A couple of lifetimes ago, when I was an innocent young thing navigating the mean streets of the Big Apple, some friends and I went to the Bottom Line -- a famed Greenwich Village music venue, sadly now closed -- to hear a line-up of three bands. The Bottom Line mostly catered to jazz and blues bands, so the setup was a bit different from the usual rock venues: there were long wooden tables dotted about the room, where you sat and ordered drinks and nibbles in between sets.
One of our number was particularly exhausted, having pulled an all-nighter for a class assignment the day before, and the first couple of bands were, shall we say, less than stellar. Loud, yes -- but rather pedestrian in musicianship and tepid in their stage presence. So despite the noisy and smoke-filled atmosphere, my tired friend actually laid her head down on the table and dozed off briefly during the second set, unable to keep her eyes open any longer. Unfortunately, we were seated right at the foot of the stage, smack in the middle. There's no way the lead singer of that long-forgotten aspiring band missed her inadvertent napping. It must have been a crushing blow; it would be for any performer.
She roused herself when the second band cleared the stage to make way for the third: a then-unknown (though not for long) band called They Might Be Giants. As the Johns Linnell and Flansburgh were setting up their equipment, Flansburgh leaned over, tapped my friend on the shoulder and teased, "Hey, try to stay awake during our set, will ya? We'd like this place to invite us back!" She was mortified; we were in stitches. And of course, she stayed awake for TMBG's set, although that wouldn't have been a problem even if Flansburgh hadn't made it clear he'd noticed her dozing off. Anyone who's seen TMBG live knows they put on a very entertaining show. Sure, they're quirky, innovative, with smart funny lyrics and catchy pop hooks, but ultimately it was their strong sense of showmanship, and ability to connect with their audience, that propelled them from a local favorite into the big time.
I found myself recalling that long-forgotten moment during last Friday's "Journal Club" workshop at the KITP. This one was focused on improving one's presentation skills while giving talks -- whether technical (targeting one's scientific peers) or general (for the public at large), or anywhere in between. While casting about for a creative way to approach the topic du jour, I reasoned that any public talk is a form of performance.
Some physicists might scoff if you told them they needed to develop a bit of showmanship for their presentations -- it should be about the pure truth of science, dammit, not some dog-and-pony show! -- but science has always had one foot in the theater. Public demonstrations of experiments and concepts are a vital part of science history, from the old dissection theaters of the anatomists to Oersted's and Faraday's lectures on electromagnetism, Tesla's eye-popping demos of electricity, and (more recently) Richard Feynman's frenzied bongo playing (he likes his orange juice!) and Simon Singh's derring-do inside a Faraday cage.
So showmanship matters, to varying degrees. And that means that the tools and techniques employed by actors are useful to scientists interested in improving their presentation. Lacking any formal theater training myself, I tapped into the local talent and recruited Ottiliana Rolandsson, an actress, director and soon-to-be-newly minted PhD in the University of California, Santa Barbara's theater department, to run this particular workshop (h/t to Deborah Storm at KITP, who put me in touch with her). Ottiliana was the perfect choice: lively, whip-smart (her thesis is on Ingmar Bergman), eternally curious, strikingly pretty, with a lilting Swedish accent, she definitely held a lot of appeal for the strongly international flavor of the KITP membership. And she knows her craft: her petite frame might easily have been swallowed up in the auditorium, were she not so adept at commanding the "stage."
To prepare, Ottiliana spent a couple of weeks attending several of the KITP technical talks and taking notes on the pros and cons of various speakers, and deciding which of her vast collection of actor's tools would be most useful for the physicists. And she tailored the workshop accordingly. First, she spoke of her admiration and respect for the work being done at KITP, assuring them that not only was their work important, but that people like her -- non-physicists who love ideas and are naturally curious about the world -- were fascinated by what they did, even if we can only grasp a tiny fraction of the details. Therefore, she concluded, "How you present yourself is also very important." It's an excellent point: you can be doing the most brilliant research in the world, but if you can't communicate its importance effectively to either your peers or the public, then your work will not have as big an impact. More practically, for young up-and-coming physicists, the ability to give an engaging lecture is a strong selling point during the highly competitive job search process. Yet only a few institutions bother to provide their grad students and post-docs with any kind of training in this area.
This is also true of authors, frankly, and writers tend to be much more shy and internalized than the average person. When my first book was published, I found myself thrust quite abruptly into giving informal talks at bookstores -- as well as radio and print interviews, but those were easier because at least I had experience conducting them, so I knew the drill. People who know me today have a hard time believing this, but I grew up painfully shy and suffered from crippling stage fright. I worked very hard to overcome it (the jujitsu training helped a lot), and managed to swim instead of sink at my first bookstore appearance. It got easier from there. (My solution: keep my opening remarks brief and informal, and then move as quickly as possible into an interactive Q&A. I didn't learn the more formal approach of PowerPoint until last year, thanks to the Spousal Unit's patient tutelage.) But it would have been far less stressful if I'd had some rudimentary training, rather than having to learn to connect with an audience on the fly. I needed someone like Ottiliana.
I particularly liked Ottiliana's emphasis, while making her case, on the speaker as a "portal" for information. If that portal is closed -- if the speaker is aloof, withdrawn, standing with crossed arms, mumbling, not making eye contact, or not acknowledging the audience -- then the information is blocked and can't get through effectively. If the portal is open -- if the speaker is lively, engaging, interacting occasionally with the audience, relaxed and confident -- then the information flows more freely through the speaker to the audience.
This is essentially a restatement of my constant emphasis on making the connection: without it, no true communication can take place. Often, I think, there is more of a one-way approach to giving talks: the speaker is imparting knowledge to passive listeners. That's not the KITP model. In most of the technical talks, there's tons of give and take, and constant real-time feedback. But they're talking peer-to-peer. There's no denying that even gifted speakers frequently lapse into "didactic mode" when encountering non-scientists, whereas a conversational approach is far more effective at fostering connection with that particular target audience.
So how does one go about becoming an "open portal"? Well, it's probably not something that can be accomplished in a single hour-and-a-half workshop, but one has to start somewhere. Ottiliana walked us through a simple breathing exercise, designed to help a speaker relax in those nerve-wracking (for most of us) few minutes before giving a talk. Personally, I'm always a little tense the first 5 minutes, before relaxing into the rhythm of my presentation, and I'm sure I'm not atypical in that respect. So I'm definitely going to be using that little exercise in the future.
Then she talked about some of the mannerisms she'd observed while attending those aforementioned technical talks. For instance, one speaker (she didn't name names) was personable, engaging, and an excellent speaker, but didn't make full use of the space at his disposal. He was so concerned about not blocking the view of his PowerPoint slides that he stood off to one corner the entire time. Not only was it a static, non-dynamic pose, but those people seated to the far right had an uninterrupted view of his derriere. She then demonstrated how the speaker might have moved more freely in the "stage space," acknowledging different sectors of the audience each time. (I noticed that Ottiliana did this herself as people were filing in for the workshop, to great effect. I learned a great deal from observing her about how to foster more audience interaction.)
There needs to be a balance, of course. A speaker shouldn't be constantly pacing back and forth nervously, and must make sure, if s/he is using PowerPoint, that the audience has an opportunity to look at the requisite slides. Too often, though, we tend to focus overmuch on reading the slides, so she suggested giving them a chance to absorb the content, then deliberately stepping in front of the slide projection to draw the attention back to oneself as the speaker. (It goes without saying that creating an effective PowerPoint presentation is an art form all its own. To that end, Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles outlined a number of useful tips for making good use of the technology back in 2006.) Pacing is everything: it's important not to talk too fast, or to gesture overly wildly with one's hands (I am guilty of both of these on occasion). Calm, controlled, confident movements are the order of the day. And that takes practice to develop.
Then the fun began! Ottiliana asked for volunteers to run through a few basic acting exercises. First up: KITP's fearless leader, institute director/Nobel laureate David Gross, who told me afterwards that he'd dabbled in theater in high school; he also played Richard Feynman for a staged reading of QED at KITP's STAR conference in 2005. It showed: once she realized he'd been to Stockholm (remember, she's Swedish!) for the Nobel ceremony, Ottiliana delightedly asked him to tell the story of the dinner as if he were giving a talk. He started with arms folded across his chest -- he was "on the spot," as it were -- but opened up as his story progressed, and really did come across as calm, confident, with controlled yet animated movements, particularly with his hands. Ottiliana's only suggestion was that he pretty much stood in the same place, and recommended a few staged movements to animate the delivery even further.
Then it was my turn -- hey, I can't very well ask workshop participants to engage in activities if I'm not willing to suffer with them. I was joined by particle theorist Herbi Dreiner of the University of Bonn and Bisi Agboola, a mathematics professor at UCSB. They, too, had some stage experience: Bisi had done high school theater, and Herbi is involved with Physikshow in Germany: 90-minute staged physics demonstrations with his physics students from Bonn that frequently play to sold-out audiences (you can see a YouTube video of one of their demos here). Bisi turns out to be a natural raconteur: he told an amusing anecdote, and Ottiliana's only suggestion was that he make better use of his hands.
So I was the only one participating in the exercises with zero stage experience, and no Nobel Prize to bolster my confidence. First, I had to talk about why I now need occasional back adjustments after 10 years of jujitsu (being on the wrong end of frequent guillotine chokes and neck breaks is not conducive to a healthy upper back) -- rendered as if I were a fragile old woman. Turns out I suck at playing a fragile old woman, but got some additional coaching from Ottiliana and managed some semblance of stooped, quavering fragility.
Then she had me tell the same story, this time as a victorious gold medalist Olympian athlete. This was done to illustrate how mental images can influence body language. Ergo, a strong mental image -- a victorious athlete, or (in Herbi's case) a lion -- is more effective at exuding confidence as a speaker than a weaker mental image (a little old woman, or a mouse -- watch the online talk if you're dying to see Herbi's spot-on interpretation of mousy behavior). We quickly ran out of time, otherwise there might be even more entertaining video of physicists attempting to emulate various animals.
Ottiliana's tips would have been handy the week before, when the workshop focused on how to come off better during TV appearances. My pal Diandra Leslie Pelecky (The Physics of NASCAR) attended, and agreed to a videotaped mock-interview with Jerry Roberts, who heads up the student communications at UCSB, among other things. He's had a long, successful career in print and broadcast journalism, and was able to adopt three distinct interviewing styles with Diandra to run her through the paces of how to deal with different kinds of situations: the combative, 60 Minutes style of grilling ("Tell me, Ms. Leslie-Pelecky, if that is your real name..."); the morning show airhead ("How does Mrs. Earnhart seem to be coping with her husband's death?"); and a more straightforward, serious interview that covered some actual science. Joe Polchinski (inventor of D branes in string theory, and one of the few permanent members at KITP) also agreed to be mock-interviewed, revealing a sly sense of humor in the process. For instance, asked if there was any controversy about string theory, he deadpanned, "Oh no. Everybody agrees that string theory is correct." It cracked up the room.
We then played back the tapes and discussed what worked, what didn't, and why. The camera misses nothing, you see, and what works for a live lecture might not translate as well to the small screen. What you do with your hands becomes critical, as does where you look. Fidgeting doesn't come off well, either. I discovered this the hard way, the first time I did BloggingHeads.TV, and found myself seated in a swivel chair. For the first five minutes of the video, you can see me unconsciously swiveling back and forth for no apparent reason (because you can't see the chair in the tiny video screen). The second time I appeared, the headset was too big and I kept fiddling with it throughout the diavlog. Who knows what will go wrong if there are future diavlogs?
The point of both workshops: presentation matters, even though different contexts might have different requirements. Nobody should be forced to be somebody they're not -- Ottiliana in particular stressed that this is about finding ways to communicate one's true self to an audience, not to put on a fake performance and/or pretend to be someone else. Personally, I can't do perky. Or fragile little old women. But I'm gradually figuring out how to improve my presentation while still being true to my personality. Hopefully, KITP will bring Ottiliana back for future, more extensive workshop. Just imagine what would happen if the majority of physicists worked at becoming master communicators -- able to indulge their inner sense of playfulness without detracting from the seriousness of their research, thereby connecting with their audience so well, the excitement would be palpable. Physics would become the hottest commodity around. And it deserves to be.
TMBG also deserve a nod for the wit of their science songs such as 'Why Does the Sun Shine?'
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=21394184
and 'Mammal'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgNhMlKv4aA
Posted by: Monte Davis | April 07, 2008 at 11:42 AM
Excellent post! I was just thinking about this the other day as I attended a symposium of artists talking about their work and I couldn't catch a whiff of what they were going on about, and then I had to help a friend tailor her presentation for an anthropology conference.
There is far too much power-point abuse these days, and I never feel quite comfortable having to speak at a podium (i.e. not being allowed to move around a little bit). I usually speak a little too fast when I start off, but eventually I hit a more proper rhythm, too. It's something similar to when I was in school plays; before the curtain went up I'd be incredibly nervous, but once I was "in character" things became easier. I knew what I was going to say and do, and it just became a matter of making sure I hit all the proper points.
Posted by: Brian Switek | April 09, 2008 at 10:32 AM
It's all about balance, really. PowerPoint is a tool, like anything else, and depending on the purposes of your talk, it can be quite useful. It's just that it's often wielded clumsily. :) I've been having fun with PowerPoint in the last few months, playing around with the capabilities, testing what works and what doesn't, all in hopes of combining it with better "stage skills" to get much more entertaining talks in the end. I hope.
Posted by: Jennifer Ouellette | April 09, 2008 at 10:44 AM