Performing Arts

Live artistic expression through dance, music, theatre, and opera. Combines technical skill, creative interpretation, and embodied performance with theoretical understanding of performance traditions and cultural contexts.

Goals

Develop performance skills and artistic interpretation. Understand performance techniques, traditions, and cultural contexts. Analyze relationships between performer, audience, and meaning. Cultivate creative expression. Examine performance as cultural phenomenon.

Why these books

Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit (2009) is the natural starting point, and one of the most practical and honest books about artistic practice ever written. Tharp, one of the great choreographers of the twentieth century, argues that creativity is not a gift visited upon the talented few but a disciplined habit built through daily rituals, sustained attention, and a willingness to work without guarantees. The book moves through the full cycle of creative work — preparation, ideation, the management of creative blocks, collaboration, and the often-painful process of knowing when a work is finished — drawing on Tharp's own decades of experience and the practices of artists across every performing discipline. For students, it provides something no purely theoretical text can: a rigorous, battle-tested account of what it actually takes to show up and do the work, day after day, year after year. It is less about inspiration than about the infrastructure that makes inspiration possible.
Steve Martin's Born Standing Up (2007) is the most personal book on the list, a memoir of the decade and a half Martin spent developing his stand-up comedy act before achieving the sudden, overwhelming fame that ultimately caused him to abandon the form entirely. It is a masterclass in the long, largely invisible process of artistic development — the thousands of performances in small clubs and college auditoriums, the constant experimentation with timing, structure, and persona, the gradual and hard-won understanding of the relationship between performer and audience. Martin writes with remarkable candor about failure, loneliness, and the peculiar psychology of someone who needs the validation of an audience while remaining fundamentally solitary in his creative process. The book's central lesson is both humbling and liberating: that mastery is the product of relentless iteration, and that the performer audiences eventually see represents only the visible surface of an enormous submerged body of work.
Anna Deavere Smith's Letters to a Young Artist (2006) brings a different and essential perspective — that of a theatre artist, educator, and public intellectual reflecting on what it means to commit to an artistic life with integrity and purpose. Structured as a series of short, direct letters addressed to a young artist navigating the early stages of a creative career, the book addresses questions of identity, discipline, race, ambition, failure, and the relationship between artistic practice and civic responsibility. Smith draws on her own experience as a performer and her encounters with artists, activists, and public figures across decades to build an argument that art is not merely self-expression but a form of social engagement — that the performing artist has obligations not just to craft but to the world the craft inhabits. It is the most philosophically and ethically serious book on the list, and it gives students a framework for thinking about artistic vocation that extends well beyond technique.
Together these three books trace a coherent and complementary arc. Tharp addresses the daily discipline of building a creative practice from the inside out. Martin illuminates the long, unglamorous road to mastery and the complex psychology of the performer's relationship with an audience. And Smith raises the larger questions of purpose, identity, and responsibility that every serious artist must eventually confront.

Performing Arts

Goals

Why these books

Books

Within Performing Arts