Methods of Creation

Something I admire about surgeons, dentists, deep sea divers and astronauts is their ability to perform sensitive, technically demanding work wearing gloves.  Working with gloves is a serious handicap, and yet it is necessary in some professions for various kinds of reasons.

This revelation occurred to me suddenly during a rectal examination of my prostate gland.  For my entire life before that moment, it had never occurred to me to admire doctors for their ability to work with gloves.  But while the doctor was feeling what he could feel in there, protected but also desensitized by a rubber glove that also protected me, it became crystal clear to me that I admire anyone who can do delicate work wearing gloves.

Jobs, careers, employment, vocation, occupation, business: call work what you will, each profession comes with its own prescribed, limited, and limiting formats. Mine come because I am a professor who inhabits two workday worlds, one as a bee biologist and the other as director of SFU’s Centre for Dialogue. These are two quite different callings, similar in being potentially creative but in practice often stifling imagination and expression.

 Take science, where a typical presentation has a tightly controlled layout, whether it’s a written paper or a lecture. The introduction reviews the field and justifies the work, the methods tell readers or viewers what you did, and the results are tense with data and statistics. The ending conclusions are meant to impress with the tiny bit of new knowledge you’ve discovered and the inevitable next steps to justify a future grant application.

Emotion? Passion? What about the joy of discovery and the flashes of insight that are supposed to characterize science and reveal the great mysteries of the universe? Largely absent, subdued by the emotionless language of rationality that our scientific culture insists on.

Last week, I posted a series of five articles in this space, each in some way inspired by Experiments, a dance production expressing the essence of scientific discovery.  It premiered last weekend with three performances at the Dance Centre, opening and closing its Vancouver run.  Perhaps the show will travel, and perhaps it will come again to Vancouver.  The future, as we all know so well, is yet to be seen.

This is the fifth in a series of articles inspired by Experiments, an evening-length dance production expressing the essence of scientific creativity.  It will be performed November 25 – 27 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. 

Gail Lotenberg, the choreographer and director of Experiments, suggested that I mount a sculpture exhibition at the Scotiabank Dance Centre during Experiments (it is there now).  There was space for only one actual sculpture, and we agreed that I would display it as a rotating laser light show, which will operate during all four performances.  In the stairwell we hung 13 photographs of sculptures. Gail wanted textual material of two kinds, too, so I made two large posters.

In the interviews with scientists  that she videotaped, Gail was struck by two things I said.