As a dancer, it is apparent to me that these experiential methods hinge on limiting one’s reliance on symbolic language and encouraging exploration, play, and improvisation—all of which are experiential, enactive approaches to cognition. Not coincidentally, exploration, play, and improvisation are the tenets of contemporary dance. By choosing to step back from verbal and graphical representations in the process of bodystorming, we may discover the following:
Freed cognitive resources that would otherwise be spent decoding and maintaining constructed language. Researching TEDxWindyCity took significantly more time outside of the studio, since technical jargon familiar to each presenter—such as “graphic facilitation,” “resource streams,” and “silos in inefficient markets”—were unfamiliar to us.
Tacit knowledge that provides insight to the material at hand. Once my dancers were armed with preliminary information, they continually synthesized information and discovered new connections between sources that had not been made before.
Multiple simultaneous meanings that can change in time and according to context. Dancers stacking themselves became lines of text, building materials, people in these systems, and the emotions of those involved.
Christopher Knowlton • Dancineering, Researchals, Bodystorming, and Informances
High bandwidth of information by communicating and experiencing through multiple layered, dynamic contexts. We used movement, gesture, body shape, spatial relationship, facial expression, narration, costuming, color, sound, voice, and setting concurrently in order to convey all 10 presenter’s ideas in 10 minutes. In comparison, each presenter was allotted 20 minutes to explain their idea with the aid of a slideshow presentation.
Intimacy and empathy with the information being conveyed. My dancers and I were surprised by a standing ovation and a number of audience members who said they cried or became emotional during the performance.
Informances
Our performances for Dance Your PhD, TEDx and One State are hardly novel. The Dance Your PhD competition is inspired by Stanford University’s A Protein Primer, a 1971 dance film that describes protein synthesis.9 In 2006, professional company Liz Lerman Dance Exchange explored genetics in their breathtaking Ferocious Beauty: Genome, collaborating with scientists in the field. As mentioned, our performances emulated a 2011 TEDx performance by John Bohannon and Black Label Movement, who collaborated again in 2012 for the impassioned TED-Ed Original Let’s talk about sex.10 The mobile design world has also coined a term for these types of presentations: “informances”—informative performances.8
While we had made our informances to educate specific audiences, I had overlooked how quickly my dancers were understanding complex subjects. Black Label Movement had similar findings from The Moving Cell Project, a collaborative effort with bioengineer David Odde. By providing professional dancers with a set of rules governing their movements, the group was able to rapidly prototype, explore, and troubleshoot proposed models of diffusion, microtubule catastrophe, and macromolecular crowding.11 Moreover, they found that when abstract concepts were put into concrete physical terms, the dancers easily understood them. This suggests a high degree of untapped potential for learning through embodied practices. As one dance researcher wrote, “exponents of contemporary dance epitomize cognition that is multimodal, embodied and distributed.”12
Consider the chemical process of “breaking a bond.” When you say the word “break,” you are likely to make a hand gesture similar to snapping a pencil, as seen in the images above, on the left. “Dissociation” better describes the process, but like most scientific terminology, the word is cryptic and cumbersome. However, the process can intuitively and more accurately be demonstrated by interlacing your fingers and pulling your hands apart, as seen in the images on the right. Why? Like all symbolic language, “break” is simply a metaphor referencing something in the real world. A physical medium like movement is better suited to represent a physical phenomenon.
Even this type of small-scale arts integration could have profound effects on education, especially for students who gravitate towards enactive modes of learning. As the dearth of enrollment in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) consistently makes headlines, initiatives to reinvigorate interest by integrating the arts into STEM to form STEAM—excuse the pun—gaining steam. Despite these fields producing the most exciting, life-changing, and ubiquitously available innovations in the last several decades, students consistently describe STEM fields as “boring” and “difficult.” I believe dance is uniquely suited to reduce barriers to participation and understanding, help the public realize the creative potential in these fields, and continue to drive innovation.
Which hand gesture best helps you understand how chemical bonds break?
Christopher Knowlton • Dancineering, Researchals, Bodystorming, and Informances
Imagine a dance company in residence at a science museum. The group could bodystorm the subject matter of exhibits to create public informances that augment otherwise static installations. Additional interactive workshops and hands-on experiences would improve understanding, participation, and engagement. Their movement expertise could help collaboratively develop movement-responsive exhibits using motion-sensing devices such as Microsoft Kinect. The studio itself could be put on display as a fishbowl exhibit of contemporary dance and the creative process. Performances and workshops could function as outreach education in the form of “traveling exhibits” to institutions which have limited or no access to the museum. In doing so, the company could learn more about barriers in science education, share best practices among teachers, and develop a movement-focused arts integration training for educators. As Carl Flink wrote, “a future science classroom might look more like a dance studio or gymnasium.”11 Ultimately, I feel the need to invert my initial question and ask: Can we understand science and engineering the way we understand the body? Based on our work so far, I firmly believe we can.
CHRISTOPHER KNOWLTON is a PhD candidate in Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago and currently researches orthopedic joint replacements at Rush University Medical Center. Chris is also a professional choreographer and movement artist. The dance work herein was created collaboratively with The Dance Team, a rotating pick-up collective of Chicago-based dancers. Email: [email protected]. Copyright © 2016
References
John Bohannon and Black Label Movement. 2011. Dance vs. PowerPoint, a modest proposal. TEDxBrussels, filmed Nov 2012.
www.ted.com/talks/john_bohannon_dance_vs_powerpoint_a_modest_proposal
The Dance Team. 2012. Multiactivity Wear Testing of Total Knee Replacements by Christopher Knowlton. Dance Your PhD 2012. www.vimeo.com/50507963
The Dance Team. 2013. 10 Talks in 10 Minutes Through Dance. Performed and
filmed at the TEDxWindyCity, Feb 23, 2013 in Chicago, IL.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJPHzIgA6Qc
The Dance Team. 2013. The Dance Team at One State Together In the Arts 2013. Performed and filmed June 25, 2013 in Moline, IL. www.vimeo.com/130515499
Smith, B. K. (2014). Bodystorming mobile learning experiences. TechTrends, 58(1), 71-76.
Oulasvirta, A., Kurvinen, E., & Kankainen, T. (2003). Understanding contexts by being there: case studies in bodystorming. Personal and ubiquitous computing, 7(2), 125-134.
Schleicher, D., Jones, P., & Kachur, O. (2010). Bodystorming as embodied designing. Interactions, 17(6), 47-51.
Burns, C., Dishman, E., Verplank, W., & Lassiter, B. (1994, April). Actors, hairdos & videotape—informance design. Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 119-120). ACM.
A Protein Primer. Directed by Robert Alan Weiss, 1971. Department of Chemistry of Stanford University. www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9dhO0iCLww (Uploaded on Jun 6, 2006, retrieved Jan 1, 2016.)
John Bohannon and Black Label Movement. 2012. Let’s talk about sex. TED-Ed Originals. ed.ted.com/lessons/let-s-talk-about-sex-john-bohannon-and-black-label-movement (Published on Dec 3, 2012, retrieved Jan 1, 2016.)
Flink, C., & Odde, D. J. (2012). Science+ dance= bodystorming. Trends in cell biology, 22(12), 613-616.
Stevens, C. J., & Leach, J. (2015). Bodystorming: effects of collaboration and familiarity on improvising contemporary dance. Cognitive processing, 16(1), 403-407.
Stories and Storytelling
Anthony Weeks
On the first day of my Documentary Methods class in film school, the professor wrote a word in big letters on the board: PROFLUENCE. I had never heard the word before. Profluence, in brief, is about flow. It means movement, tension, propulsion, unexpected twists, and resolution. All good stories, whether narrative or documentary, are profluent because they create an experience of starting somewhere, and by the end of the story we arrive somewhere else. We are moved. Profluence is the narrative connective tissue that transforms moments into scenes, scenes into acts, acts into stories, and stories into connections.
In 2005, I was seven years into my career as a professional graphic facilitator. While I had built up a respectable cross-industry, international practice and developed both my business acumen and graphic skills, I was not happy. I had lost the newcomer’s zeal for experimentation, play, and fun.
As I became more professional, I bargained away my fresh-eyed naïveté for the joyless rigidity of “this is the way I work,” “this is the way I draw _____,
no matter what the context or content,” and “this is my style and this is how my stuff looks.” I felt stale, uncreative, and stuck.
I needed to step out of my professional life and immerse myself completely in another creative pursuit. A fortuitous glance at an ad in a San Francisco free weekly newspaper revealed my opportunity: “Documentary Media Studies: The New School in New York announces a new graduate-level certificate program, beginning in Fall 2006. Applications now accepted.”
That is how I ended up in that classroom. The notion of profluence changed my life. Once the meaning became apparent to me, I began to see movement, connection, and story in beautiful, disturbing, curious, and unpredictable ways.
My sabbatical, intended to be a temporary, one-year immersion at the New School, stretched into three years. I couldn’t get the documentary thing out of my system. While I took an occasional graphic facilitation gig to stanch the hemorrhaging from my bank account, I began to think seriously about a career change to “filmmaker.” I enrolled in the MFA program at Stanford in documentary film and video. I reveled in the pursuit of story. I made films about an unemployed Mexican immigrant who saw the Virgin Mary in a rock and built a shrine to it in his garage; a Chinese hotel housekeeper who ruminated about the family she left behind as she changed sheets and scrubbed toilets in a San Francisco boutique hotel; actors with disabilities in Hollywood who scrambled for bit parts while their able-bodied counterparts won awards and accolades for playing characters with disabilities. Individual lives, mostly unrevealed and invisible. In every film, there was the question: Where is the profluence?
How do stories become stories, though, not just data points? How do they move? Where do they go? Who cares? Is the artifact of meaning the film itself—or the way that it makes people think and feel after it is over?
As a newly-minted Stanford MFA, my transition into work was rough. Documentary film is a competitive business—and a potentially impoverishing one. The “occasional” graphic facilitation gigs became more frequent, yet my re-entry into graphic facilitation was fraught with feelings of failure and resignation. What was this whole madcap filmmaking escapade about if I was just back doing what I was doing before?
Anthony Weeks • Stories and Storytelling
While becoming reacquainted with former clients and collaborating with new ones, I discovered that my graphic facilitation work looked different. It felt different. I worked differently. Perhaps I had learned something, after all.
Whereas my work circa 2005 had been a collection of aesthetically pleasant scattergrams, replete with bullet points and orphaned icons and text, my new work unfolded in flows, currents, arcs, arrows, dotted lines, and pathways. I asked new questions: Who is the protagonist here? Who is going to do all these bullet-pointed items? Who will be glad about it? Who will hate it? What are the bumps in the road? How is all of this going to be memorable and repeatable? Who is the audience? Why should anyone care?
This professional and creative reboot that began in 2006 finally made sense when I ordered new business cards. Struggling to find the right descriptors for my services offered, I ended up with a too-long list: “Graphic facilitator. Illustrator. Process consultant. Filmmaker. Producer. Information designer…” Frustrated, I deleted everything and just wrote:
“Anthony Weeks. Storyteller.”
This fit me. The word “storyteller” elegantly encompassed the services I could competently offer while sending a signal to the people with whom I hoped to collaborate. Now I was less interested in being the quiet scribe on the side (or in the back), furiously scratching away in an effort to capture every word. I wanted to be a partner in helping groups to think about moments as building blocks of stories. Connect the dots. Discover intellectual and emotional resonance. Tell a story that felt like a story, not just a collection of disparate data points. Reveal the profluence.
While we know that good stories have value for engagement and connection, we still harbor skepticism about the idea that stories have currency. They might be frivolous. Or too personal. They might be—gasp!—emotional. We are daunted by story because we still hold on to the notion that stories, somehow, cannot possibly be as rich with content and data as a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation. We are afraid of our own subjectivity. We are afraid of the sound of our own voices.
Discovering our own voices requires deep and intentional listening—to ourselves and to others. Storytelling necessarily depends on storylistening because stories derive their meaning in their re-telling. Both storytelling and storylistening invite the exchange of experience, the awkward yet skillful dance of faithful interpretation, honorable subjectivity, and graceful authenticity.
Our subjectivity as storytellers and storylisteners is our calling card, our differentiator, our way of creating value. For facilitators, graphic recorders, and visual storytellers, no matter how quiet, unobtrusive, faithful, and seemingly clear our respective channels, we are always making choices: what we include, how we write it, where we put it on the page, the juxtapositions of chunks of content, the graphics we draw, the colors we use, the size of the paper, our position in the room, and the ways in which the graphics are (or aren’t) used in the facilitation. Objectivity is a myth.
I question our role. Is our charge to “capture information” or to liberate stories?
“Capturing information” is problematic. To me, the capture of information seems like closure and restriction of possibility. If we hew closely to the notion that our primary role is to just write down what people say, we become glorified note-takers—and thus, easily replaceable. Information capture is a phone book, a grocery list, or a video clip of a soccer game. We know, though, that a phone book is not a novel, the recitation of a grocery list is not a soliloquy, and video footage of a children’s soccer game is not a film. It is context and meaning that transform our work into an experience and a narrative.
Our subjectivity as storytellers and storylisteners is not the problem. It is our strength, our virtuosity, and our ability to embody humanness. Those qualities are irreplaceable.
As I experiment and grapple with making story an integral part of my work, I am reminded of the words of media psychologist Dr. Pamela Rutledge:
Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call t
hem schemes, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we justify our decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, create our identities, and define and teach social values.1
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