Dancing to Darwin
A Bird's Eye View from Rambert's Scientific Advisor, Professor Nicky Clayton
It has been both a pleasure and a privilege to collaborate with Mark Baldwin and Rambert Dance Company on The Comedy Of Change. By day I am the Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University and my own research focuses on the evolution of intelligence and problem-solving in young children and animals, particularly crows who are extremely smart and have huge brains - the Feathered Apes. But by night, I am a dancer and indeed I spend most evenings at tango or salsa, and I wouldn't miss my Saturday morning jazz workout at Bodyworks for the world. I have even negotiated my lecture schedule to accommodate my dancing desires!
Working with Mark - and everyone at Rambert - has given me the most amazing opportunity to put the two sides of my life together. We first met on a cold but sunny afternoon in January last year, thanks to a mutual and very dear friend, Stephen Keynes. Stephen is Chairman of the Darwin Trust and one of Charles Darwin's great-grandsons, and knowing that I loved birds and dance he felt compelled to ensure that Mark and I met. So, on Sunday 11 January 2009, Theodore, my sleek black Audi TT, and I ventured over to Lamas House, where Stephen was out in the garden waiting for me and Mark was busy in the kitchen, preparing our scrumptious lunch. I have such a vivid memory of that first meeting. Mark and I clicked right away and while the prawns and garlic mash sizzled in the oven I showed him my collection of Comme Il Faut tango shoes, which I keep in Theodore's boot. And when Stephen came back a few minutes later there we were in the kitchen playing with a few tango moves, which we ended up demonstrating in the studio a few weeks later.
Now you might think that a Cambridge professor of comparative cognition and the world-famous choreographer and Artistic Director of Rambert Dance Company are worlds apart but actually our two areas of expertise have a surprising amount in common. They both involve information-gathering activities with an emergent property - although in science your theories can be disproved and your experiments criticised, whereas in choreography your creative art can only be disapproved! And fundamentally we are faced with the same problem, namely how to communicate and convey ideas and thoughts in the absence of language, and to do so we capitalise on movement particularly behavioural displays. I have been known to claim that the only real difference is that the individuals that I work with have feathers and no hands!
For The Comedy of Change, my challenge was to distil scientific ideas about Darwin to inspire movement, energy and musicality, combining my knowledge of evolution with my research on the cognitive capacities of crows and my passion for dance. Essentially, Charles Darwin's theory of natural and sexual selection describes the biological nature of change. Individuals compete for valuable resources, such as food, mates and places to live, and because individuals vary, those that are the best adapted to the current environment are the ones most likely to survive and reproduce, producing offspring who perpetuate the genetic line by inheriting their parents' successful characteristics. Indeed, in On the Origin of Species Darwin explicitly states "This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variation, I call Natural Selection." Although males compete with one another for mates, the females are also quite choosy; resulting in a special form of natural selection that is exclusively concerned with increasing an individual's mating success, sexual selection. This explains why animals have such elaborate courtship rituals, which Mark used to great effect in Jonathan Goddard's solo of the bird of paradise for example.
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