Creativity Overview

Twyla Tharp has a lot of ideas about creativity and suggestions about how to follow these ideas. Much of her book is examples of artists who taught her their methods whether directly or otherwise influenced her. Her ideas come from a fast pace approach the creativity in which one doesn't simply sit down and be creative but learns ways to harness their creativity. Maybe not applicable for all, her teachings seem geared towards adults in a field in which creativity is key. She, for instance, is a choreographer so creativity is her foundation. She asks us to step outside of the box and embrace our mistakes that society would otherwise tell us were failures. She has a positive outlook on the process and would seem to wish it utilized more in today's world. She knows the importance of a creative mind in any profession because without creativity we have nothing new or fresh to work with and we become sort of stuck in our old ways. We see creativity as something completely new but there is no such thing because as she says in the book everything comes from something else, there is no original thought. Creativity is simply the process of taking pieces of what we have and gluing them together in a different way. If we put more emphasis on individuality in the younger years of schooling perhaps that would be a conductor for teaching creativity. Children want so badly to be a mold of something they see or hear about because that's the way society is today, everyone fits into a mold. By teaching from a young age and beyond that you can be anything you want to be, we would feel more at ease with our creativity and fear less the rejection of others that may hold us back from overstepping our boundaries into something magnificent.