Word-less - but not speechless
Find this session's presentations here.
If we say face-to-face science engagement, is the first image that comes to your mind a facilitator deep in conversation with a visitor? Spoken words indeed seem to be our field’s default medium when it comes to daily interactions with audiences.
Join us in challenging this assumption. Together we’ll break the monotony of verbal communication and explore the creative horizons that open up once you free yourself from your internal thesaurus. How else can we convey (scientific) ideas in simple face to face situations? Can our bodies come to the rescue, can we draw, mime, sing, dance, use gibberish, what else?
Our three non-verbal practitionners will each briefly demonstrate a word-less technique. Convenors will then outline a simple piece of science to be conveyed and the audience will work on this challenge with the practitioner of their choice, before sharing their production with the whole assembly.
Session speakers
Head of Public Engagement
Newcastle upon Tyne
United Kingdom
At the Centre for Life we developed a science show without words. It became a firm favourite with presenters and audience alike. By immersing yourself in beautiful demonstrations set to music it allows you to think about how the demonstration works for yourself before anyone tells you. At the end of the show, there is an opportunity to ask questions for those questions that are still unsolved.
We will perform one of the demonstrations to illustrate the technique and discuss how the show provokes curiosity in the audience so that they ‘pull’ the explanations from the presenter rather than the traditional way we ‘push’ explanations from the stage.
Freelance - co-creation practices and projects
I'm interested in how drawing can help share contents, messages, feelings. By looking at them, by making them or through collaborative drawing. Together we can overcome our own fear of judgment and express our ideas in other ways than speech. Don't need to be an artist to do something meaningful with a pencil!
Music as an nonverbal art can connect to physics, mathematics, biology or culture. Analysis with words might help to understand, but not to do and experience. The pure musical movement makes us doing complex meters or rhythms and understand some basics better than any words.
Michael Bradke collects Musical Games and soundtools from around the world, and connects them to many scientific themes like physics, mathematics, biology, geology, mathematics, water... see: www.musicmuseum.com
My contribution will be based on "Dialogue in Silence", an experience in total silence where participants discover a repertoire of non-verbal expression with the help of deaf and hearing impaired guides and trainers. I would like to exercise creativity with the audience, in silence.
