Maybe it is because I'm slap bang in the middle of another head cold, and my brain can barely handle something as silly as a "Real Housewives of..." episode, but I'm dance performanced out. We've got tickets to one last show, this Saturday, and they are currently up for grabs on Facebook. Free. Go see some modern dance in Baden, Switzerland. Because we aren't going to.
We've seen three performances so far, and it has been great to get so immersed in modern dance. The last one, yesterday night, La La La Human Steps' piece "New Work" was the hardest to sit through. Modern ballet, but disappointingly one-noted. Lots of fast, frenetic movements, indistinguishable dancers doing what looked like, at most, 5 different moves. Really really fast. For 80 minutes straight, no intermission. Not with a head cold, thanks. Although there was a live quartet playing music, so I think both M and I spent some of those 80 minutes with our eyes closed, resting, and just pretending it was a baroque music concert.
We also spent all of our tram and bus ride home talking about what was wrong with the performance. Ok, we spent 45 seconds listing what we liked, in an attempt to justify the ensuing butchering of the show. I think what bothered me most about it was that it seemed to most pretentious - in its lack of vulnerability, lack of variety, lack of anything that could be taken as indicative of the Greek myths it was supposed to be based on. This in contrast with the first performance by Kidd Pivot company that was full of vulnerability and explanation.
Yes, Kidd Pivot included a piece of work by Voltaire, that was narrated at least 3 times. And I got it, and enjoyed it so much more as a result. What is the point of a dance performance that the choreographer tries his best to not help you understand?
Oh, we two were full of criticism for the night. I mean, we could have watched 2+ episodes of Battlestar Galactica in that time and been home already when we were done.
Which brings me to a similar question I've been asking about academic talks. Why do people give talks at conferences? So many of them are poorly done, the speaker is nervous, the slides are incomprehensible, etc., etc. So why go? Why sit through so many hours of an activity that does not further your understanding of your field?
The fact that last night's performance by a celebrated choreographer left me feeling like I'd sat through a 3 hour set of talks on nucleosynthesis at a conference that left me bored and confused and hating the topic more than before. It also reminded me that I've heard some physicists and astronomers talk about preferring a confusing talk to one which they understood completely. That one which they could understand completely must have been at a baby level. That they would rather sit in a talk which they could just about follow the intro slide and then not understand the next 30-45 minutes.
Why? People go to talks like this, they write talks like this, and they go to dance performances like this.
I remember one conference where journalists gave reviews of panel talks
after each 4 talks, and 10 or 15 times, each reviewer asked, begged, the
audience members who had yet to give a talk to simplify their talks, to
add more definitions and explanations of the basics of their work. And
the upcoming speakers kept not complying with the journalists' requests.
Maybe I'm the last one to this party, but I'm starting to think that it is because people feel like they have had a more valuable experience when they participate at what feels like the periphery of something lofty. Maybe it makes them feel loftier. If they didn't understand most of it, imagine how much less someone else would understand! Maybe that makes people feel more important or intelligent or cultured. There must be some value in these experiences to people that keep them coming back and keep them from making even their own talks more accessible. This also means that there are cultural pressures against making lectures and talks more accessible to most people in an audience.
Because, honestly, what fraction of departmental colloquia to you think are actually at the beginning grad student level, like they are supposed to be? Or leave you feeling like you really learned something new? And if there are so few, consistently, why do people keep attending these events?
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I cannot stand colloquia and shorter talks where the talker decides to shoot over the heads of the intended audience. Yes, I know you're clever. Now demonstrate that by communicating effectively to me.
ReplyDeleteI think I give pretty good talks, but at a recent conference I almost got a standing ovation by obeying the simple rules of slide and figure preparation (this was on day four of a week long conference). People were delighted to read a slide not covered in dense equations or pale blue figures and 1 point lines.
Which is a little bit disheartening, IMHO.
I heard a comment about a talk recently about how really novel (and great) it was that the speaker spent 5 minutes giving the audience a definition of terms and giving context for the size scales involved in the talk, in metric units for the physicists in the audience.
ReplyDeleteThat's a low bar. That's the lowest bar we set (apart from putting your name on your report) for undergraduate lab reports and homeworks! And yet it is completely missing in professional talks.
And when a talk is supposed to be aimed at first-year graduate students that should not mean:
ReplyDelete1) what you think you remember yourself knowing about your own specialty when you were a grad
2) what you think grad students should know
It should mean, did the people who happen to be first and second year grad students in your audience understand your talk or not. There could be a feedback sheet, with questions about the topic you were hoping to convey the understanding of, and if the students in the room can't answer them, maybe your talk needs to be rewritten with their answers in mind.
Does anyone actually give first-year grad colloquia? Has anyone seen someone who does?