Interactions with Twyla Tharp's CREATIVE HABIT book
If you know me very well, you know one of my ongoing interests involves what creativity is and how it affects our lives. As a creative artist, I view this as akin to a doctor reading medical journals or a lawyer pouring over law records and legislation. I checked out choreographer Twyla Tharp's book THE CREATIVE HABIT: A PRACTICAL GUIDE from the public library. I've been making my way through it over the past few days. Really good stuff.
One of the points she covers involves the conepts of zoe and bios (she she relates from Carl Kerenyi's book DIONYSOS). Here's an excerpt:
Zoe and bios both mean life in Greek, but they are not synonymous. Zoe, wrote Kerenyi, refers to "life in general, without characterization." Bios characterizes a specific life, the outlines that distinguish one living thing from another. Bios is the Greek root for "biolography," zoe for "zoology."
Zoe is like seeing Earth from space. You get a sense of life on the rotating globe, but without a sense of the individual lives being lived on the planet. Bios involves swooping down from space from the perch of a high-powered spy satellite, closing in on the scene, and seeing the details. Bios distinguishes between one life and another. Zoe refers to the aggregate.
Reflecting on my own creative DNA, I realize I'm a narrative, detail-based artist. In the longform-improv that I performed last night (Swearingen and I did a "family-friendly" FUN GRIP show for Plano Childrens Theatre as part of their World Theatre Day celebrations), I realize it is entirely detail and story-centric. There are more abstract kinds of improv (unrelated, abstract, and vague), and though I've tinkered in those forms before, I'm not drawn to them. We are free-form as a rule, but FUN GRIP definitely drifts towards stories over mere "interactions."
Last night, the improv involved two rival fathers each with a son in a local swim meet. One son wanted to be a "contemporary oil painter," but his step-dad pushed him to practice swimming "27 hours a day, 8 days a week." The other son was very slow - physically slow in moving - and his dad, who worked at AIG, had a home filled with sercet rooms which houses many swimming trophies from all their ancestors. What followed included bio-mutations, time-travel to the middle ages (but almost the Renaissance), angry mobs, heads in toilets, cardiac arrest, and many other plot points and details. In fact, it would be hard to imagine the improv not following a story structure. A bios approach.
Thinking of my playwriting, it is also story-based and detail driven. I dabbled in the world of abstraction and other non-narrative formats, but I seem to always come back around to a bios approach. Same with directing, my cartooning, same with what kinds of music I like, the paintings I'm drawn to, the kind of movies I like, and on and on. Everything tells a story.
This was a nice revelation! The more I figure out how I work, the more I know I'll save myself frustration and heart-ache later on, and concentrate on getting more, and better, creative work done...