Creativity and Good Taste

I'm reading Twyla Tharp's bestseller, The Creative Habit. Tharp is an Emmy- and Tony-winning American dancer and choreographer (think "Hair," "White Nights," "Movin' Out"), and her book is the best I've ever read on creativity.

To my delight, yesterday while looking for a clip from Movin' Out (which weaves Billy Joel's masterpieces into a narrative), I found her on YouTube giving a four-minute commentary on one of her dances. At the end she refers to Proust and his story in Remembrance of Things Past about madeleines.

I often remind my students to incorporate the five senses--especially smell and taste--into their work. Proust's anecdote gives a stellar example of why in "The Cookie":

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind.

She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.

An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

Follow the link to her commentary and enjoy.

And remember to register for the book drawing tomorrow.