THE CREATIVE HABIT: Learn It and Use It for Life By Twyla Tharp with Mark Reiter. Simon & Schuster. 243 pp. $25 In the black-and-white photo on the cover of Twyla Tharp's book The Creative Habit, the celebrated choreographer is looking down at us from atop a tall stepladder. You know hers will be a serious discussion of creativity, because Tharp isn't smiling. Hunkered down on that narrow platform, her chin in her hands, she looks stern and resolute. But the point of the picture is clear: Follow her advice, and you, too, can join her at the top.Images are paramount to Tharp, one of America's best-known dance-makers. The image she's employing here is that she's also a qualified creativity guru, and given her long history of artistic achievement, that's a hard one to dispute.

A Day in the Life of Twyla Tharp

By ERIKA KINETZ
The New York Times

Twyla Tharp appeared at 6:03 a.m. on a recent Wednesday wrapped in a brown DKNY trench coat, her mop of silver-white hair bristling with energy in the predawn torpor of East 91st Street. At 6:04 a.m., she tripped over the prong of a forklift parked in front of Eli's Bread. Her newspaper lurched out of her hands. A fan of credit cards spilled from her wallet. She tumbled onto the street, hitting the ground hands first, executing a near-perfect forward roll and landing in a reasonable semblance of the splits.

Then she got up, and without comment, proceeded into the Pumping Iron Gym.

...

Now she has completed her second book, "The Creative Habit." And she wants to be very clear that it is not about dance.

"It's not about explaining dance," Ms. Tharp said tersely. "I could care less about that."

The Brains of the Outfit

By ELIZABETH ZIMMER
The Village Voice
January 7 - 13, 2004

Twyla Tharp has been blunt about her desire to earn serious money, the kind of paychecks regularly pocketed by star athletes and pop icons. Her recent, Tony-winning Movin' Out, a Broadway smash that melds Billy Joel's familiar songs with her own hyperactive choreography, is just the latest in a series of career moves designed to make brilliant dancing accessible to people more at home in stadiums than in opera houses.