Distributed creativity: What's special about freestyling together?

Show Notes:

Welcome to 'Science of Slink,' the evidence-based pole podcast with Dr. Rosy Boa. In this episode, Dr. Boa explores the concept of distributed creativity and its implications for improvisational dance. She shares personal experiences from her dance journey and the impacts of dancing with others versus dancing alone. Dr. Boa discusses foundational theories of distributed cognition and creativity and highlights key studies, including a 2020 paper by Leach and Stevens on relational creativity in dance. Join her for insights into how collective improvisation enhances quality and relevance in dance movements and stay tuned for information on upcoming online freestyle classes and community events.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to the Science of Slink

00:41 Personal Journey and the Impact of COVID-19

03:33 The Concept of Distributed Creativity

04:47 Exploring Distributed Cognition

08:46 Distributed Creativity in Dance

12:29 Research Findings on Improvisational Dance

16:51 Final Thoughts and Upcoming Events

Citations:

Hutchins E (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-58146-2.

Sawyer, R. K., & DeZutter, S. (2009). Distributed creativity: How collective creations emerge from collaboration. Psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts, 3(2), 81.
Leach, J., & Stevens, C. J. (2020). Relational creativity and improvisation in contemporary dance. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 45(1), 95–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1712541

Transcript: 

Welcome to Science of Slink, the evidence based pole podcast with me, your host, Dr. Rosy Boa research doctor, not, not a medicine doctor, none of this is medical advice.

Today,  listen, you're either going to be like, this is the coolest shit I've ever heard, I immediately have to read more about this, or you're going to be like, duh, I don't get why this is interesting.

And, If you're in the latter camp that's okay. But if you're in the former camp, I think you're going to be, be with me in it. So today I want to talk about distributed creativity. And why when we do particularly improvisational dance together with other people, not just alone on our own. Why it's different and some of the benefits we might get from that.

So,  I'm gonna start with a little bit of, I don't know, kind of like a personal story, personal background. So I don't know if some of y'all know this and some of y'all, you know, danced with me way back in the day. But from 2012 to about 2020, I did a lot of in person freestyling with other folks. I did some doubles, I did just like Just a lot of stuff in person which I very much enjoyed.

And then in 2020, I stopped doing that for COVID reasons. And also I think 2018, I started teaching and then during COVID, I switched to teaching online. And, you know, for a while I was dancing with a lot of folks online, and then I moved and I found a studio, and they were, you know, still masking, had HEPA filters, all that stuff.

And I have a an immunosuppressed family member, so I'm, I'm a little bit more cautious than I would say your, your average person when it comes to COVID really cannot be bringing that bringing that home and giving that to folks. So, when the in person precautions started to, like, peter off and also a lot of the, kind of, the online options kind of died away that's actually when I founded my studio, because I was just not able to find the type of training space I really wanted online where there was freestyle together with people, and also it was really evidence based and, you know, building on, on what we know about.

You know, good techniques and best practices around, around movement and you know, science. You listen to the podcast, you know what I'm into. And one of the things that I really missed in that interim when I wasn't really dancing with people, I was just dancing by myself.

I did have a space, which was great. I was very And continue to be very grateful, was very grateful at the time is that technically I wasn't actually doing that bad, right? Like I,  not to toot my own horn, I know a lot about pole, I know about teaching pole, you know, I have a trick I want to try, I can break it down into its component parts and condition them together and work on them on their own and make, make progress that way.

So technically I was actually doing fine. I was, I was learning new stuff. Building strength and flexibility. It was, I was ticking, ticking, ticking boxes.  But what suffered the most was my freestyle, which is tragic because that's the thing that I care about the most. That's the thing that I like the most.

That's like the core of what dance is to me and what keeps me going and why I do it. So.  When I was doing it by myself, and I didn't have that,  you know that social environment, I didn't do things as often. When I did do them, I didn't do them for as long. And also, I just had less variety in my movement.

I just did fewer distinct different movements. That's something that I, that I noticed pretty, like, just in my body, I noticed that I was doing it, that I was sort of getting stuck in ruts.  And we've talked before in other episodes about you know, how exercising with other people, having that social support, can help you show up more consistently, can help with motivation, can help you push yourself harder if that's something you're interested in doing, can help you exercise for longer stretches of time I think the, like, staying motivated as a home pole dancer episode is a good one if you want to sort of hear more about the research on that.

But previously I hadn't really dug into the creativity aspects of it and, you know, how does working with other people encourage you to do new things? Because that has very much been my experience both as a dancer, as a mover, and also as a teacher. I really noticed that folks who are able to form connections with other people who are interested in freestyle really develop a much wider vocabulary, really have access to a lot more different stuff in their body, different styles, different tempos, because they're getting the like, the cross poleination from moving with other folks.

And that's been my experience as well, right? The more chances I get to dance with other people and freestyle with other people, the more rich and textured and varied my own freestyle is, and to be perfectly blunt, the more fun I have.

So that was my experience. And you know like I often do when I have a question, I was like, all right, so who's researching this?

Because one of the wonderful things about certainly, the way science has been done up until now is that if there's something that you're interested in, probably someone is doing work on it and you just gotta find it which is a challenge in and of its own, if this is something that you're struggling with, may I recommend reference librarians they, they know about knowledge and how to help you find shit, and Yeah, shout out to librarians.

Y'all, y'all are great.

I actually happen to already know sort of the direction to look here and it got me in a direction that I was not expecting, which is it got me to literature that's building on the distributed cognition literature. Now if you're not familiar with distributed cognition I think a lot of folks aren't.

It's mid 90s, I'd say, is when it started kicking off. Definitely something that I was running across. People, people working on, you know, pretty heavily in, you know, the, the 2010s, et cetera. Hutchins is, is sort of the, the founder of the, theory. I guess, yeah, it's a theory. I call it theory.

But basically, the, the core idea here, the core premise is in opposition to sort of a way of thought that had come, been the predominant one previously, which is that cognition happens in your brain. And you may be saying, Rosy, cognition does happen in your brain. Yes. And,  I think Hutchins and a lot of people who've worked on this literature and this way of looking at things since would say, it also happens elsewhere, right?

So the sort of first place that I ran into this, this literature was in looking at writing, right? And looking at the difference between cultures where information transmission is primarily oral and cultures where information transmission is primarily literary. So of course, we are in a literary culture.

If you have clicked on a YouTube podcast link or, you know, Spotify or wherever you're listening to this, if you use the internet, congratulations, you're in,  you're in a literary culture. You know, you're probably even hyperliterate, right? Like, you're probably at the point where you can't look at text and not read it.

Hopefully  . I, I know that, you know, if you are someone who, who struggles with with adult literacy, that is, that is a genuine struggle.  I am, I'm dyslexic, but I, in a way where reading is not often a challenge. Lemme put it that I don't wanna get too deep into it, but anyway. The point is,  if you interact with writing a lot and if you write things down the argument here is that part of your cognitive processes are happening externally too, right?

So a great example of this is a to do list. A to do list is a list of things I've taken from my brain that I've put somewhere else That are still part of my cognition, right? And when I go back and I refer to that to do list, it's like a little like a little enclave, right? Like a little you know, I've, I've offloaded is the term, right?

Some portion of what I am doing to someone else. We also can have things like shared cognition, right? So this would be things like teamwork. If you've ever worked at a job and had co workers, right? You're all working towards the same thing. No two people have exactly overlapping knowledge, but together, everyone in the company has all the knowledge needed to make the company run.

I mean, hopefully right? Or there's a lot of talk of this in the design. So I think an example you hear of a lot is like cockpits, like cockpit design for for pilots. There are things that are sort of externalized into, you know, that apparatus that they don't have to have in their brain, but they still have access to, right?

And I think it's part of a larger epistemology of thinking, a larger way of approaching knowledge a belief about knowing. That says, okay, you, we are not brains in jars, right?  You have a body, and that affects you. That has consequences. You are a person.

That has consequences. You exist in a social and a cultural context, right? There's I don't know.  If you're familiar with, again, back to epistemology, if you're familiar with, sort of, like, positivism  really this is one of those, those fields where it really comes to a head Right?

Like, can introspection be a genuine place of knowledge creation? And I think some people would genuinely say no, and other people would genuinely say yes. And I think the distributed cognition people would say, like, also, like, conversations, right? Like, interactions you have with other people can be a place of genuine knowledge creation.

So, distributed cognition. It is. Very interesting, right? But this is also talking about thinking, this is talking about cognition. What about creativity? Because that's what I was talking about, right? That's how we got into this in the first place. Well, wouldn't you know, distributed creativity is also something that people have been working on.

So Sawyer and Desutter, 2009, Distributed Creativity, How Collective Creations Emerge from Collaboration was sort of the paper that kicked this off, and it was in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

And they were specifically looking at an improv theater troupe. And what they were saying was like, hey,  if we're talking about creativity, if we're thinking about making new things, right, where the end of this process is the product of creation. In this case you know, an improv theater performance.

We cannot have any meaningful model of this form of creation that is one person is doing it in their mind, which previously had really been sort of the default assumption in the creativity research, right? It was really about, like, how does a person come up with an idea? And there had been some work up to that point on brainstorming and sort of, like, corporate creativity,  a little bit more.

And their big point was that some things have to be done together, and we need to have a way, as, you know, psychologists studying creativity, to be able to talk about this act of communal creation perhaps as something that's distributed, perhaps as something that we can think of as parallel to shared cognition.

So the just quoting from them here "situations where collaborating groups of individuals collectively generate a shared creative project" is what they were using is what they were creating. This concept of distributed creativity to describe drawing on again that idea of distributed cognition.

So that's, that's the general background. And I think we can all think of lots of examples of creative acts, where doing them with other people is really important. And part of the reason why I think this in particular, this literature in particular, something that I've, I've been running into and, and reading more in, is because they also talk about improvisation quite a lot.

Because improvisation is You know, the improvised thing is the, the product of creation. I think it's a, something that's really appealing to folks who are looking at creativity. So there's been quite a bit of work in distributed creativity in music, in improvisational theater. I don't.  I try not to read some of y'all know I'm, I'm a TTRPG enjoyer, tabletop roleplaying game.

Listen, if you are under any misapprehensions that I was anything other than an enormous nerd, please discard them now. I'm really into TTRPGs, and I think that this is a place for like, yeah, there are solo TTRPGs, but most games are designed to be played together with a group of people, and what emerges is a collaborative act, right?

Like, if you've ever run something, like, you've been a dungeon master or a run a TTRPG that you know, you're going in, you have like ideas, you have things that, you know, might happen but really you don't know what's going to happen because it's a collaborative act that you're doing with other people together.

And that active product of creativity in this case, like the TTRPG session, is something that happens across the table that everyone has a hand in, to a greater or lesser degree. I tend to be a very collaborative GM, so a very, a very high degree for me. We're not going to talk about TTRPGs  anymore in this, in this episode. But,  a place where this also happens is drumroll, dance.

And that brings me to the paper that I think is most relevant for what we're going to be taught, what we do in the studio, well,  our spare bedrooms, our living rooms,  you know, what we do in our homes where our, our poles are.

Or, you know, wherever we have space to move. And that is improvisational dance. So this paper Leach and Stevens 2020 Relational Creativity and Improvisation in Contemporary Dance in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews was the paper that I read that made me want to be like I gotta do a podcast episode on this.

So, this is an experimental paper.  And basically, they are building on this idea of distributed creativity, building on this other idea of distributed cognition, and being like, okay, so how does having multiple dancers moving together change what they do in terms of improvised movement?

And I will say, they were in Australia, they were in a studio, and these people were physically together, they were not looking at people dancing online like we are, but  I don't have any reason to believe that it wouldn't also apply to online, especially because some of the research looking at like, do social effects of motivation for exercise hold online as they do in person?

The answer is like, yeah, they do. Given that background, given the fact that I have found dancing with people online to be very generative and improve my own creativity, I don't know, I don't a priori have a reason to believe that this wouldn't also apply to online. That's just what that sidebar is about.

Basically what they did was they had dancers improvise and they had some prompts. The prompts were circle, cylinder, and then square. So it's like, dance a circle, dance a cylinder, dance a square. And aren't you, people who take my freestyle flow classes, aren't you glad that I give you juicier prompts than that?

I know they're trying to like control for things. I don't know, maybe, maybe we can recreate this research and I'll give you these prompts and you can see what you think. But they have the answers improvised for two minutes and four minutes, or two batches either alone, in a duo, or in a trio.

And what they did was they notated the number of new movements they did during this improvisation session. And then also they had folks do a questionnaire, right? And I think they had the dancers do a questionnaire, and then they also had like an outside observer taking notes on the questionnaire.

And the way this was phrased was that this was improvisation that would then later be made into choreographies. They were trying to come up with new movements. This wasn't necessarily a situation where improvisational performance was the goal. Like it is for me at least.

I'm, I'm, I'm an improv performer. What can I say? And I think the studies were really interesting. So the first thing that they found was that the number of new movements produced was highest in the solo condition. So the dancers did more novel movements when they were dancing alone. However,  The quality and relevance of the new movements were higher in the duo and trio conditions.

So, when dancers were dancing together, they found that the movements that they created were more relevant to the exercise that they were doing and also the quality was better, right?  Which is really interesting to me.

And I will say, I think this, the number of new movements, probably wouldn't actually obtain,  maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't online as someone who has, who has done, you know, contact improv and partner work before in pole, I tend to move a lot more slowly when I'm improvising with somebody particularly if, like, there's pole work involved, right?

I'm not gonna, like, they're up the pole. I'm like, all right, time for spin on this spin pole. I'm just gonna chuck myself in there. No, no, no. We're gonna ease. We're gonna ooze. We're gonna take our time. We're not gonna surprise nobody. So I think that, you know, certainly I would do fewer things if I were improvising than if I were doing in a group than I would if I were solo.

But very interesting that having more partners in this creative exercise created more relevant and more interesting movements. It seemed to improve the, the overall quality of the, the improvisation which again, very much is in keeping with my experience. Which I don't find super surprising because, again, I tend to feel better about my improvisational movement, my freestyle movement, when I'm doing it with folks, when I have, you know, some degree of audience or observer in in when I have, like, some degree of community around it, right? So,  anyway, really interesting study.

As always, all of these studies, all these citations will be down there so that the original, like, distributed cognition, if you want to go read in that. Really interesting body of work.

I'm a pretty, personally, a pretty embodied cognition person. You'll never guess that as a movement professional, and I'm kind of into that idea.  May or may not be something that you're into, that's perfectly fine.

And then of course the Distributed Creativity paper, where that's first proposed, that 2009 paper, Sawyer and Desutter. And then this 2020 paper which is Leach and Stevens again, looking at, looking at improvisational dance.

And like I said, I think this, this creativity line of research is really relevant to us, because they do look at improvisation a lot across different different types of, of disciplines.

So, big takeaways. I think one is that we gotta remember that we are not brains in jars alone on ourself. We exist in a social and cultural context that we cannot extract ourselves from.

And people, I don't know.  Listen, individualism  is a hell of a drug. And I think we all, if we are in, you know, the western industrialized space. I think we tend to have  that pop up a lot, right?  That white supremacy culture, it's, it's got some kick to it.

But, I mean, the fact is humans are social, right? We're not eusocial. We're not bees. But we do exist in a social context and we do have culture, right? I think a lot of the things that we do as humans we have to do with other people.

Great example here, language, right? Like you, you have to learn  language through interaction or else it just doesn't work. And that's just, that is just a fact of being human, right? And doing things with other people, and that includes freestyle dance. It makes them better and makes them possible in a lot of contexts.

And that's okay, and that's normal. And you don't have to come up with every new thing and new idea yourself. And in fact, I encourage you to, if that is an idea that you have in your head, just maybe, maybe tug on it a little bit every so often and see if eventually you might be able to like, Peel that out and toss that  because it's just gonna make you unhappy, right?

You're you're denying your  Fundamental truth of how people work.

I thought it was really interesting  Feel free to read more deeply in the literature always happy to chat in the comments I think pretty much every place where this is posted, you can leave comments. And if you can't find a place for it, I've got a contact form on my website, slinkthroughstrength.com.

 And if you're like, Rosy, you've convinced me.  I, too, wish to freestyle with other people. You know where you can do that online. It's it's on my online dance studio, slingthroughstrength. com. And I've actually recently added a Tuesday class at 1pm Eastern, which is seeming to work pretty good for folks.

I think, I think I've hit that sweet spot where US West Coast and Europe can both sort of show up to the same class. And then Wednesday nights at 7: 30, also Eastern, p. m. Also teach Freestyle Flow, and then once a month, roughly, I'll teach a Community Flow class, which is sort of similar, but that's free, and that's just for folks to, you know, come, move in community, meet people hang out, move your body, have a nice time, and just chill.

 I would love to have you come move with me. Beginners are very welcome. I provide lots of structure. And coming up In the medium near future Dates TBD I'm gonna be running a series for more advanced freestylers who are like, I wanna be  pushed. I wanna get weird with it, with other people who are also interested in getting weird with it.

And really, really try to push them boundaries a bit and really get into the creativity of it. And I'm really looking forward to that. Yeah. So  stay tuned. Sign up to my newsletter. You know, follow me on socials. I'm a blue sky. I'm on Instagram. And yeah, hope I'll get a chance to dance with you soon.

And if I don't, hopefully you're dancing with other people, right? You've got a place where you can do that. You've got a space where you can do that and you can really Connect and build together. And that's what I want for you in your life right now.  Have a good one. I look forward to talking with you or slinking with you very soon.

And until next time, stay safe, stay healthy and, you know, look out for each other.  Bye!