Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Brothers Rich + Tone Talauega are choreographers whose energy is so powerful one performance makes the whole room seem to vibrate. This morning at TED, with the help of music producer Keith Harris, they unleash an eclectic menagerie of dance forms that meld martial arts, hip-hop and classical dance. The intensity is palpable across the theater as we watch dancers from across the world float, fight, shake, bend, fold, pirouette.

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The TED staff got up to dance this afternoon to celebrate V-Day. This global movement, founded by TED speaker Eve Ensler, turns 15 today and is celebrating with the One Billion Rising campaign — inviting us to stop, dance and rise against violence.

One Billion Rising is dedicated to the 1 in 3 of the world’s 3 million women who have been the victims of violence at some point in their lives. Ensler is calling for a global strike against this staggering statistic. So what does dance have to do with it? Ensler explains in the talk below, given at TEDxWomen 2012. “Dance,” Ensler says, “is dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive, contagious. It breaks the rules.”

Our office danced to the V-Day anthem “Break the Chain,” as did men and women in communities around the world today. Watch some of the risings now at onebillionrising.org, and check out our moves below.

Patton put the question to the girls themselves. And they came up with a fascinating concept — a father-daughter dance. The dance was such a hit the first time around that Camp Diva decided to make it an annual event. But as they started planning the dance a year later, Patton ran into a glitch — one of her camper’s fathers was in jail and wouldn’t be able to attend.

As Patton shares in today’s talk, filmed at TEDxWomen, another girl in the group had a bold idea.

“She suggested, ’Why don’t we just take the dance to the jail?’” recalls Patton. “Most of the other girls doubted the possibility of that. They said, ‘Are you crazy? Who is going to allow a bunch of little girls, dressed up, to come inside a jail and dance with their daddies?’”

Luckily, Patton found someone crazy enough to allow this — Richmond City Sheriff C.T. Woody.

“He is a very special sheriff,” explains Patton. “He contacted me immediately and said that whenever there is an opportunity to bring families inside, his doors are always open. One thing he knows is that when fathers are connected to their children, it is less likely that they will return.”

And so, a father-daughter dance was held in the Richmond City Jail with 16 inmates and 18 daughters invited.

“The girls were dressed in their Sunday best. The fathers traded in their yellow and blue jumpsuits for shirt and ties. They hugged … they laughed together,” remembers Patton. “It was beautiful. The fathers and daughters experienced the opportunity to have a physical connection … [The fathers could] extend their hand for a dance. Even the guards cried.”

Patton hopes this evening will create permanent change for these families.

“We have created a forum for girls who have heavy questions on their heart to be in a position to ask their fathers those questions, and given the fathers the freedom to answer,” says Patton. “A father who is locked in should not be locked out of his daughter’s life.”

To hear more about this incredible dance, and the wonderful ideas Patton and her girls had for continuing the father-daughter bonding, watch today’s talk. And after the jump, check out some photos taken at this unique dance.

In a room inside the Richmond City Jail, the girls wait for the dance to begin. Because several of them had their ride fall through, a lieutenant colonel at the jail went to pick them up himself.

As soon as the dance began, all 16 inmates and their daughters took to the dance floor.

This father invited his twin daughters to the dance. Here, he holds one of them as the group gets a salsa lesson.

9-year-old De’Brianna Richardson poses for a photo with her father, Faiz Lawton, who was in jail for auto theft-grand larceny. Lawton tells Richmond Magazine that the best part of the dance was, “Just being able to embrace [De’Brianna]. Being able to hug her, hold her, squeeze her, kiss her, talk to her closely, share a meal with her.”

All of the father-daughter pairs at the dance got to borrow FlipCams, allowing them to record video messages for each other.

A father-daughter pair cut a rug on the dance floor. Because his daughter did not get to the dance until late, this father was worried she wouldn’t show at all. In addition to dancing, the fathers held a contest where they made up rhymes about their daughters on the spot.

Lin’Asia Harris hugs her father, Linwood Harris, who was serving 90 days for failure to pay child support. Harris was released shortly after the dance and told Richmond Magazine, “She knows from her heart that I’m not a bad person.”

The dance wrapped with the fathers and daughters dancing to Luther Vandross’ “Dance with My Father.” As the daughters left the Richmond City Jail, they exchanged journals with their fathers, each book full of messages for the other to read when they felt distant.

Photos by Jay Paul Photography and Angela Patton.

Mexico City is home to nearly 9 million people. The 8th largest city economy in the world, Mexico City is bursting with energy, vibrancy and color. But at the same time, it is also facing a health crisis. Diabetes has crept up to become the leading cause of preventable death in Mexico — with about 90 percent of cases stemming from obesity. Experts warn that if the prevalence of this disease continues to rise, it could overwhelm Mexico’s health system.

TED Senior Fellow Gabriella Gómez-Mont has a fascinating idea: could dancing be part of the solution?

Mexico City is known for dance — from couples well-versed in salsa and cumbia to the city’s dance halls where young people sweat under laser lights. Gómez-Mont wondered if this spirit could be harnessed to promote health. She asks, “What if we could turn a whole megalopolis into one gargantuan dance floor, and promote an active lifestyle while having fun and taping into the playful, social and happily competitive side of the city?”

In collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of experts — including Pablo Landa, Clora Romo, Constanza Gómez-Mont & Taxidermie  — Gómez-Mont is launching a citywide dance competition. The vision? For the whole city to become a dance floor.

Gómez-Mont’s idea is to bridge virtual and physical space. While neighborhoods and communities will be encouraged to host in-person dancing events, their events can be submitted for awards with the help of a new website, as well as through Gómez-Mont’s independent culture lab Tóxico and Laboratorio para la Ciudad, a creative urban think-tank that she co-founded. People will vote on winners over social media, where they can also connect with other communities up on their feet and shaking it.

“I am intrigued by the idea that cities should not only house the human body, but also provoke the human imagination,” says Gómez-Mont. “This for me is the essence of City 2.0.”

In 2012, the TED Prize was bestowed upon an idea rather than an individual — The City 2.0, an online platform for the sharing of ideas to make cities function better. The $100,000 prize was broken into 10 grants of $10,000 each, to be given to a variety of projects spanning areas like transportation, education, housing, health and public space. Gabriella Gómez-Mont has been given the final grant.

To read all about the winners, head to the City 2.0 website.

Photo: Stefan Ruiz

What made Wayne McGregor want to become a choreographer? Onstage at TEDGlobal 2012, he revealed his two childhood inspirations—John Travolta’s moves in Saturday Night Fever and a forward-thinking dance teacher who encouraged him to invent his own dances.

“I’m obsessed with technology of the body,” says McGregor, founder of the company Random Dance who is also known for choreographing Radiohead’s “Lotus Flower” video and for serving as movement director for the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. “And I’m obsessed with finding a way of communicating ideas through the body to audiences that might move them, touch them, help them think differently about things.”

While we all use our kinesthetic intelligence on a daily basis — when we judge the movements necessary to pick up a coffee mug or scoot around a slow walker on a crowded sidewalk — not all of us are conscious of our physical thinking. In this thrilling demonstration given at TEDGlobal, McGregor works with two dancers to bring us into his process of transposing ideas into space and channeling them through different bodies.

To see how it all works, watch his talk. Below, McGregor gives advice on how everyone can develop their physical thinking.

Here, Wayne McGregor – along with Scott deLahunta and Philip Barnard of Random Dance’s science-based R-Research projects – on how anyone can think like a dancer.

Physical thinking can build on the power of fast intuitions. It isn’t just one kind of behavior. It happens in your head, with and through your body and with objects and people out there in the world, be they real or imagined. It can be realised through body-to-body transfer (showing); using bodies as objects to think with (making on); and tasking. All can help break movement habits and innovate.

What you can do in preparation for moving:

Find a Point of Departure: It helps to start armed with something clear, a stimulus to play with and inspire that is not obviously connected in any way at the outset to movement. It also helps to have a number of simple ideas you might try out to get from the stimulus, either directly or indirectly, to generate specific innovative movements. You can do this in many ways — try extracting some part of your image, change the perspective or your relationship to it in any way, look only for the colour blue or reduce the whole thing to a line drawing. The more skilled you become at extracting properties from the stimuli, the greater the range of things you will be able to think of.

Dance Inside Your Head: Build a model (visual/haptic or even auditory) of a part or the whole of the stimulus — or even of some thing you associate with that stimulus. The model you decide to use should be very clear.

Shift Focus Frames: Move attention around the whole landscape of imagery in your mind – what your body senses and what you see in your mind’s eye or hear in your mind’s ear, and the intuitive feelings and emotions that arise. If something feels of interest or unusual, focus your attention on it and how it might help you move.

What you can do while moving:

Throwing Shapes: Try this drawing exercise whilst moving. Project your image (Dance Inside Your Head) into the physical space in front of you (or above, behind, underneath you) and begin to ‘describe’ it using your body. Use different body parts to describe different parts of the image. Create 5 (or 10, 20, 60) distinct descriptions and join them together. You are building a movement phrase. Move the projected image or an aspect of it somewhere else (Shift Focus Frames), perhaps make it larger or change the projected image completely. Start over.

Streaming: As you have practised Throwing Shapes in tiny snapshots, try sequencing image and action simultaneously. Try Dance Inside Your Head, Shift Focus Frames and Throwing Shapes in combination, randomised or discretely ordered. Instead of inventing small descriptions you remember, try longer phrases that you don’t try to remember. Improvise, with the image itself, where you project it, how your attention shifts around it, what you sense from it and let these specific inputs inform your movement choices. The model(s) you use, where and how they are projected and described should still be very clear — but now you are physically ‘surfing’ the stimuli in longer events, creating evolving movement sequences. Don’t worry about remembering the exact movements you create but do try to remember the sequence of your images and what approach you were working on.

After moving:

Think about the movements you created. Be clear in your own mind about why you made the decisions you did, even if it is just “because it felt intuitively right”. This will help consolidate your insights for later use.

Happy dancing.

Wayne McGregor bounds onto stage wearing a tracksuit. “I’m passionate about creativity,” says the choreographer excitedly. “And it’s something you can teach. You can find out something about your own cognitive habits and use that as a point of departure to misbehave beautifully.”

McGregor, who runs his own company, Random Dance, is here to choreograph and premiere a dance piece on stage. TED’s familiar with premieres, but this is most certainly a first. Initially, however, he gives us some of his own background. Growing up in the 1970s, John Travolta was his role model, and with the support of parents and a dance teacher, McGregor soon began to invent his own dances. “That was the first time I had the opportunity to express my own voice,” he says, and the beginning of his obsession with the technology of the body.

McGregor isn’t only interested in working with dancers. He works with designers, visual artists, economists, anthropologists and people from all sorts of domains to bring their expertise to bear on a different kind of process. After all, he says, “we’re all experts in physical thinking. We all have a body.” It’s just that we normally think about the body only when it’s gone wrong. He wants us to think more generally.

At this point, he introduces us to two dancers, Catarina Carvalho and Paolo Mangiola, who are there to help to devise and perform the TED-inspired dance. “They have no idea what we’re going to do,” he says. “What’s important is how they grasp information and how they think with it.”

What follows is somewhat difficult to describe. McGregor begins to dance out a version of the letter “T.” It’s not particularly literal, but the dancers begin to move behind him, inspired by what he’s doing and, as he puts it, “downloading the movement.” The audience is rapt, watching as the dancers grasp aspects of the phrase and then twist and adapt it. They’re not copying exactly, but taking the movements and owning it within their own bodies. It’s spellbinding.

Now, a duet. “Think of Catarina and Paolo as architectural objects,” he commands. “They’re no longer people, they’re lines.” More improvisation follows before the pair puts the two routines together to practice. It’s not perfect but it is extraordinary.

Finally, McGregor lays down a challenge for the audience: to imagine the word “TED” and then zoom in on the letter “E.” “Make it a space the body can go inside of. What happens if you reach for it with your elbow?” This is such an interesting challenge, presenting us with a new way of thinking about the relation of the brain with the body. This is forcing us to think about our physicality in bold new terms.

Now he puts the three parts together, and the premiere follows, accompanied by McGregor’s own astonishing form of beatboxed rhythm-keeping. It’s a remarkable piece of work, and one the audience acknowledges ecstatically. “I hope you’ll go away and make a dance for yourself,” says McGregor breathlessly. “Or at least that you’ll misbehave more beautifully, more often.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

MoveTVnetwork asked dancer and choreographer Galen Hooks, shown above in rehearsal with The LXD, about her favorite performing moment. In this wonderful 4-minute interview, she talks about what it was like to dance onstage at TED2010 — and to receive the longest standing ovation in TED history:

Watch the full video of The LXD at TED2010 >>

Photo: James Duncan Davidson / TED. See more photos of The LXD at TED >>

PS:

I'm so touched by these comments from @galenhooks on her best ever moment in dance... vimeo.com/36883994 #LXD #TED

—
Chris Anderson (@TEDchris) February 19, 2012