dance dance (your) ph.d.

Jules Feiffer used to draw cartoons for the Village Voice, back before it, too, sold out to the man, and every now and then he'd throw in an interpretive dance cartoon like the animated one that opens his website. The caption would read something like, "A dance to bowling" and a leggy, Giacometti-like woman would spin her way across the panels, inevitably ending in some kind of disastrous tangle. The subject of this post reminds me somewhat of those cartoons. I hardly know what category to put it in. Biomimicry? Fifteen Minutes? Communicating Science? Just how do you label an interpretive dance of your Ph.D. research? I guess "How cool is that?" works.

Dance, of course, has its own physics in its turns and leaps (one that Jennifer has covered in some of her writing about the physics of the fight in her Buffyverse book), but representing physics, or any kind of science, in dance is a whole different matter. This isn't the first collaboration of its kind, however. In 2004-5, Britain's Institute of Physics worked with the Rambert Dance Co. to create "'Constant Speed,' a ground-breaking physical interpretation of scientific principles," commissioned for Einstein Year. This year's first World Science Festival, held here in New York, featured Armitage Gone! Dance's "The Elegant Universe," inspired by Brian Greene's book of the same name.

Gonzolabs, the people who thought up the 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest, are also pretty sure that "the human body is an excellent medium for communicating science—perhaps not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article, but far more exciting." Let's test that hypothesis.

Behold, samples from  "Taking Science to the Dance and Back Again," in which graduate students, post-docs, and professors dance their Ph.D.:

In true Jules Feiffer mode, we have Jolene Chang's "The Mechanism of Agrin's Function in Interneuronal Synaptogenesis":

For the more physics minded, there's also a hot "physics tango" of "Single Molecule Measurements of Protelomerase TelK-DNA Complexes"; an interpretive dance of "Generating Entanglement in a Cold Atomic Ensemble via Atom-Light Interaction in an Optical Resonator"; "Understanding turbulence to use magnetically confined fusion" and more. Here's one of my favorites, "The Effects of Climatic Variability and Land Cover Change on Aquatic Ecosystems, Carbon Cycling, and Ecosystem Services of the Amazon River Basin":

Explanations of the dances can be found on YouTube by clicking on "more info" to the right of the video. Gonzolabs has links to all the videos. The winners, BTW, will have their research professionally choreographed and presented as "This is Science" at the 2009 AAAS meeting in Chicago. Gonzolab's adds that "the goal of this contest is to bring scientists and artists together in a successful collaboration. The output--"THIS IS SCIENCE"--will continue to develop with the aim of a full theatrical run and, hopefully, a world tour."

How cool is that, indeed?

H/T to Dr. Glam.

Comments

[Leitchy]

Sorry Lee, but what does "H/T to..." mean? Huge Thanks? Hack Slash Thump?? I Googled, but nothing is coming up that appears to be relevant.

[Zero]

Leitchy: Hat-tip (i.e., thanks to).

[Lee Kottner]

Zero got it in one.

[Jackson]

See the book Physics of Dance by Kenneth Laws and his numerous presentations -- a lecture accompanied by a professional dancer.
http://physics.dickinson.edu/~podance/Presentations.htm
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Music/Dance/?view=usa&ci=9780195149166