The Dance of Creativity
November 5, 2001

Choreographer Mark Morris is famous for his boundless talent and versatility. But what can business leaders learn from him? In this interview excerpt, Harvard Business Review senior editor Diane L. Coutu finds out.

by Diane L. Coutu


To understand how a manager might approach the challenges of genius, senior editor Diane L. Coutu recently visited choreographer and dancer Mark Morris at his home in Manhattan. If anyone deserves the label of genius, it is Morris. At an age when most children are still trying to color within the lines, he was already choreographing dances. By 15, he had composed his first ballet. In 1980, he formed the Mark Morris Dance Group—a collection of often unconventional-looking dancers who, in 1988, were invited to become Belgium's national dance company. There, Morris created some of modern dance's most enduring works. When he returned to the United States in 1991, Morris was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (popularly called the "genius grant"), and today the Mark Morris Dance Group is widely considered to be the most exciting company in the business.

In a three-hour conversation, Morris talked about the realities of living with genius—from the inside as well as the outside.

Coutu: "Creativity" is the hottest buzzword in business today: Everybody wants to be creative, not just artists. Is something forced about this push for creativity?

Morris: Oh, it's all so completely phony. Look at education: There's this horrible homogenization going on—everybody has got to be special. So if it's somebody's birthday in grade school, then you have to celebrate everybody's birthday, all year long. Everyone gets absolutely equal treatment; nobody is allowed to stick out—whether it's because they are behaving badly or are brilliantly smart. Everyone has to be of equal value intellectually, artistically, and creatively; it makes me want to scream. There's this irrepressible drive toward mediocrity; everything seems to be degenerating into a kind of middlebrow "world-class." Singers like Charlotte Church, bless her little heart and love her, and Andrea Bocelli are important for popular culture. But come on, these people are not world-class singers, and they will never be. I'm sorry. The very designation "world-class" drives me nuts.

Q: Do you think businesspeople can be creative?

A: They can, but it's important to distinguish between creativity and art. The most common form of creativity is problem solving: You can't get the truck through the tunnel, so you let the air out of the tires. I presume that businesspeople are very good at this kind of creativity, which is also important in dance. If I keep running into you on stage, I have to figure out what I'm doing wrong.
By contrast, art depends on whether you can invent something from very little. That's the way it is with me. I can make up a dance just by listening to music. I can invent an entire canon of works that didn't exist before. Of course, skill and learning are also involved, but art goes beyond skill.

Q: In the creative process, do you ever seek advice or feedback from other people?

I think the reason we're so popular with audiences is that we don't lie or bluster.
—Mark Morris

A: I talk to my friends. But there's a lot that I don't talk about because it's not word stuff, it's dance stuff, and dance is communicated primarily nonverbally. Of course, on some pieces, my very, very close advisers and friends have said to me, "Mark, the ending is wrong. You're cheating everybody."
And then I really did think about what they said. A few times, I even tried another ending because of what I heard. But invariably the new ending was retarded in some way: For instance, everybody started laughing at a part that was so not funny to me. So even though I do listen to other people's opinions, over the years, I have come to trust my own instincts more.

Q: How much do you consider your audience when you make a dance?

A: A lot. After all, I'm in the entertainment business, and we are putting on a show. For me, dance is quintessentially a theater thing, we're all about pretense. We dance wearing makeup and costumes. We try to please people. And yet, paradoxically, I know that if I try to make up something just to wow an audience, I'm doomed to fail. It just doesn't work. Indeed, if I find myself trying too hard to tweak and adjust things in order to deliver a message to please a particular audience, then I know something is wrong. I don't create a Protestant or a Catholic dance. I just do a dance—and let the audience take away from that whatever they want. There is a quotation I love that says, "My work isn't for everyone, it's for anyone." That is so true for me.

Q: What do you think accounts for your company's success?

A: I think the reason we are so popular with audiences is we don't lie or bluster. We don't inflate ourselves. The dancers dance honestly—that's the best thing I can say about them. Indeed, one of the things I scream about the most is "fake, fake, fake," or "chicken, chicken, chicken." I want the dancers to reach a level of authenticity that is surprising—not only to audiences but also to themselves. In the end, we have to mean what we're doing or else it's all worthless.
That's the point about genius, really. It involves both skill and honesty. Consider Maria Callas, whom we all loved and adored even though she was singing so horribly flat half the time. Yet she had this terrific authenticity. Horowitz made lots of mistakes playing the piano, but it worked because it's not about playing note perfect. That doesn't mean that you have to be touchingly imperfect to be a genius, but you do have to be real. And that's the essence of my company: We are real people who are incredibly skilled.

Excerpted with permission from "Genius at Work," Harvard Business Review, Vol. 79, No. 9, October 2001.


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A Master Class on Emotion

As an artist, Mark Morris is a master at communication. At a time when executives are being told that they must constantly—and authentically—communicate their ideas and feelings, Morris has much to teach us.

"One of the most important things I've learned in my work is that you don't get emotional to communicate emotion. A fabulous mezzo-soprano friend of mine once told me that the last way to make people cry is to cry yourself. You can't cry when you're singing because you get all choked up and everything shuts down. Deep communication is not an emotional free-for-all.
That's why I, personally, am opposed to the method school of acting, where actors are encouraged to immerse themselves in their feelings. I think self-expression is terribly overrated; I prefer communication. Of course, it may be fun for a three-year-old to spin and spin until she falls down, but it gets a little irritating if you're the uncle watching. That's not communication, it's something else. The same is true of a lot of music, which is why most garage bands are still playing in garages.

A lot of people don't understand that controlling emotion is an essential part of any performer's bag of tricks. Here's a beautiful example of what I mean. I was once in Tokyo and we were bumped from the plane and forced to spend the night near a mall at the outskirts of the city. One shop had a display of about 1,000 TVs for sale. On every one was the same image: a geisha crying with a handkerchief. I watched this picture for several minutes. I couldn't believe how moving it was, this woman painted white and crying. After a few minutes, the camera came in for a close-up, and I realized that the crying geisha was a puppet, it was a chunk of wood that a 75-year-old guy was manipulating. It made such an impression on me that I have never forgotten it. When it comes to emotion, you see, mastery—and not indulgence—is everything."

Excerpted with permission from "Genius at Work," Harvard Business Review, Vol. 79, No. 9, October 2001.