Motherhood Quote by Twyla Tharp

Creation, for Twyla Tharp, isn’t a ladder of masterpieces so much as a series of births. The line about “each…an equal high” pushes against the way audiences, critics, and even grant committees demand a greatest-hit narrative: name the peak, rank the work, flatten a career into a few canonical titles. Tharp refuses the premise. Calling dances “children” is a sly bit of emotional re-framing that makes the usual question (“Which one matters most?”) feel faintly indecent, like asking a parent to quantify affection.

The intent is partly defensive, partly aspirational. Defensive because dance is an especially brutal art to preserve: bodies age, casts change, pieces vanish if they aren’t restaged. Saying she “worked to make it intact” signals a choreographer’s obsession with coherence and survivability, not just inspiration. Aspirational because she’s describing a practice where the reward is built into the process. An “equal high” suggests she’s chasing the state of making, not the status of having made.

There’s subtext, too, about labor and lineage. Motherhood is an image of care, but also of unglamorous responsibility: rehearsal hours, repetition, discipline, maintenance. That’s Tharp’s brand of rigor masquerading as warmth. In a culture that treats art as a marketplace of winners, she’s insisting on a different metric: integrity over hierarchy, craft over coronation, a body of work that doesn’t need a single favorite to justify its existence.