A Choreographer's Creative Process in Real Time | Wayne McGregor | TED Talks

441,743 views ・ 2012-09-14

TED


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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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As you might imagine, I'm absolutely passionate
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about dance. I'm passionate about making it,
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about watching it, about encouraging others
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to participate in it,
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and I'm also really passionate about creativity.
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Creativity for me is something that's absolutely critical,
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and I think it's something that you can teach.
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I think the technicities of creativity can be taught
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and shared, and I think you can find out things
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about your own personal physical signature,
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your own cognitive habits, and use that as
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a point of departure to misbehave beautifully.
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I was born in the 1970s, and John Travolta was big
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in those days: "Grease," "Saturday Night Fever,"
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and he provided a fantastic kind of male role model for me
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to start dancing. My parents were very up for me going.
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They absolutely encouraged me to take risks, to go,
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to try, to try. I had an opportunity, an access
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to a local dance studio, and I had an enlightened teacher
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who allowed me to make up my own and invent
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my own dances, so what she did was let me make up
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my own ballroom and Latin American dances to teach
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to my peers.
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And that was the very first time that I found an opportunity
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to feel that I was able to express my own voice,
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and that's what's fueled me, then, to become a choreographer.
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I feel like I've got something to say and something to share.
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And I guess what's interesting is, is that I am now obsessed
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with the technology of the body.
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I think it's the most technologically literate thing that we have,
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and I'm absolutely obsessed with finding a way
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of communicating ideas through the body to audiences
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that might move them, touch them,
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help them think differently about things.
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So for me, choreography is very much a process
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of physical thinking. It's very much in mind,
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as well as in body, and it's a collaborative process.
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It's something that I have to do with other people.
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You know, it's a distributed cognitive process in a way.
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I work often with designers and visual artists,
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obviously dancers and other choreographers,
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but also, more and more, with economists,
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anthropologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists,
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people really who come from very different domains of
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expertise, where they bring their intelligence to bear
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on a different kind of creative process.
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What I thought we would do today a little bit is
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explore this idea of physical thinking,
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and we're all experts in physical thinking.
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Yeah, you all have a body, right?
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And we all know what that body is like in the real world,
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so one of the aspects of physical thinking
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that we think about a lot is this notion of proprioception,
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the sense of my own body in the space in the real world.
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So, we all understand what it feels like to know
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where the ends of your fingers are
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when you hold out your arms, yeah?
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You absolutely know that when you're going to grab a cup,
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or that cup moves and you have to renavigate it.
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So we're experts in physical thinking already.
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We just don't think about our bodies very much.
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We only think about them when they go wrong, so, when
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there's a broken arm, or when you have a heart attack,
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then you become really very aware of your bodies.
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But how is it that we can start to think about using
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choreographic thinking, kinesthetic intelligence, to arm
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the ways in which we think about things more generally?
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What I thought I'd do is, I'd make a TED premiere.
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I'm not sure if this is going to be good or not.
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I'll just be doing it.
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I thought what I'd do is, I'd use three versions
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of physical thinking to make something.
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I want to introduce you. This is Paolo. This is Catarina.
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(Applause)
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They have no idea what we're going to do.
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So this is not the type of choreography where
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I already have in mind what I'm going to make,
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where I've fixed the routine in my head
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and I'm just going to teach it to them,
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and these so-called empty vessels are just going to learn it.
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That's not the methodology at all that we work with.
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But what's important about it is how it is that they're
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grasping information, how they're taking information,
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how they're using it, and how they're thinking with it.
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I'm going to start really, really simply.
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Usually, dance has a stimulus or stimuli, and I thought
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I'd take something simple, TED logo, we can all see it,
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it's quite easy to work with, and I'm going to do something
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very simply, where you take one idea from a body,
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and it happens to be my body, and translate that
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into somebody else's body,
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so it's a direct transfer, transformation of energy.
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And I'm going to imagine this, you can do this too if you like,
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that I'm going to just take the letter "T" and I'm going
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to imagine it in mind, and I'm going to place that outside in
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the real world. So I absolutely see a letter "T" in front of me.
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Yeah? It's absolutely there.
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I can absolutely walk around it when I see it, yeah?
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It has a kind of a grammar. I know what I'm going to do
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with it, and I can start to describe it, so I can describe it
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very simply. I can describe it in my arms, right?
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So all I did was take my hand and then I move my hand.
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I can describe it, whoa, in my head, you know? Whoa.
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Okay. I can do also my shoulder. Yeah?
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It gives me something to do, something to work towards.
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If I were to take that letter "T" and flatten it down
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on the floor, here, maybe just off the floor,
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all of a sudden I could do maybe something with my knee,
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yeah? Whoa. So If I put the knee and the arms together,
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I've got something physical, yeah? And I can start to build something.
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So what I'm going to do just for one and a half minutes or so
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is I'm going to take that concept, I'm going to make something,
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and the dancers behind me are going to interpret it,
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they're going to snapshot it, they're going to take
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aspects of it, and it's almost like I'm offloading memory
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and they're holding onto memory? Yeah?
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And we'll see what we come up with.
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So just have a little watch about how they're, how they're
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accessing this and what they're doing,
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and I'm just going to take this letter "T," the letter "E,"
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and the letter "D," to make something. Okay. Here goes.
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So I have to get myself in the zone. Right.
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It's a bit of a cross of my arm.
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So all I'm doing is exploring this space of "T"
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and flashing through it with some action.
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I'm not remembering what I'm doing.
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I'm just working on my task. My task is this "T."
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Going to watch it from the side, whoa.
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Strike moment.
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That's it.
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So we're starting to build a phrase.
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So what they're doing, let's see, something like that,
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so what they're doing is grasping aspects of that movement
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and they're generating it into a phrase.
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You can see the speed is extremely quick, yeah?
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I'm not asking them to copy exactly.
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They're using the information that they receive
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to generate the beginnings of a phrase.
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I can watch that and that can tell me something
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about how it is that they're moving.
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Yeah, they're super quick, right?
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So I've taken this aspect of TED and translated it
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into something that's physical.
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Some dancers, when they're watching action,
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take the overall shape, the arc of the movement,
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the kinetic sense of the movement,
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and use that for memory.
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Some work very much in specific detail.
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They start with small little units and build it up.
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Okay, you've got something? One more thing.
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So they're solving this problem for me,
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having a little --
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They're constructing that phrase.
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They have something and they're going to hold on to it,
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yeah? One way of making.
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That's going to be my beginning in this world premiere.
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Okay. From there I'm going to do a very different thing.
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So basically I'm going to make a duet.
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I want you to think about them as architectural objects,
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so what they are, are just pure lines.
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They're no longer people, just pure lines, and I'm going
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to work with them almost as objects to think with, yeah?
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So what I'm thinking about is taking
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a few physical extensions from the body as I move, and
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I move them, and I do that by suggesting things to them:
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If, then; if, then. Okay, so here we go.
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Just grab this arm.
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Can you place that down into the floor?
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Yeah, down to the floor. Can you go underneath?
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Yeah. Cat, can you put leg over that side? Yeah.
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Can you rotate?
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Whoom, just go back to the beginning.
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Here we go, ready? And ... bam, bake ... (clicks metronome)
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Great. Okay, from there, you're both getting up.
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You're both getting up. Here we go. Good, now? Them.
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(Applause)
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So from there, from there, we're both getting up,
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we're both getting up, going in this direction,
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going underneath. Whoa, whoa, underneath.
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Whoa, underneath, whoo-um. Yeah? Underneath. Jump.
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Underneath. Jump. Paolo, kick. Don't care where. Kick.
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Kick, replace, change a leg. Kick, replace, change the leg.
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Yeah? Okay? Cat, almost get his head. Almost get his head.
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Whoaa. Just after it, maybe. Whoaa, whaaay, ooh.
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Grab her waist, come up back into her first, whoom, spin,
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turn her, whoo-aa. (Snaps) Great.
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Okay, let's have a little go from the beginning of that.
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Just, let me slow down here. Fancy having eight -- (Laughter)
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Fancy having eight hours with me in a day.
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So, maybe too much. So, here we go, ready, and -- (Clicks metronome)
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(Clicks metronome)
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Nice, good job. Yeah? Okay. (Applause)
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Okay, not bad. (Applause) A little bit more?
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Yeah. Just a little bit more, here we go, from that place.
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Separate. Face the front. Separate. Face the front.
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Imagine that there's a circle in front of you, yeah?
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Avoid it. Avoid it. Whoom. Kick it out of the way.
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Kick it out of the way. Throw it into the audience. Whoom.
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Throw it into the audience again.
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We've got mental architecture, we're sharing it,
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therefore solving a problem. They're enacting it.
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Let me just see that a little bit. Ready, and go.
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(Clicks metronome)
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Okay, brilliant. Okay, here we go. From the beginning,
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can we do our phrases first? And then that.
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And we're going to build something now, organize it,
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the phrases. Here we go. Nice and slow?
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Ready and go ... um. (Clicks metronome)
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(Clicks metronome)
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The duet starts. (Clicks metronome)
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(Clicks metronome)
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So yeah, okay, good. Okay, nice, very nice. (Applause)
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So good. So -- (Applause)
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Okay. So that was -- (Applause)
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Well done. (Applause)
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That was the second way of working.
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The first one, body-to-body transfer, yeah,
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with an outside mental architecture that I work with
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that they hold memory with for me.
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The second one, which is using them as objects to think
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with their architectural objects, I do a series of
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provocations, I say, "If this happens, then that.
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If this, if that happens -- " I've got lots of methods like that,
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but it's very, very quick, and this is a third method.
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They're starting it already, and this is a task-based method,
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where they have the autonomy to make
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all of the decisions for themselves.
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So I'd like us just to do, we're going to do a little
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mental dance, a little, in this little one minute,
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so what I'd love you to do is imagine,
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you can do this with your eyes closed, or open, and if you
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don't want to do it you can watch them, it's up to you.
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Just for a second, think about that word "TED" in front of
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you, so it's in mind, and it's there right in front of your mind.
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What I'd like you to do is transplant that outside
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into the real world, so just imagine that word "TED"
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in the real world.
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What I'd like you to do what that is take an aspect of it.
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I'm going to zone in on the "E," and I'm going to
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scale that "E" so it's absolutely massive,
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so I'm scaling that "E" so it's absolutely massive,
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and then I'm going to give it dimensionality.
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I'm going to think about it in 3D space. So now,
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instead of it just being a letter that's in front of me,
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it's a space that my body can go inside of.
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I now decide where I'm going to be in that space,
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so I'm down on this small part of the bottom rib
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of the letter "E," and I'm thinking about it, and I'm imagining
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this space that's really high and above. If I asked you to
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reach out — you don't have to literally do it, but in mind —
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reach out to the top of the "E," where would you reach?
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If you reach with your finger, where would it be?
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If you reach with your elbow, where would it be?
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If I already then said about that space that you're in,
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let's infuse it with the color red, what does that do
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to the body? If I then said to you, what happens if
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that whole wall on the side of "E" collapses and you have to
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use your weight to put it back up,
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what would you be able to do with it?
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So this is a mental picture, I'm describing a mental,
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vivid picture that enables dancers to make choices
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for themselves about what to make.
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Okay, you can open your eyes if you had them closed.
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So the dancers have been working on them.
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So just keep working on them for a little second.
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So they've been working on those mental architectures in the here.
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I know, I think we should keep them as a surprise.
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So here goes, world premiere dance. Yeah? Here we go.
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TED dance. Okay. Here it comes. I'm going to organize it quickly.
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So, you're going to do the first solo that we made,
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yeah blah blah blah blah, we go into the duet, yeah,
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blah blah blah blah. The next solo, blah blah blah blah,
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yeah, and both at the same time, you do the last solutions.
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Okay? Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, world premiere,
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TED dance, three versions of physical thinking. (Applause)
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Well, clap afterwards, let's see if it's any good, yeah? (Laughter)
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So yeah, let's clap -- yeah, let's clap afterwards.
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Here we go. Catarina, big moment, here we go, one.
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(Clicks metronome)
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Here it comes, Cat. (Clicks metronome)
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Paolo, go. (Clicks metronome) Last you solo.
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The one you made. (Clicks metronome)
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(Clicks metronome)
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Well done. Okay, good. Super. So --
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(Applause)
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So -- (Applause)
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Thank you. (Applause)
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So -- three versions. (Applause) Oh. (Laughs)
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(Applause) Three versions of physical thinking, yeah?
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Three versions of physical thinking. I'm hoping that today,
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what you're going to do is go away and make a dance
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for yourself, and if not that,
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at least misbehave more beautifully, more often.
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Thank you very much. (Applause)
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Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
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Here we go. (Applause)
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(Applause)
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