Dancing Your Research
In the 2011 TEDxBrussels presentation, Dr John Bohannon who is a molecular biologist brought a team of dancers on stage as a radical alternative to Microsoft Powerpoint to elucidate and demonstrate the complexities of ideas in motion. More specifically, he was explaining how laser photons enter into a new state of matter – non-metal, non-gaseous, non-liquid – called superfluid.
Still referring to the incredible properties of superfluids, Bohannon states:
“… A thin film will creep up the inside wall, flow over the top, and ride out the outside. Now, of course, the moment that it does at the outside environment, and the temperature rises by even a fraction of a degree, it immediately turns back into normal matter. Superfluids are one of the most fragile things we’ve ever discovered. And this is the great pleasure of science: the defeat of our intuition through experimentation. But the experiment is not the end of the story. Because you’d still have to transmit that knowledge to other people. I have a PhD in molecular biology. I still barely understand what most scientists are talking about.” [3:14 – 3:45]
By now, the audience would have seen a dancer climb over Bohannon and join other dancers sprawled on the floor. And with a sudden clap of his hands, the dancing superfluids stand up again (just like normal matter). It is a highly visual and visceral experience listening and watching how these atoms and photons move on stage. These dancers then follow behind Bohannon in circular formations until they arrive in one straight line, as he continues to deliver the rest of his TEDx talk before advocating for a more visual, visceral format of presentation compared to Powerpoint.
But what is most compelling to me is that Bohannon understood that the live performance could not be replicated again.
It could be recorded and archived on video like the above TEDx talk, but the live performance emits a certain materiality and ephemerality that cannot be captured on film. In a material, emotive sense, this highly-charged performance lingers on, long after the talk ended – more than what a Powerpoint can deliver.
The power of the arts.
They linger…
Here, the art form becomes the medium of presentation.
Bohannon’s “Dance Your PhD” initiative has contributed to doctoral students making and tranforming their findings into aesthetic expressions. For example, the 2016 winners on the Science Mag website reveals an arguably more aesthetic dance-film titled Antibiotic Apocalypse (by Carla Brown from the University of Glasgow) than, say, the others.
Some initial questions related to the performance output continue to linger:
1. Do you get trained performers to perform your research? Why/Why not?
2. What aspects of the findings are you showing and not showing when they are performed?
3. How would the performance affect one’s emotional, as well as logical, reception of and response to your research?
4. Are aesthetics a more esteemed ‘measurement’ or indication of the practice?
5. What is the role of the researcher in the performance?
6. What is the critical relationship (ie. power differential) of the researcher with the arts community and the research subjects in the process of creating a performance?
7. Which end of the spectrum between fiction and fact does the research performance reside? This necessarily brings up concepts of authenticity, interpretations, constructions, and identities into the debate.
8. Will the context (of the research fieldwork) be reduced or accentuated during the performance?
9. How does one give voice to the richness of the research findings?
But the art form – the dance – should also be the process of investigating a piece of research.
10. How does research inform the artistic practice, and how does artistic presentation inform the process of research? At which stages do they intersect?
In a 2010 article “Encounters in Child Care” (from Judith Ackroyd and John O’Toole’s edited book, Performing Research), Jill Robinson writes about the values researchers bring to any study:
“In staging the text given to me by participants as a script for performance and inscribing it with my own values and priorities, I was concerned that the script would not be recognisable to those people whose experience it was meant to represent. Irrationally (according to what [Laura] Richardson suggests above) I didn’t have the same concerns about the evaluation report. I therefore wanted to return to participant groups to see what they thought of the way in which I had constructed their experiences in the script. I met with the person who had led the group who had funded the evaluation and with the key informants from the two schemes I had used. I gave them the script and talked about what I had done. The response from them was positive and enthusiastic.” (Robinson, 2010, p. 116-117)
Perhaps what is being performed is not just the research subjects’, but also yours.
How do you negotiate that in terms of ethics and aesthetics?
Dance involves concepts of space, weight, flow, pathways, directions, balance, levels, and shapes.
Dance also examines issues of materiality, corporeality and embodiment – which, if taken further, would mean asking questions around how one’s research question, processes, and findings can both be embodied and performed in time and space.
While some of these questions continue to exist – and rightfully so – it is (politically) important to recognise that arts research and practice try to avoid questions of a binary nature.
There are ambiguities and gaps in performing your research through dance; it resembles the fluidity and complexities of research in understanding another cultural group or research subject. It also brings to mind what Deleuze and Gauttari characterise as multiplicities; it is not a singular term nor a collective noun, but multiplicities in pluralities.
Dance.
Then dance. Again.
That’s how research moves.
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Author: Dr Edmund Chow | 27 June 2018 | LASALLE