Improvisation is an often underappreciated art. It requires paying close attention to what’s going on around you, being prepared for the unexpected, using whatever’s handy in unusual and even “wrong” ways, and of course, taking the risk of falling flat on your face. Thus life evolves—making use of off-the-shelf stuff in the environment, the stray cosmic ray that tweaks some DNA, even biological “inventions” evolved for wildly different purposes. Scientists improvise experiments, scrounging around for unused magnets, forgotten phototubes; actors improvise tragedy and jokes. Even the most closely choreographed dance can require immediate improvisation should a ballerina slip and fall. Life is improv, if we let it be. But it isn’t all that easy to be spontaneous.
For our December 7th Categorically Not, artist David Barker will take us on a tour of an entirely improvised world—Second Life—where users create museums, nightclubs, stores, dance moves, schools, live music and even movies and charity events. His Avatar, demarco Spatula, will show us how he created the Splo Science Museum, and how we too can take part in this often surreal world. Dave feels right at home in Second Life because he’s been designing and creating exhibits at the Exploratorium for over twenty years, exploring the relationships between light, illusion, art and science.
Also from the Exploratorium, Linda Shore—trained as an astrophysicist and educator and now an Exploratorium staff scientist—will give us a taste of her wacky web cast Iron Science Teacher—based on the Japanese game show “Iron Chef.” Now in its 14th year, the show has its own cult of groupies who cheer on teachers charged with creating science activities using a "secret ingredient." (All shows can be watched at the link above: just click Linda’s name.) Linda is the director of the Exploratorium Teacher Institute and co-author of the award winning “Science Explorer” series of activity books.
Finally, Cal Arts faculty members Vinny Golia, Kathy Carbone and Gordon Kurowski have developed a rapport of spontaneous composition by improvising together for the last year. Brought together by Kathy Carbone's multi-disciplinary research, the three improvisors weave tapestries of dance and music together while maintaining a lyrical sensibility and playful structure. Vinny is a performer and multi wind instrument player; Kathy is a dancer specializing in movement experimentation, and Gordon is a musician as well as an audio and video engineer, animator, and digital artist.
It doesn’t get darker than this (or more fun). Wendy Freedman, first woman Director of the Carnegie Observatories, will talk about her current efforts to understand the identified “dark energy” that appears to account for 70 per cent of the stuff of the universe--a strange repulsive entity that seems to pushing galaxies apart (and that’s in addition to the 95% of good-old “attracting” matter which is also unidentified); Wendy is currently building the largest telescope on Earth at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile--its images will be 10 times as sharp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope. As for darkness in the human heart, Jonathan Kirsch will tell us how everything we know about torture, totalitarianism and thought control we learned during the Inquisition; his fascinating new book, the Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God, traces practices used today in Iraq (and the Holocaust) to our medieval masters. Jonathan is a literary attorney and author of numerous other books, most recently, A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization (and he’s such a delightful guy!). Shakespeare also knew a thing or two about darkness, so actor, author and director Nancy Linehan Charles will show and tell about her new production of MacBeth, which recently completed a sold-out run at the Pacific Resident Theater in November. Nancy’s been in everything from Charlie Wilson’s War to Six Feet Under, and--among other honors--won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Featured Performance in Toys in the Attic in 2003; she also creates, produces and directs Shakespeare for children.
