Time & Perspective Quote by Twyla Tharp

Tharp is talking about laughter the way a choreographer talks about breath: not decoration, not a break from “serious” work, but a technique for changing what bodies and minds are able to take in. Coming from a dancer and maker known for precision and rigor, the line quietly overturns the cliché that high art must stay solemn to be taken seriously. The intent is practical: if you want an audience to follow you into abstraction, difficulty, or vulnerability, you first have to lower their defenses.

The subtext is that audiences arrive armored. They’re anxious about not “getting it,” about being judged for their reactions, about the social performance of culture itself. Tharp frames humor as permission. Laughing with you (not at you) builds a temporary alliance; it tells the room, “We’re in this together,” and that togetherness buys risk. In dance, where meaning often travels through gesture and rhythm rather than literal language, that trust is currency.

Her phrasing is canny: “relax” and “look at things differently” are psychological outcomes, not aesthetic ones. She’s describing how comedy rewires attention. The “release of tension” isn’t just pleasant; it creates energy, a rebound effect, like a spring uncoiling. That energy can then be redirected into concentration, surprise, even awe. In context, it’s also a defense of range: Tharp’s work has always mixed the cerebral with the vernacular, the virtuosic with the playful. Laughter becomes a choreographic tool for smuggling complexity past the bouncer of self-consciousness.