Angela Richardson
Students in a mask workshop with artist-in-residence Stuart Flack (white shirt).
It’s all about the data, according to Stuart Flack, an interdisciplinary artist wrapping up a residency at UW. “There are lots of theaters and dance companies that want to focus on social issues and make their work relevant to what’s happening today,” he said at a September “Lunch and Learn” session introducing his residency for UW-Madison Division of the Arts. “But if they want to talk about big subjects, like immigration or poverty, they really need to bring quantitative data into the piece. Most performers aren’t trained to think about issues in those terms.”
On the other hand, researchers need to learn how to communicate creatively, says Flack, a Chicago-based playwright, producer, social entrepreneur and policy researcher who has worked closely with the Chicago theater troupe The Seldoms. “Researchers also want to figure out how to get their work into public eye in a way that resonates — beyond podcasts, videos, PowerPoint presentations and speeches. The number guys don’t have the vocabulary to present complex analytic material in a way that’s engaging.”
Bringing it all together has been the focus of Flack’s whirlwind semester at UW-Madison where, as an artist-in-residence, he conducted workshops with undergrads, helping them write 10-minute plays and create devised theater pieces.
Flack also taught a class called “Performing Information: Exploring Data through Live Performance” to graduate students and undergrads from many different backgrounds. The course brought together ideas from social science, design, computer science, theater, dance and writing. The students learned how to integrate complex information into live performance, using the principles of magic, clowning and performance art.
That’s why doctoral candidates in literature, music and rhetoric, business students, theater undergraduates, and one master’s student in public policy spent their Thursday evenings learning how to juggle in a classroom in Grainger Hall, a few doors down from the lecture halls where some of them took statistics and accounting. The students also learned to improvise scenes, experimented with masks, and attempted to spin plates.
When Flack first began thinking about bringing the disciplines of theater and data analytics together, he looked to the comedic masters of early American film: Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. “Their particular brand of physical comedy is ridiculous and playful, but serious at the same time,” he explained. Combining that sensibility with vaudeville-era performance techniques, Flack and his students devised short theater pieces designed to engage directly with audiences, helping them absorb concepts in both cognitive and emotional ways.
Data Vaudevilles: Bits and Bytes was performed Dec. 8 in the UW’s Discovery Building. An unconventional performance from the start, audience members were led into the auditorium that had been cleared of chairs, and asked to chat with actors who were lying on the floor, covered in garbage bags full of trash. Graduate student Reggie Liu then asked spectators to physically drag the “trash” from their countries of origin, mapped on the floor, to China, which has been acting as dumping ground for much of the world’s waste since the 1980s. It was a silly and sobering illustration of his research on an environmental crisis.
Other students used magic tricks, clapping, singing, call-and-response, costumes and clever props to introduce the audience to important data. Zachary Pulse, a doctoral candidate in oboe performance, asked attendees to login to a Soundcloud page on their iPhones, which aurally demonstrated how much land in the U.S. is devoted to growing crops, grazing animals, urban centers and national parks.
Abigail Swetz, who is pursuing a master’s in public affairs, illustrated the mortality rate for anorexia nervosa patients by asking attendees to actually become the data. Each person was given a sticker with a number on it before entering the auditorium. On her cue, those bearing certain numbers sat down, leaving the “survivors” standing.
In “One dot, One Niño,” Spanish literature doctoral candidate M. Isabel Martin Sanchez asked for a volunteer to take stuffed animals out of a wire cage and distribute them to the crowd. She then spoke passionately — in Spanish — about the immigrants who have been separated from their families and detained at the U.S./Mexican border. For each statistic, she took a stuffed animal back and flung it across the room.
In the post-show talkback, students shared details about the non-traditional methods they used to transform their reports into storytelling that will hopefully lead to social change. Flack said that he hoped the experience would allow the participants to be more comfortable and creative in making data-driven arguments in the future.
Says Flack: “You really can make engaging performances based on data, and those performances lead to a deeper appreciation of what the data has to tell us.”
