.
They were not using language, but surely neural rays were going out.
And probably if there had been a catastrophe in the culture, you know some kind of huge fire or something awful.
You know that people are thinking, you have a sense of what that thinking is and that there was and is and can be a kind of non-verbal communication that's not even a physical you're not using sign language to communicate but that you have a sense of what we called in the day in the air.
In the air.
And that that is a very powerful form of communication that we don't really respect anymore.
And how potent is it neurologically?
This last year, the podcast series Telepathy Tapes was very, very popular.
I haven't had a chance to watch it in full.
I listened to a little bit of it.
It's about how kids who are nonverbal perhaps can tap into this.
And it's gotten some criticism from the standard scientific community, but also less than you would have anticipated if it had all been complete BS.
So I think it's gotten partial acceptance there.
This brings us back to the notion of a center, believe it or not.
Fish have lateral lines.
They sense the electrical fields of other fish and other things near them.
I mean there's many, many examples from the animal kingdom of you know, like the platypus with its electric.
People call it an electric sensing bill, but it sends out these electrical fields that then it can detect things in its environment, because its vision is very poor.
Somebody once said.
Ed Yong, the writer, said that so many animals rely on smell.
We sort of smell with our eyes, which sounds crazy, but we use our eyes the way that other animals use their noses.
And that gives you an insight into how they use their noses.
But most animals have a sense of how close or far other members of their species and other things are.
We tend not to think about that, unless you live in a big open space and you get on the New York subway and like suddenly you're like whoa, this is, This is different, but we have these.
We don't really have a lateral line, but we have remnants of things that are similar.
They're beautiful studies showing that if you look for in an experimental context magnetoreception in the human brain, people perform above chance.
In other words, we can detect magnetic fields.
People are going to think I'm crazy, but this is published in Science Magazine.
No, no.
Yeah, we can sense electric fields, but we sort of have to train ourselves to do it, and perhaps some people are just naturally leaning that way.
So there absolutely is.
When I say energetic neural communication across space, that isn't just words, sound waves and vision photons.
So... there's stuff happening at a distance and smell.
I think we vastly underestimate the extent to which pheromones and odors of people who are upset, or there's a study showing that human tears affect hormones and people around them.
You need to have a 16-year-old boy around you when it comes to the sensitivity to smell and perfumes being sold commercially these days.
Oh, my goodness.
But the thing about distance is something that I'm very, very interested in.
I mean, the awareness is mostly visual for dancers, and it's usually established, again, in class.
If you have a crowded class, the distance can be the next one would be out here from this point.
But a really crowded class.
The distance might be out here, in which case you're going to be angling yourself to the diagonal so you're able to get full reach, which is going to impact on design right.
But there are also ways and it's very demanding actually and it requires a lot of trust on everybody's part where I can get dancers to work very close together.
And that has a real visual impact and it becomes a physical sensation of the person watching.
It can become an anxiety.
Oh, don't step on that.
She's going to get stepped on.
There I'm kind of using it crassly.
But it's interesting to push people into what's called one another's space and be able to condense the amount of area that people feel comfortable in or require, which could be a very good thing culturally speaking, because we got less and less space.
It's interesting that this notion of communication across space if we could just continue down this path a bit.
Last year I had the great honor really to do a lecture about music in the brain with Renee Fleming, the great opera singer.
And we got onto this topic of the fact that opera singers will capture an emotion.
They're using their diaphragm in a very particular way, getting a certain frequency of vibration in their body, obviously using air, shaping the air as it leaves their lungs to sing, and how?
Maybe that's actually impacting the same sets of neurons in the audience, but they're not singing.
Okay, this is kind of an interesting idea that where you're feeling the emotion of the singer because your phrenic nerve, the nerve that controls the diaphragm, it might be vibrating at a similar frequency.
Yeah, absolutely.
This sort of gets back to this, like more.
I don't want to call them primitive, but more fundamental aspects of language and communication.
Yes.
I wonder with dance...
And perhaps with athleticism too, like on a football field, when we see somebody move or people move in a certain way whether or not – we don't realize it perhaps, but that there's almost the illusion that we're moving like that.
Like we're accessing – this idea of portals like artists, portals that we're actually sensing at some level what it would be like to move like that.
And of course, I can't.
Absolutely.
I mean, you know these ocular glasses right that you believe that you're projecting yourself into that item up there and actually feeling it.
Hello, right?
That must be what is working, what's creating that illusion.
You're not really inside that item, but you feel and believe as though you are.
I've done a VR where you think you're in a different body.
It's really weird and kind of cool.
I guess so.
I'm a little terrified to deal with it.
Or also I haven't taken the time to really expose myself to it.
It definitely is of interest.
But when you talk about soccer or an athletic event, you can feel.
In boxing you can feel the impact.
You can feel how much poundage is behind that punch.
Yeah, you boxed.
Yeah.
With Teddy Atlas as your trainer.
We have some friends of Teddy Atlas around here.
Yes.
What motivated that?
I was in my early 40s and the Olympics were in LA and I was making a new piece and I wanted to compete.
But there are no competitions for what I do.
I mean a dancer's range is much more than an athlete's, not to the same degree in specialization, but across the board.
Is speed flexibility, maneuverability in air, coordination flexibility.
Dancers have got all of these components to a very high degree.
So no events for me at the Olympics.
But I could make a piece that would be highly athletic and I wanted to be in the very best possible shape I could be in.
So I decided that the training that was involved in a boxer being in shape was more extreme than what I was doing with my dancing regimen and that the rope coordination, the stamina being involved, the power coming off the punch, the grounding of the body so that you had a punch, the willingness to take the blow in exchange for the unwillingness to go down.
You would not go down.
You're not going down.
And we don't do that in dance.
So I figured, well, I'll go where they do do that.
So Teddy, we were running steps backwards.
This is a very good thing.
I mean, you know, and shadowboxing, it's a great, great training format.
Yeah, I agree.
You know, as a neuroscientist I have to put a call out against sparring for anyone who's not trying to make it a profession.
And maybe even for those that are, that's their choice.
But But speed bag work and the visual coordination that's involved is also incredible.
Near, far, but also just switching from peripheral to central vision.
I imagine it improves the brain in many, many ways, except for the getting hit in the head part.
Well, probably.
And you're also... well known for being quite strong.
Tell us about your deadlift record.
I was training in a real weight gym with competitive weightlifters and was very serious from the time I was probably in my 50s until mid-60s say, and that you were nobody in that gym if you didn't do your body weight for three on the bench.
I mean, you know, what are you in here for, right?
So it had that kind of requirement to it, which is very encouraging if you want to lift heavy weight and also snap pneumonia right, which is like okay, I actually never did that.
But the jolt of pulling more weight off the ground than you really can do or you have ever done really does send a rush to the body that is unique.
And what was your personal record?
227.
227 deadlift.
Yep.
Awesome.
Oh, I don't know about that.
I mean, you just do it day in, day out.
And I wasn't, you know, you can't train day in, day out.
But training rigorously and continuously for probably eight or ten years, yeah.
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Several times you've mentioned the bar.
I think most of us understand there's a bar along the wall with a mirror sometimes behind it, etc.
What For the uninformed, like for me, what is bar work really about?
And could you give us an example of a few – I mean is it designed to improve flexibility?
What is this notion of the bar?
All of the above.
A bar is a set regimen of exercises that are developed – to strengthen the structure of the body, to basically approach the jumps, to gain height in the air for the men, for the women, if they're working on point, the strength in the legs and the torso to be able to support that weight in the little area down here.
And so it's developed, essentially from Mars evolved, but basically their format is brilliantly designed and begins with usually plié, which the terminology is French, which means to fold.
So you're folding the body in the plie.
You're folding, you're going down, and the positions are first, second, third, fourth, and fifth, okay?
First, you have actually one center that comes off of here and here.
Or you're off to this side or you're off to that side.
But if you're working very rigorously, you're working to develop that single center in first.
Second is a much more evolved kind of hierarchy, muscular kind of situation, where it's being supported from the torso and the leg muscles more than from the feet.
The third position is never used because third looks like a bad fifth.
So it's just been eliminated, which is kind of too bad, because I actually do use third, but not if I think it's at a moment where it could be judgmentally determined.
Actually, it was an uncrossed fifth.
Oh, dear.
But in any case so.
Third weight is somewhere between openly distributed and cross through a single center between the two legs.
Okay,
This is the fourth, right?
And the fifth, that fourth is closed, so that it's just a reduced, even higher center.
Okay, in these positions first second, usually not third.
First second, fourth and fifth, plié first to bend to fold.
Next tendre to stretch, to reach out from that base, not so far as you're going to fall, but far enough so that you have to evolve and occupy a little bit more space each time you do it.
And you will go first from the tendu to a plié, to a tendu to a plié, and then tendu to a straight leg which, by drawing in, you're pulling the center even higher.
And so therefore it comes later in the series of exercises.
They're designed to evolve, right?
After the stretches comes the rond de jambe, one of the few exercises actually that's circular.
Most of ballet comes from fencing.
It's very linear.
It's the attack, it's the retreat.
But it doesn't have a whole lot of that going on, unless somebody's gotten very ambitious and flamboyant with their fencing.
Styles could be, I don't know.
But in any case, rond de jambe is the circling of the leg from a full fourth forward, all the way to an open second, all the way to a full fourth back, all the way back to your second, all the way back to your fourth.
Forward and down, full rotation.
Both sides, by the way, you're always reversing.
Even the ones that are in a symmetrical position, you still reverse right and left because, as I'm sure you're well aware, right and left occupy your body all the time and are constantly arguing with one another.
We have an interior conflict going on that makes almost anything else in life impossible.
But so we have right and left, which we're always trying to balance, okay?
After rond de jambe, you can have petit battement, which is little throws, little throws.
So from your fifth or from your first, You're reaching quickly out, little darting movements, right?
Then you can have frappe, which is to beat frappe.
And so from the ankle, it'll be a flexed foot that extends, boom, and boom.
And all of this is about developing releve to lift, to releve, right?
Up to the metatarsal as high as you can get, pulling up through all of this releve.
And this develops a strength that you need to jump, because from the plie down you're going to drive up.
And the more power you have down here, the more you can get up.
That little extra eighth of an inch counts.
So, frappe after frappe is grand battement, the big battement, the big throw all the way up and down.
But not all the way up, changing the angle of the hip so that the rotation is going to alter the line.
Holding the hip straight through, up.
E, up. either through fourth or through second or through arabesque and back.
Those are the fundamentals.
Now, if you're Merce Cunningham, you can operate in all of the interstices, through all of that, but you still have the regulation of the body's map, and that's what the ballet has already done.
Amazing.
Not amazing, just very highly evolved in terms of how to control movement, in terms of strengthening and developing the body.
Did the people that developed this care about the underlying physiology, or they just and I'm not saying they should, but it seems like an incredible intuition, at least that they came up with it.
You'll forgive me for saying something stupid like this.
The body is very smart.
And one of my problems has always been what knows what first.
Does the body already get it, brain, and we're trying to educate you?
Or is it brain telling body what to do?
In the case of the classical technique, I think it's actually the body that feels that it could get a little higher if only its rotation were a little more open.
So it urges that...
I don't think brain is going, well, you know what?
If you actually could open that leg out, you'd go higher.
And you're going, brain, I don't know about that.
What does that mean?
You don't know what it means.
The body knows what that means.
I've heard it said you know, we think that we're a brain with a body, but perhaps we were a body that later got a brain.
There are certain sophisticated movements, rhythms and so forth.
I mean, for example, a great composer is a great mathematician, right?
And the indications and the divisions of time I would accept is coming.
You know, particularly because of how you see the notation and how the note can be subdivided.
It's a very visual thing.
Once you're into the eye, you're into the brain.
I mean, you know, it's like, do you know what I'm saying?
This is more about the body and this how the toes are going about its business down here are very much involved.
About the body.
Yeah.
Thinking sometimes is really overrated.
For sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As human old world primates which we are.
We got a bunch more machinery up front in the prefrontal cortex which let us think and plan and reflect and strategize a lot more.
Also allowed humans to do bad things a lot more.
Trickery and things like that, but also to plan really incredible, wonderful things.
But I do think in many ways it was at the expense of some of the machinery involved in these.
I hate to use the language lower, let's just say more fundamental intuition.
I don't want to give too many anecdotes, but years ago I developed an obsession with comparative neurology.
There's this beautiful journal it's hundreds of years old called the Journal of Comparative Neurology.
I was fortunate enough to participate with that journal, but for a while, reviewing these papers which, for modern science, people don't really care about, these papers.
They're like, what is the cerebellar vermis shape of the Atlas turtle?
I don't even know if there's an Atlas turtle, but I just guess we were talking about Teddy Atlas of the whatever right.
Of the two-toed, three-toed sloth, whatever, all these weird species.
But no single paper says teaches you that much, except about this really arcane thing about the mallard duck hypothalamus or something.
I'm sure that paper is in there, by the way.
But when you start comparing the nervous systems of these different animals and the way they move and the way they think because there are certainly papers about humans in there you start getting emergent fundamentals.
You go oh my goodness, you know the like, the once the forebrain got bigger, the cerebellum got a Evolution starts to make a lot more sense.
But evolution at the level of things like we're talking about today, movement and communication.
And it leaves you with this question, which is a lot of the reason you're here today is, I think we all really want to understand, even if we don't know that we want to understand.
Like what are we really here to do?
What are we good at?
How do we tap into these other aspects of ourselves?
When you talk about the brain developing in different areas to different degrees, I sometimes wonder about and I mean to be neither naive nor romantic here the morality of the body.
And if the people who run our governments and who design our social systems had a sense, on a daily basis, of preserving and protecting and honoring their physical bodies, if their brain would be allowed to concoct some of the schemata that then tell bodies everywhere what they're going to be doing.
Tell me more.
I think I understand.
I do believe that taking care of the body and one's health first is fundamental.
Anyone that's lost their health for any amount of time understands what I'm talking about.
But we don't tend to do that.
We prioritize the brain a lot without understanding that it exists in this whole context of the body.
It's not just health.
It's propriety and excellence.
Who wants to nurture and encourage the body to realize its full potential that it was gifted with when it was born.
Let's say you and I were in charge of education.
Okay.
Do you think kids teenagers, maybe even young adults and older should all do something akin to like gymnastics?
It's an interesting thought.
Which one?
I mean I respect gymnastics a lot.
I get dancers sometimes who are not ballet trained but who are gymnastically trained, and they're courageous in a different way.
They have a different center, but they have a willingness to throw through space that a dancer does not or you're not trained in the ballet to throw.
There are moments that you dart forward, but they're very restricted, whereas a gymnast is continuously comfortable with that kind of spatial explosion, which is a beautiful thing.
Should there be a policy that every young person needs to do, a form of movement that encompasses a lot of different tempos and some jumping, some rolling, some stretching, because we tend to specialize in sport very early or people decide they're no good at sports.
No, no, they're not allowed to do that.
Sorry.
Something they've got to find that they're good enough at to encourage themselves to respect themselves.
Otherwise they quit.
I will interrupt you here just to say that I think this brings us back to your, your early development and expectations on people, on kids and adults.
In other words, standards.
I heard somebody say something really interesting recently.
That was you know, it used to be.
Now I'm sounding like I'm.
You know, I am 50.
It used to be that there were pretty high standards set on all of us.
Whether or not we got a lot of love and support depended on the household.
But the standards were always high.
There seems to be a period of time in which there was a lot more love and support.
Some people will disagree with me, but maybe standards weren't held as in high regard.
Of course, it varies by family, varies by circumstance.
But I think ideally we get back to a point where standards are high for everyone, like etiquette.
God forbid, you know, not going to the movies in your pajamas, for instance.
Yeah, not just etiquette, but also behavior.
Which group social dance, whether it's ballroom or square dance?
There are rules and regulations and there are ways that you know that you can work, that are going to respect the traffic pattern, if nothing else, and that's going to transfer to how you drive a car.
And this, you know, gets established early and deeply in a young person.
And, you know, we're talking here, I don't know, second graders, third graders.
I mean as much as I make light of my mother and I don't make light of her at all but sometimes feel challenged by the education that I received.
It was not a bad education.
It was across the boards.
It was very difficult for me societally.
But I was grounded in music.
I was grounded in movement.
I was grounded in these different forms of community activity, including string quartets.
I was grounded in the family-owned Foothill Drive-In Theater between Rialto and Fontana.
Okay, I grew up.
From the time I was eight until I went to college, watching a screen and getting myself into the snack bar when there would be a run on hot dogs, because it was really boring up here.
And I saw boring come get to the snack bar, sell hot dogs, okay?
Plus, which it was a place where the speakers often didn't work.
There were a lot of cars, 600 cars.
It was a big, big movie house, okay?
And a big screen.
And so I learned to watch action and without sound.
And I learned to watch movement and what communicated without language.
It's incredible you're saying this.
One of the things that I listed I wanted to talk to you about is this concept of wordlessness.
A few years ago, I started practicing something because someone said, you should try this.
You should try and walk down the street and just feel what's going on and try not to get into a verbal dialogue about it and just experience life through the lens of like what must be like to be some other species of animal.
And this might sound silly to people, but it's an incredible portal into how limited our experience of things normally is.
And maybe for some people, they're always in wordlessness and they need to get more into words.
But it sounds like you had an... an incredible upbringing.
First of all, you were taught to be hardworking.
I mean, I think one can't overemphasize how I mean hard work is awesome, because it's a super skill for anything you encounter, right?
But watching the movies without sound, that's incredible.
Well, even more.
I had twin brothers and a sister who was born three days before they were a year old.
So essentially they were triplets.
And my mother gave up and started feeding them all with the same spoon and put them in the same room.
And they developed an allelia which happens with.
You probably know this a certain percentage of twins.
A language before they learn to speak English.
They evolve because they're so close to one another all the time and it's a guttural, syllabic form of communication.
I could speak it, but I could certainly understand it.
My parents could not understand it nor speak it, so I became the family translator.
So from day one, I'm observing and serving the audience.
I love it.
And it's nonverbal.
This is wild.
I have close friends with a pair of identical twins.
And they tell this story from their childhood, where one walks in and goes up to the toast of the other one.
They're women now.
They were little girls then.
And takes her fingers and goes like this over the toast.
Right.
To this day, the other one won't eat that type of toast.
But it wasn't like, oh, this is bad.
Something was communicated in the movement and to this day will not touch that type of toast.
Right.
And it's so funny.
They have tons of stories about this that they can communicate without words.
Right.
And a lot of it was signed.
I don't remember a lot of this was bread and butter.
And so very early I got the idea that movement communicates.
Who needs all this garble on top and your brain has got it?
What does that writer laugh at?
That's going to be that side is going to be right.
You don't need to translate it into language to understand what the movement is asking for.
But unlike so many artists and creatives, the world is very fortunate that you were asked to be a translator, because you don't exist in some.
I could think of names here, but I don't want to insult anyone.
There are some artists that are genuinely weird. to the rest of us because we can't understand them.
Now, they're not necessarily weird, they're just different.
But I have to imagine there are probably many, many incredible creatives whose work we never hear or see because there's no one there to translate it for them and they certainly can't do it for themselves.
You have to have a certain amount of fluency in the world of business, in the world of being able to communicate with words, otherwise your work doesn't get out there.
Maybe that's why there are so few people that really sit where they do in their craft.
I think that a word here is objectivity, that in doing work there are moments where you have to get outside that work and you have to look at it as an outsider.
How do you do that?
Do you film it and watch?
I do it by pulling myself out of the action.
There were times when I danced, right?
And I danced inside as well as trying to get outside.
This is genuinely a way to become extremely neurotic, and it's a very difficult task.
In some ways it's very rewarding because the whole thing evolves from you and, plus which, you're the jury.
But it's not going to be, you can't maintain it for very long.
And anybody who makes something wants to have, anybody wants to have the capacity to be unemotional about it.
Get back, forget how you feel about it.
What does it say to you?
You, in a way, become your own translator.
Does this read?
You said something really, really useful, I think, about critics in your book.
You said that.
The good ones, the honest ones, the ones that aren't just trying to get some clickbait or get someone to read their story so they can get their couple thousand bucks, so they can make rent that month, the really good critics.
Keep us honest about who we're supposed to be as creators.
Now that makes it sound like People who aren't creating stuff that's being critiqued out in the world.
Don't have anything to learn from what you're about to say.
But I would argue that from the very beginning, when we start to create anything, a short story, a poem, even if we're just daydreaming about what we might create, it's impossible to not get into the well, what are people going to?
– how is this going to land?
What are people going to think?
So learning how to hold critique is critical to the creative process, even if journalists aren't eventually writing about your work.
How do you work with inner critic, which is really about outer critics, let's be honest.
How do you work with that and what's your relationship to that?
This is very, very difficult because you have to love what you're doing.
Anything that's going to be really meaningful, there has to be an extraordinary degree of love.
And we do refer in my office to, you know, the child of that work.
Each dance, in a way, is your gift and it's your child.
And somebody's out here and they're going to slit its throat?
How are you supposed to feel about that?
Also because what we do is very, very personal.
Musicians translate it into sound.
There's a certain distancing from them personally.
We're very personal.
You speak bad of my dance, you speak bad of my body.
I don't go down so well.
Right.
So it's difficult to process the exterior critic's word.
And, on the other hand, as I said, one still has to, even though you love the thing you got to.
I mean, you know, long ago my trainer actually had two huge wolfhounds and I made the mistake one day of criticizing one of them.
I mean, never criticize a guy's dog, okay?
This is true.
Yes, you can criticize the child, but not the dog, all right?
Wolfhounds are beautiful animals.
They are.
Very majestic animals.
Yes, they had to.
But so, yes, there you are.
You know, this critic just called your dog a bad name.
And, okay, maybe your dog has got only three legs and six months to live.
I'm being cruel, but am I?
I'm being realistic.
Your dog has three legs and six months to live.
Well, that's not a criticism.
That's an observation.
Yeah, but it comes across because it's less than perfect.
So you see, it's a difficult arena.
There's no single answer.
It's like neon.
You've got to shift on, shift off, shift on, shift off.
Is it crazy?
A little.
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Every once in a while I find myself thinking oh, you know, in the early 2000s, you know the way art and music and media was.
It was better in the you know, growing up in this area.
But then I realized that people have probably been saying that sort of thing forever.
And that for young people now, I have a niece who just went off to college.
Like, you know, she's not thinking about how it was back then.
For her, it's happening now.
And I think it's hard for us to adapt to the fact that we were young once and now we're less young and that it's all new for them.
And so the The question is – and they don't have that frame of reference.
So, when it comes to critics, when it comes to dance and art, do you see things getting better worse, or do you just think of it as like oh, it's just –, it's always been just an evolution?
I have a hard time going, oh, you know, we had great music in the 90s.
It was awesome music came out.
They should have been around in the 70s.
Exactly.
You're making – exactly.
That's the point.
Right.
But for people who are 16, 18 now, they're not thinking that way.
They're thinking we got all that music and there's all this other great music.
So I think the goal perhaps is to just stay open.
Yeah, I think it's not judgmental.
It's not good or bad.
It's what can I learn from this?
What can I take from this?
What can I transpose from this to put over here?
What can I use, make everything transactional?
Can you elaborate on that?
No, I like it like that.
Full stop.
Okay.
Now, transactional, what serves me here?
What can I use?
Sometimes transactional gets a bad name.
You are trying to use something.
Yeah, I'm trying to use something.
Well, the whole thing of you know great artists steal you know nothing is a new idea, this kind of thing.
Do you believe that?
Absolutely.
To some degree.
I mean, that's why it's one of my privileges to work with the life of a composer, if I'm serious about that.
I worked on Amadeus, right?
So I read all of Mozart's writings, which are voluminous, and looked at every manuscript he had ever touched.
And I was given access to this.
Why wouldn't you take advantage of that?
For the movie Amadeus.
Yeah.
Love that movie.
Thank you.
We did too.
Love that movie.
Yeah.
The images of the lime being thrown over the body is still imprinted in my mind.
But it tells you about that era and how little people had.
Totally, and how much was preserved from the era.
We shot in Prague for Vienna.
It was hard working there, still under the regime.
And that, in a way, put it closer to what Mozart had to deal with, the sort of restrictions that he had.
But the research that went into that picture was enormous. all of the illumination was from candles.
All of the illumination in the candles.
They used the same beeswax as they had used 200 years before.
All the mechanisms on stage were what were used in the original productions.
And because we shot in the opera house which had not been updated.
In fact, it's one of the ways Milos got back in was to say okay, we will pay for the reconstruction of the opera house when we're done.
And they took him up on it.
But I was using the same mechanics under the stage that Mozart had.
The door that opened into the orchestra was the door he touched when he came in to join the orchestra.
And we had scenes that had live fire.
We were swinging live fire around.
You don't do this, but we were.
And out of the floor, there were little holes.
And we figured out that those little holes were a special kind of pollen that they put down.
And if they lit them, they would send up sparks.
And we were doing the sparks from the floor out of the pollen.
And you had chandeliers coming down that had hundreds of candles.
And in between takes you're shifting all of the candles in, like 50 chandeliers coming down here before you can do the next take.
Meanwhile, you got the clothes that are in here, and there are no gussets.
So nobody's arm has gone any higher than this.
You got the men in heels like this.
Nobody is running with huge strides.
Stuff like that.
Wow.
Now am I.
You know, I don't know what to do with that kind of information other than to marvel at human invention.
We've definitely come a long way.
I don't know that we've come a long way.
Things were different and they maximize their resources.
I will say candles are better than white light LEDs, but that's a topic from another podcast.
Probably.
When are we going to do that?
Incandescents are better than LEDs, but I'm just thinking about all these candles and I'm wondering whether or not it was very, very warm to work in that environment.
Sure, it was very, very warm.
People were sweating all the time.
What do you think smell was in the 18th century?
Very stenchy is how smell was in the 18th century.
I had no idea what went into it.
The making of that film.
It was real.
That spectacular film.
Everyone should see that.
It was real.
It'll also give you a window into how psychiatric illness was treated.
There's that brutal scene from a, I guess they called them insane asylums.
Yep.
And nowadays we probably understand that 95 of those people were probably suffering from things that nice at-home care probably would have resolved.
There's a pill for it.
Or there's a pill for it.
Yeah.
Or a combination of sunlight and pills and other things.
Speaking of which, what's your view on modern versus ancient medicine versus the body?
Just being really smart.
I know not much about either ancient nor modern medicine.
I'm not sure I'm equipped to have a view on these things.
I simply myself try to stay as close to what is, forgive the word, natural as possible.
In terms of eating, I am currently not eating Except for this trip, okay?
No carbs, no sugar.
All right.
Which I find to be a keto diet, I find to be more manageable, I can control it better.
I know where my weight is, I can feel how close to the bone, where whatta whatta, I got a hee-haw.
You can't do that if you're eating a lot of pasta.
And also, I fortunately cannot cook, therefore I basically eat everything raw.
I can eat meat raw.
I certainly eat vegetables raw.
I'm exaggerating.
I can use the oven, okay?
I can boil water.
But that's about it.
No sauces ever.
Nothing decorative.
I've often said if there were a pill for food, I'd take it.
I'm not sure I would because I'm not sure it would have what I needed in it.
I'm not sure I'm getting that anyway.
But at least I'm making an effort.
And I know where it comes from.
I don't like mystery a lot.
So it sounds like meat, fish, fruits and vegetables are your staples.
Say so.
Yeah, likewise.
And I think it's funny that nowadays it makes total sense when we say the carbs and sugar are really the problem in most cases.
And whereas for years it felt like the public health space around nutrition was utterly confused, it was like fat is the bad thing, then protein and then meat is the bad thing.
I mean deli meats probably they are not great for us, but healthily sourced we.
We went through a period, probably about a year or even two, where we carb loaded because we thought we'd have more energy, we'd be stronger.
We just got heavier, but anyway, maybe we had a little more power.
I have a friend whose daughter is very interested in ballet.
She actually is part of a conservatory that goes up, they actually live in San Francisco.
I don't know that she's part.
I don't think she's part of the San Francisco ballet, but there's something adjacent to that.
And I said, you know, how is that?
You know, because you hear these stereotypes of you know it's brutal on young girls probably boys as well, but minds about their weight and the training and it's unhealthy.
And he said nowadays they They've adjusted for some of that and they really try and keep a healthier environment.
What's your view on that?
I mean, standards versus health.
I mean, this is a topic that spills over into everything.
In science, I used to work 100-hour weeks, 100, 1-0-0.
I heard there was a guy that worked 101, so I worked 102.
Then I realized that I couldn't sustain that.
I'm not suggesting anyone do that, but everyone has a kind of war story from their time.
But now there does seem to be more care taken to mental health, physical health.
So how do you balance that in the world of dance, where you want standards to continue to stand or rise, but you also don't want people mentally destroyed?
This is a hard one.
There's always going to be a trade-off to some degree.
I mean the stress of performance is, whether it's athletic performance or dance performance, is extreme.
And unfortunately it's been my experience that the better the performer, the worse the nerves before.
Huh.
Sorry about that. the more intensely important that curtain going up is to that person.
And the possibility of failure is always there.
And the degree of rehearsing that's gonna address.
That is why didn't you do more is always the response.
So that is, I'm sorry, it's a reality, it's a choice.
Don't choose that profession.
We can't make life totally nice.
It is partially what it is.
Choose something else.
You know often and I'm not alone in this, one hears it often you know a parent or a child even will come up.
Can I be a dancer?
I say, don't do it.
Find something else if you possibly can.
If you can't, be a dancer.
Because you want to set that thick line.
Yeah.
I mean, and there are other folks who will find their own way to address that line and who will massage that line.
And as part of creativity is addressing those old lines of boundaries, classical, modern.
It's interesting when you put that barrier, you naturally select for the people that really want it.
Yesterday I had an early morning call with a friend of mine who's a former what they call Tier 1 SEAL team operator.
So he was in the Navy SEALs.
But then there's another selection process within it for the Tier 1 or the sort of elite within that already elite community.
And he has children, and I said, are they interested in military?
He said, one of them is.
I said, is he interested in going to the teams?
And he's like, he is.
I said, what are you telling him?
And he said, I'm telling him not to do it.
And he keeps coming back that he wants to do it.
And I'm reassured.
He keeps telling him, don't do it.
You're going to hate it.
It's going to be the worst thing ever.
And he keeps coming back, no, I want to do it.
So he's convinced now that he actually wants to do it.
Well, but unfortunately telling a kid not to do it is a bait and can just engender.
I want to do it just to prove that you're going to go up against authority.
That's not the right reason to select.
Sure.
Better to just say, you got to really, really want to do this.
Even more, can't you find something else?
And if they can question it, they don't want to do it enough.
He did add that if he feels he likes it more than it sucks, his words, then he'll be okay.
I would buy that.
There's got to be some tilt in the seesaw more towards I like this more than it sucks.
Yeah, I'd buy that.
That's fair.
And I see a lot of parallels between the communities that you come from and he comes from, frankly.
Elite is elite.
It has a price to pay.
Do you think nowadays, because of social media and the internet, there's a larger pool of dancers to select from and talent that gets selected to work with you, for instance, is better because it's just such a bigger pool?
That top 1% reflects an even better 1%?
It's different because the talent is being trained and challenged in a different way as young people.
In other words, they're now competitive. activities for dance.
I started to say activity sports for dance.
It's not quite a sport, though it converged, which is fine.
But when I was evolving as a dancer, we had very strict borders.
This was tap, this was ballet, this was modern, this is jazz over here, and you could step across the borders and try out different of these, even acquire knowledge from all of them to become something, but you had to do it on your own.
And then you would work to gain acceptance into whatever performing arena.
Now children, very young children, eight years old, even younger, six-year-old kids.
There are competitions for children as dancers or as performers.
And this engenders a totally different purpose and performance in the kid.
I was not, I'm Buster Keaton, right?
I take it on the chin, stoic, down, out, or I make the move, right?
The kids are out there to sell it.
And they're out there to get their points.
And it is partially in their technique, but it's also immediately in their manipulation of the audience.
Great.
That's called performing.
And maybe you'll be a good actor.
But in the meantime you're shortchanging your technique, because you're not asking the audience to just gauge you on what you can do physically, but how you can sell it, because you want those points, and so do your parents.
So these competitions in a way are very difficult and for a long time I wouldn't work with competition trained dancers.
Now I find that it's broadened and that the kids are more sophisticated in the ways that that they attack technique for performing.
And they're also hardened in a way.
I can put them in younger.
I don't worry they're going to be nervous.
They're not going to be nervous.
They were nervous when they were out here trying to get, you know, graded 30 points on the Wada Wada and the Witch Witch and to get the hits for the Wada Wada and you know.
They're no longer nervous about squat, so put them in.
This is great.
But in the meantime, they are doing it for reasons outside of the thing itself, for what they can gain from it, from their Internet hits, from their hanga, their hina, the wada wada, as opposed to just doing it for the thing itself and taking what comes from it.
It's different.
Yeah, that extrinsic reward.
While it's important to keep people moving forward if they want to be a professional, it definitely contaminates the core motivation.
And what the kid will accomplish because they won't have to do it the hard way.
They'll do it the easy way if it works as well.
I was always trained to do it the hard way.
You can always do it the easy way, train for the hard way.
And I can see that in performers.
And a performer who has done it the hard way has more range.
And when they work, you're going to be more interested in them because they're making more choices.
And an interesting artist is a choice maker.
An interesting performer is always about making choice.
That's what will keep you focused on them.
If they're just doing what they think is going to win, you're going, really?
Listen, I love social media.
I teach on social media.
But the problem with social media, as it relates to craft and feedback, et cetera, is that it puts you on a reinforcement schedule of you did something yesterday.
You can put it out there and you and you can immediately get the response.
I think there's a sweet spot between practice, mastery, and feedback.
And when it animals of which we are get, we adapt to certain contingencies.
You know, every 48 hours I expect something back.
Every 72 hours, every one of.
I always tell people if they want to do a PhD, you got to love the topic, you got to embrace the lifestyle.
But also, if nothing else, it will teach you to work very, very hard for four years to get something.
Sometimes there are a couple of publications in there, or more or less, But if nothing else, it will teach you how to work very, very hard for something that only comes to you at earliest four years from now, which I think is very valuable.
Even four years is like a promise.
You might want to think about working for no reward.
And after four years, you don't get anything other than the opportunity to continue.
I love that.
I love that.
My graduate advisor... put this into me.
We published a paper in science.
I was so excited.
And I said, we're going to throw a party.
We're going to celebrate.
And she just laughed.
She was like, I could buy you a pizza, but I'm not even going to do that.
She said something to that extent.
I can't remember the exact words, but I remember what came next.
She said, you already got the party.
Yeah, right.
And I was like, you're right.
I love doing the experiment.
And we went on, I think we published close to 10 papers together.
And when I wasn't thinking about the PhD, in fact, they forced me to take my qualifying exam.
I didn't want to take it.
I just loved doing experiments.
And if you love doing experiments, turns out you publish a lot of papers, publish a lot of papers, turns out it's easy to get a PhD.
Right, exactly.
Et cetera.
You're doing something for the right reasons, not to get something else.
But it's hard to explain that to someone who's really driven.
Not even nowadays.
It's just hard to explain that to somebody, because I think people who are really driven also they want people to understand something.
They need to understand excellence on their own terms, not from outside, but from inside.
I can do more.
I can do more.
That's what I'm interested in.
Oh, you like that?
Not enough.
I want more.
Just letting that really sink in.
I totally agree.
I'm just trying to think of the messaging that works for kids.
Almost none.
I have a grandson, believe me.
They operate on their own, in their own frame.
Yes.
Yeah.
It worked on you, worked on me to some extent.
Yes, because my mother was a concert pianist and she wasn't able to.
The war came and she started teaching to help support the family.
And in a way I think I was aware of the sacrifice that she had made, but I also heard the level of excellence.
From the time I was a, I went to her lesson.
She'd continued and I heard the practicing.
And I think even with no training, I heard that that was better than that.
And they got closer.
And you develop your own morality.
You don't have somebody telling you what is good and what is bad.
It sounds like, if I may, that you develop your own internal standard That's very high.
It's very high.
It's unattainable.
And you're going to hate yourself a lot of the time.
They don't tell you that, but it's true.
Well, I'm just saying.
Yeah, it's true.
I don't know if hate, hate's a strong word.
It is a strong word.
Maybe not satisfied, but... Sorry, it's called hate.
I love your honesty.
You've said before, before you can think outside the box, you have to have a box, right?
But you also talk about having an actual box.
Yes.
Explain.
Well, the actual box holds the tangible items that are very sensory, that have the feel or the smell or the weight of when you first thought that idea.
Maybe your dance isn't going to look like a rock, but when you picked up that rock there was a certain kind of physical resistance and that suggested a kind of movement.
And if you don't keep that rock, you'll forget sometimes where it came from.
I was working on a film script once and I was told look, write down your initial instinct, your initial idea for what the film is to be.
Put it in a drawer and lock the drawer, because there are times when you're going to not know what the fuck you're doing.
Unlock the drawer and remind yourself.
That rock can remind you of that original instinct, that original movement that evolved from it.
And you go, oh, yeah, yeah, that's where I am.
That's what I'm doing.
But we overthink things and we compound it.
And it's not that complicated.
You want to keep it as simple as possible.
You want to, I think, keep it as close to the initial reason you wanted to do it, the initial sense of excitement.
And again, to use the same old word love that you had for that moment in time that you wanted to share.
I love the idea of anchoring to physical items around something that's conceptual, because the conceptual journey can be, whether or not it's a book or a dance or whatever, a podcast.
It can be so opaque at times and you're trying to stay anchored to the center, to the spine, and But it can be really tough.
And having a physical object that you understand means A, and that's it.
It's non-negotiable.
There are certain things you don't forget.
Those are the important things.
That's what truth is.
You don't forget it.
I guess this is the reason we have plaques and wedding rings and things like that is they symbolize something important in a very simple way that everyone understands.
And in this case, it's important that you understand.
Yeah, but it's a symbol of.
That's different.
Symbol is different from the actual rock.
The rock is the thing itself.
It's not the symbol of anything.
It's the rock.
So it has a property that is what you're trying to thread through your work.
Yes.
It doesn't stand for something else.
It actually has that thing.
And that's in a way why ritual, because ritual is not quite the same as practice.
Ritual is done for a purpose.
It's done to accomplish an end.
Purpose, you just do it.
So let's break those apart, ritual, purpose, and habit, if you were to separate those out.
Okay.
Ritual to accomplish a goal or a kind of control practice, a consistent ongoing activity that somehow keeps reoccurring.
Habit you do because you're in the habit of doing.
I mean, habit and practice are actually very close.
Habit is dangerous because you've got to do it that way.
That's the habit for it.
Practice is just get the job done.
You can do it in different ways, but get the job done.
Habit, you've got to do it the same way.
Throughout the entire listening to your book, I had this question in the back of my mind.
Did you take weekends off?
No, what's a weekend?
It's a seven-day work week here.
Love it.
You've gotten things like honorary degrees from Harvard, this kind of thing.
A lot of accolades from a lot of different places.
Do those things matter to you?
No, they matter more to other folks.
And sometimes I have trouble with them.
They don't tell me anything that I have done or, more importantly, will do.
Can I honestly say it's not nice for somebody to say to you, you've done a great job?
I can't say that.
I can, you know, try to feel that it's.
I think one thing about that kind of action is that it takes a magnanimous person to recall that they have a goal that's going to be ongoing, no matter how many accolades they get.
But the people giving the accolade want to matter.
They want to count.
They want to believe that what you have done is important.
And in a way, you owe it to them more than to yourself to accept that.
I know you don't like the term, but you came up with it and I think it's very interesting and important, which is this notion of scratching.
When you're searching for the next idea or the idea, this notion of scratching.
Could you tell people what scratching is about?
Okay, two conditions where scratching is kind of an approach.
One is you're really lost and you have no sense that there's any progress to be made.
And if so, where's the direction to go?
And you have to be patient with yourself in the situations and just try something.
And did it mean anything or not?
And having the faith to continue that journey is a kind of scratching.
The other is you know perfectly well where you're going.
You just don't know how to get there.
And in scratching or essaying or trying that approach you still got to remember where your basic thing is, but you know you've got somewhere to go.
That's a nicer place to be than when you are just in an absolute vacuum and scratching for something that has meaning.
And scratching can take a lot of forms, you've said.
It could be going to a museum and seeing what captures your eye.
It could be just living your daily life and just making sure that you capture anything that kind of pokes through.
Is that right?
Yeah, being open about things and being willing to be caught off guard, being willing to be surprised.
Could you talk about movement and longevity?
I mean, you're... How long have we got?
As long as you want.
I don't want.
It's my least favorite topic.
And it's my most important topic at the moment, which is why it's my least favorite topic.
Bodies alter every so often.
Okay, a body at 10 is going to be different from a body at 20, what it can accomplish.
20 to 40 there's a kind of continuity in there that is encouraging.
Over 40, body is going to start behaving differently.
47 50s is getting a little bit numbed and all of a sudden you're feeling restricted and you get pissed off And you have got to find a way of respecting the fact that you can no longer do what you did when you were 20 or 25.
But you're still, you're pretty potent.
And that's a good thing.
And I managed to push that.
I was dancing still pretty hard until I was about 65, which is a long reach.
But after 65, I began to feel really restricted.
No, you can't do just anything, even once.
And, oh, by the way, what you're doing might not be strengthening the body.
You might be weakening the body, repeating that.
Oh, my God, what do I do here?
Nothing.
And 70, functional.
80, sucks.
You're restricted now and your body has lost facility and you can't pretend it's any other way, because you see it and everybody else sees it and you need help and you don't like help.
How do you maintain your independence and still accept graciously help as a reality and not a shame?
How do you accept a declining body as not demoralizing?
Those are tough questions.
And particularly if you're invested in the body, and it's where you learn what's true and what isn't true.
It could be true for somebody who can still do it.
It's not true for you because you still don't have that speed.
You don't have that flexibility.
You don't have...
That option, and so it becomes, I suppose and I haven't quite accomplished this, but I think about it obviously a lot we all do is an exchange rate.
Okay, I'm going to have to give up a kind of sort of physical independence, but in exchange for this I can have a lot of goodwill.
How can I circulate that goodwill to get this thing done that still feels as though it's a worthy enough accomplishment to offer?
But it's a totally different mechanism.
And it's physicality translated differently.
And, you know, one, I always in the studio, I was a very good dancer.
And I managed to build a career because dancers wanted to work with me, because they become better dancers.
And now it is not a body that is dancing better than any other dancer.
It is a body that is not moving and that needs still to be able to correspond to a great dancer with many, many options.
That you have something to offer them and that you can realize something with them, that is of great value.
I dislike the word mentor.
I don't think about that much, because I like better the word apprentice that people learn.
You don't teach them, they learn.
And that is a component here.
And I think that that's a kind of, I mean, that's the upside is you can still be mutual.
You can still share this process.
And it's the same as it ever was.
You bring what you got, they bring what they got.
You put them together and you get more than the independent what-a-what is.
And that can still happen if you let it happen and if you don't get too pissed off.
Although being a little pissed might help in terms of the pushing through.
Everybody needs a little pissed all the time.
The thing I heard you say once which really stuck with me was that you think that perhaps one of the reasons why people age at the level of the brain and the level of curiosity is that they start moving less, that it works in that direction.
And I started observing people of different ages.
And indeed, even just the amount of gesticulating that people do, it starts to decline over time.
You're an exception to this.
I know only a few other exceptions to that rule.
I think it is a rule.
You look at kids, they're moving all the time.
And I think it drops off fairly linearly after, as you said, probably about age 40.
40 or so, people start moving less.
There's a species of ocean animal that when it lands down on a rock, it actually eats its own brain.
Except the part that just keeps it alive, there to sense when something swims over it, and then it can do its thing.
In other words, if we stop moving, our nervous system atrophies.
And that's very clear.
And it seems that the distal, the fingers and the feet, the neurons that control those, certainly lose their strength, before we lose our trunk strength, and so on.
So there's this kind of outward to center atrophy.
So move more, move more, move more in every aspect of life seems to be the takeaway.
Yeah, it's not just more, it's degree also.
I think that with age we recess, we pull backwards, we reach out less, even than we can partially, the sight begins to decline, the hearing and the kind of fear sets in.
You still have to be able to maintain a fearlessness in regards to boundaries that you don't have to pull up shy.
You don't have to pull up short of a boundary.
You can still address that boundary.
It's just you're not going to be able to reach as far across as you could have in each of these different decades.
It's just, you know, you can do one thing when you were, you know, two years old.
You can do another thing now.
And it's accepting that everything can give you pushback.
You have to accept pushback.
You have to still accept pushback.
It's going to feel differently, but you still want it.
Maybe that's the thing to seek is that friction point.
In describing dancers and dance, you talked a lot about taking up space.
It's interesting.
Now we're talking about people reflexively taking up less and less space as, as they get older.
Um, Voice occupies space too.
So it's kind of interesting to think about movement as the fundamental way in which we have action at a distance or impact at a distance.
And as you said.
Shrivel.
Yeah.
Shrivel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe that's the thing to fight against.
You know, the word fight, we fight against everything.
And I do it too.
We all do do it.
We've got to look at it, I say to myself, as an opportunity.
It's not a fight.
It's an opportunity to keep the pressure on.
I mean, we become frightened.
I've seen that in some older folks too. there's a fear that sets in.
Right, and that's not necessary because we also got compensations.
For no reason, I'm thinking here of Camus who had twins.
And one of them was for some reason thinking she was going to go blind.
I guess she'd been diagnosed.
She started practicing being blind.
She started keeping her eyes closed.
This is a 12-year-old taking a cane and starting trying to find her way.
As a blind person, she'd see perfectly well.
She was providing against the future.
You're not going to provide against death, so just get over it and keep pushing through like you can see, because you can.
It's like meet the friction that's there, but at that edge, not any further out.
At a reasonable point where there is a competition, not where you're pre-defeated.
Speaking of taking up space, you've mentioned before that the fact that your name is Twyla perhaps shaped you in some ways.
Yes.
I'm fascinated by this, that how names shape our self-perception, how they shape others' perceptions of us and how, To some extent, we might live into those perceptions.
Yes.
My mother, as with everything, provided me with a moniker that would serve me.
So the name Twyla she saw in a newspaper, but it was spelled with an I, The original Twyla, who was a pig-calling princess in the next county.
Twyla, I forget her last name.
In any case, my mother changed it to a Y because she thought Twyla with a Y would look better on a marquee.
Okay, she was right that the T had to be selected for the alliteration between Twyla and Tharp, T-T.
Marilyn Monroe.
All stars have got alliterative names.
She's not wrong.
It makes it easier to remember.
It also seems to have a reinforcing quality.
One name is a T, another T must be good.
Two Ts, right?
Yeah, this is all my mother's subliminal thinking to provide me with the course of stardom.
Should I select, that's what I should go towards.
God bless her.
Yeah, that's what I said.
Well, Twyla Tharp, thank you so much for coming here today.
Thank you.
It is a real honor for me.
No, it's fun.
A real pleasure, a real honor.
And I know you are uncomfortable with accolades, so I'm just going to barrel into them by just saying that it's an honor, because I think your work is incredible.
I think the book is incredible.
So many people that I told I was going to sit down with you today.
I'm surprised they're not beating down the doors outside.
And that's because I think you represent a lot more than just incredible elite level dance and choreography.
You certainly represent that and the arts.
And thank you for your comments about supporting the arts that those will propagate far and wide and hopefully have an impact.
But you also represent this spirit behind creating things, leaning into friction but also embracing the for lack of a better word the dance of it all, including what comes from the outside and the internal process.
This is a complicated thing and I know many, many people want it or just love to see people striving and creating.
And so you really embody that spirit then.
Words aren't enough to express how grateful I am and how grateful millions and millions of people are.
So thank you.
So God bless your mother for naming you Twyla, and God bless you for coming here today.
Thank you, sweetheart.
And God bless you for doing this and for believing it's worthwhile.
So thank you.
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Twyla Tharp.
To learn more about her work and to find a link to her truly spectacular book, The Creative Habit.
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The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com.
There you can find links to various vendors.
You can pick the one that you like best.
Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.
And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.
So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn.
And on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast.
Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.
And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.
We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training.
All of that is available completely zero cost.
You simply go to hubermanlabcom, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email.
And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody.
Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Twyla Tharp.
And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
