BHB Blog

Bodystorming Hits Bangalore now has a blog of its own! All the posts and updates about the event will henceforth be available on the independent blog - here. For more details about the event you can also check the Bodystorming website. 

Bodystorming Blog Post - Day 1.

This blog post is by Anjali Vaidya, a grad student working with India Bioscience and a member of the documentation team for Bodystorming Hits Bangalore.

“If you're trying to give the big picture of a big idea, to really capture its essence – the fewer words you use, the better. In fact, the ideal may be to use no words at all.” This was how science writer (and instigator of the Dance Your PhD contest) John Bohannon introduced the idea of using dancers to explain and explore complicated problems in his 2011 TED talk, “Dance vs. powerpoint, a modest proposal,” which doubled as a performance piece with the Black Label Movement. The dance – and talk – came to the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Bangalore on Sunday April 26^th, with the role of John Bohannon reprised by Joseph Crook of the Black Label Movement.

As Crook told the audience at NGMA about the “spooky” counter-intuitive properties of superfluids, such as their capacity to slow down light, the ideas were mirrored in the movements of dancers behind him. “This is the great pleasure of science: the defeat of our intuition with experimentation,” said Crook. “But the experiment is not the end of the story, because you still have to transmit that knowledge to other people.”

Can dance help transmit complex scientific ideas to non-specialists? The spell-bound audience on Sunday suggested that it could. However, the dancers of the Black Label Movement have gone much further than just mirroring science in recent years, under the direction of dancer/choreographer Carl Flink (University of Minnesota). The dancers use movement to brainstorm scientific problems, a method they call bodystorming – and draw artistic inspiration from science in turn. Carl Flink spoke on Sunday of his collaboration with biomedical engineer David Odde (also of the University of Minnesota), all of whom are now in Bangalore for a week-long Bodystorming workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS). Odde and Flink met through the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Minnesota, through a shared interest in catastrophe – one in cells, and the other in dance. They have worked together ever since, exploring the dynamic environment within a cell through dance.

Dancers can only complement computer simulations, Flink asserted on Sunday – they cannot replace computers. What bodystorming can help with is intuition, narrowing down the potential avenues for exploration. “There are three doors you could have gone through, and now you know to go through door one,” explained Flink.

Satyajit Mayor (NCBS), who has helped bring bodystorming to Bangalore, spoke of how he gained a more visceral understanding of his research problems by seeing the dynamics of cell membranes acted out on a macro scale by the Black Label Movement at Woods Hole, Massachusetts last year. “We got a bird's eye view, and started to see patterns emerging,” he explained. The exercise also “sharpened one's own ability,” Mayor said, to break down a problem into a set of necessary mechanical rules.

The dancers, in turn, are inspired by the natural patterns that immerse them. Crystal Edwards, a dancer and choreographer with the Black Label Movement, said that bodystorming had changed her own creative process. “Instead of trying to make something happen, you set up rules and let patterns emerge,” she said. Likewise, Joseph Crook found the process of scientific collaboration stimulating, saying that it let him “think beyond the world of art for inspiration.” 

Carl Flink, as well, looks to the world around him and sees organizing principles that inspire. “Whenever you look out the window you see so much motion,” he said. “I like to capture that in my choreography.”

What does he see so far in Bangalore? Flink admitted that he and the Black Label Movement dancers were mildly terrified by the city's traffic, on their way to NGMA on Sunday. But the more that he watched, the more order he saw in the interweaving vehicles. They were guided by one rule: “If you see the space, you take the space.” Flink illustrated his words with a weaving of body and hands, making even the chaos of Bangalore traffic momentarily beautiful.

BODYSTORMING: An event to discover the physicality in science and thinking in dance.

Can body think and brain act? Bodystorming, a play on the word “brain storming”, nudges us to conceive “body” as a site for thinking, reflecting and communicating. The concept materialized when Carl Flink (Dancer) and David Odde (Scientist) from the University of Minnesota realized that they could get new insights into the common idea that they were exploring by being open and receptive to each other’s language of thinking. Bringing the two deceptively distant disciplines together, bodystorming gained momentum and was hosted as an event in many places across US and Europe.

This April, NCBS is bringing Bodystorming to Bangalore, where scientists will collaborate with contemporary dancers from across India, in an effort to exchange and understand the other’s world. Moving according to rules that govern movement of particles within a cell, the dancers gain a ‘lived experience’ of microscopic- cellular level processes. For Aparna Bannerji, an Odissi dancer who also heads the Science and Society department at NCBS, “Such an engagement can help a scientist arrive at new insights into processes that cannot easily be ‘visualised’. Bodystorming helps to visibilise the invisible.  For a dancer, the source of inspiration comes from a life-process and a scale that would not normally be explored, allowing for a new extension in their practice.”  More importantly, this concept challenges the conventional idea of science as being solely a logic and proof driven process, and opens up the importance of intuitive and inspired insights that often lead to the breakthroughs in science.

Bodystorming, draws attention to the “doing” or “practice” of science by moving it to the realm of experience. The practice of science, often pigeon-holed under the labels of thinking and theorizing, is distanced from it’s very physicality. Aparna also adds, “Thinking, investigating, creating, walking the path of inspiration that leads to new insights are all 'physical activities.” For her “There is no abstract notion of a mind that can 'think' if the body does not exist - so bodystorming helps make this connection.  If one can 'think' with mind and body aligned, then what happens to the type of knowledge that we can produce?  This is the real question I have for the process of bodystorming; will the use of a different practice, produce a different kind of knowledge?”

A scientist when she engages with her work also engages with it bodily – as she does an experiment or even as she cracks a formula. However, in Bodystorming, one is practicing science or doing science in a much deeper sense than experimenting or cracking a formula. This is because the material of bodystorming is the experience of being the object of study and not observing the object or experimenting on the object. Darius, a dancer and a Research Fellow at NCBS, emphasizes on this aspect of bodystorming “For me, bodystorming is a way to bridge the gap between me as a scientist/ observer and the object under study (a set of proteins, a cell, an organism) as you become a part of the study object.” The distance between the person and the work almost collapses as one becomes the object to be theorized about, - making body the site of scientific practice.

Science is often perceived as a body of knowledge which is separate from the scientist (the one producing the knowledge) while dance necessitates the presence of the dancer. The common epithet – of ‘Can you separate the dance from the dancer?’ can perhaps be extended to the scientist as she engages in this process.  Dance is not mere movement but reflects the relationship of the dancer with the dance. Similarly, scientific work embodies the nature of scientist’s engagement with her work. For example – we might have a better insight into Einstein’s theory of relativity if we understand his life, his reasons and the conditions in which he proposed the theory. Bodystorming exemplifies this relationship between scientist and science by addressing the process of the work. Looking at science as practice automatically entails the presence of a practitioner. The work itself embodies and is inclusive of the people involved in it.

According to Shabari Rao, a dancer and documenter of this project, “Non-scientists often tend to think of science as product as they are ignorant of the processes that are involved in the making of science. Similarly, non-artists tend to think of art as product rather than practice.” The week long residency that is organized as a part of bodystorming provides a context for dancers and scientists to understand art and science not as disembodied entities but as a way of understanding the world, as practice. Bodystorming in some sense goes beyond drawing conclusions about the cellular activities. It is a space for dancers to see science as a physical activity and for the scientist to see dance as a thoughtful activity. It is about drawing a distant world closer, familiarizing the unfamiliar and connecting the disconnected.