Collegiate Times

Theater arts and science are typically seen as non-intersecting disciplines, but members of Theatre Workshop in Science, Technology and Society, or TWISTS, don't see it that way.

TWISTS is both a research project and collaborative performance initiative that seeks to analyze contemporary issues within science and technology through an original performance piece. TWISTS includes those who have backgrounds in science, humanism, social sciences, and theater arts as well ascommunity members who all work together to create one performance.

"TWISTS itself is built on a model we've been developing over the past three years that seeks to bring a lot of different kinds of voices together into the development of our performances," said TWISTS co-director Saul Halfon. "We bring them together in these intensive, partly dialogic, partly theater performance movement kinds of workshops to get a range of responses, ideas, opinions, feelings, scenes, visions of whatever the issue is we're dealing with. From that we do a series of workshops, and out of that we sort of pull together a performance."

TWISTS co-director and former Tech graduate student, Jane Lehr, said she sees the benefits to approaching science and technology in a multidisciplinary approach. She said she liked hearing a variety of opinions on one issue.

"I think that's exactly how we should be exploring science and technology," Lehr said. "I think we can produce more socially responsible technology if we switch to that model."

Lehr said the public should be looking at science and technology issues in a variety of perspectives that involves both expert and non-expert opinions in a more reactive light to prevent harm.

Lehr, an assistant professor at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, contributes to TWISTS by securing grant money for the project and communicates with current TWISTS members by making occasional trips to Blacksburg and via electronic communication.

Halfon, assistant professor of science and technology in society, said working with people from different disciplines is both a unique and challenging dynamic of TWISTS.

Halfon said within one discipline, you have to ask, "What are they interested in? What questions do they ask? What are the expectations of what you should know that are different in every field? We encounter that as a collaborative group, trying to figure out each other's expectations and assumptions and working through those as well," Halfon said. "In TWISTS, we have a lot of things we think and say about Darwin. Somebody coming from theater arts may not have heard any of this stuff. And what do we do with our disagreements? How much do I have to learn about evolution? We end up having to learn a lot of social science. There are disciplinary differences that have to be bridged."

TWISTS is currently working on a "Living Darwin" performance - a yearlong project to commemorate Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "Origin of Species."

"'Living Darwin' seeks to explore in performance the way in which we as contemporary people, as modern people, think about ourselves, our lives, our relations with each other and our world in terms that descend from Darwin. It's about the way that evolutionary thought and Darwinists thought shape our everyday lives and become part of who we are as people, as individuals and as communities," Halfon said.

While there are many controversial societal issues surrounding Darwin, "Living Darwin" looks to explore the role of Darwin in our everyday lives.

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