Dance your PHD
So, here’s a great idea: a competition to dance your PHD. Science and performance art combining to produce something intricate yet comprehensible; serious yet entertaining; researched, rehearsed yet beautifully spontaneous. I thought I would share this with you, because it occurred to me that this is not just an innovative and exciting way to get people to understand each other’s ideas better, but in turn, something that might help turn science fiction to science fact just that little bit faster.
The originator of the competition, John Bohannon, explains it rather eloquently during his Ted Talk, but I’ll add a little thought of my own. Imagine if we could all learn from dance what we find so daunting in textbooks, if we could search ‘Wikidance’ for all the amazing things in the world that are so hard to understand. Imagine if we all shared our knowledge in this incredibly creative way, across Youtube and Vimeo and in universities and laboratories, how powerful and persuasive we could be, and how much more we would know. And how much we would enjoy knowing it.
Unfortunately I don’t have a science PHD. just a GCSE from 1990. But I have a great sense of rhythm and a nice line in lycra lurking somewhere in the back of the wardrobe. So if anyone out there has something they’d like to enter but is a little short on dance moves, I’m not too old to break out my jazz shoes…
Louisa Brann 