Creative DNA: Deconstruction/Reconstruction

I was giving a lecture to students at Vassar not long ago. Working with the students’ autobiographies, I invited a dance student, a music student who brought his saxophone, and an art student to join me on stage. I asked the dancer to improvise some movement from a tuck position on the floor. I asked the saxophone player to accompany the dancer. And I asked the art student to assign colors to what they were doing. I admit I was constructing a three-ring circus in the lecture hall. But my goal was to bring the three students together by forcing them to work off the same page, and also to free them up to discover how far they could go improvising on this simple assignment.

When I asked the art student to read out his color impressions, everyone in the hall was taken aback. He droned on and on about himself, feelings he’d had, stories about friends. Not a word about color. Finally I heard “limpid blue” come out of his mouth. I waved my arms, signaling him to stop reading.

“Do you realize,” I said, “that you’ve just recited about five hundred words in an assignment about color. You’ve covered everything under the sun, and ‘limpid blue’ is the first time you’ve mentioned a color? I’m not convinced you want to be a painter.”

As far as I was concerned, this young man was in “DNA denial.”

The above quote comes from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit. Learn It And Use It For Life. In the second chapter of the book, she introduces the concept of “Creative DNA,” which she defines as a type of code which determines our creative needs and explorations: “the forms we work in, the stories we tell, and how we tell them.” Twyla believes that certain choices, i.e. choosing to paint miniatures rather than epic battle scenes, or to write short stories as opposed to multi-volume historical sagas, are made on a subconscious level. This doesn’t limit us to one discipline; Twyla sees it more as a specific structure of work and a set of patterns we are drawn to. Of course, there are artists devoted to one form of expression but the inner creative code applies to everyone, and even in the case of a multi-disciplinary artist, there are definite strands to their work, some topics and problems they keep investigating regardless of the medium.

And Twyla is right – understanding those strands of our creative DNA can help us learn about why we do things in a certain way and learn the difference between venturing out of our comfort zone and going against our nature. The former is a necessary part of any artistic endeavour, while the latter is a recipe for becoming mediocre at something many other people will excel at because it is their real vocation.

Identifying our Creative DNA requires self-knowledge, intuition and honesty. Sometimes we want to do certain things because they seem more attractive than the ones we’re actually good at. One of the most famous contemporary Polish writers, Andrzej Stasiuk, always wanted to be a drummer. Surely, for a teenage boy, the vision of being onstage with a band, in front of an ecstatic audience, is indefinitely more appealing than sitting alone at a desk and writing. But for whatever reason, Stasiuk was able to recognise the writing skills he had and develop those instead of jamming his evenings away with friends. Which turned out to be a good choice.

I’ve met people who claim they work in a certain discipline but they either don’t seem to do much work or the work they do is preceded by hours of pain and stress. It’s as if they were consciously identifying themselves with a goal that is not part of a