Robin Boon Dale presents
What Does Stuff Do?
ZOO Playground 1 4 - 27 August
Who am I? Why am I here?
We may all have asked these questions, but Robin Dale has discovered that juggling holds the answers. Part TEDtalk, part stand-up comedy, part mesmerising circus act, What Does Stuff Do? is a unique and joyous one-man show. With a mischievous twinkle in his eye, Robin unpacks the mechanics of juggling before the eyes of the audience, revealing the underlying logic of performance and social interactions. Following this analytical thread leads from juggling into creative uses for scientific notation (demonstrated through ping pong juggling), fluid dynamics (water manipulation), and the nature of human perception and identity (a wrestling match with a flipchart). Switching deftly between dazzling skill sequences, technical analysis, and tongue in cheek philosophical tirades, Robin brings the audience along with him every step of the way. In the final moments of the show, he presents his true thesis: we are all tools! Full of potential, and with the power to select the systems we want to be shaped by. What Does Stuff Do? is a deeply playful and ultimately uplifting show which highlights what we all have in common, and the richness that the physical world has to offer.
I'm very interested in the way that you tread the line between performance and science. Could you tell me a little bit about what your scientific research is?
Sure! I’m a PhD student in the Medical Imaging lab at the University of Birmingham. Our lab works with an emerging technology called diffuse optical imaging, where we use light to measure what’s happening inside the body. My project is focussed on using AI to enable high-speed tissue scanning,
to hopefully improve the ease and accuracy of breast cancer monitoring in chemotherapy patients. We also do a lot of work with neuroimaging systems in a cognitive neuroscience way ie. measuring the responses of brain regions to stimuli – which is where the juggling has managed to sneak in.
What is it that made you see the connection between juggling and neuro imagery?
I’ve been juggling for around 10 years, and I’ve always been curious about the neural processes involved in acquiring and consolidating technical skills. People have studied complex motor skill acquisition with musicians and other skills that can be performed in an MRI machine (ie. lying down), but it’s only recently with new imaging methods that it’s been possible to collect reliable data from participants doing more dynamic skills. The choice to study juggling in the lab was circumstantial: I’m interested in it as a discipline, and I also I happen to know a lot of great jugglers that we can invite in to participate in our study. It turns out to be a great case study, because Siteswap (numerical juggling notation) allows you to quantify the complexity of juggling patterns mathematically - which is difficult to do with a lot of other motor skills - so you can analyse the relationship between complexity and brain activation statistically.
You conclude with the idea that we are all tools. Doesn't that suggest that we are therefore an external purpose? Is there space for free agency in your vision of identity?
I’m not trying to suggest any kind of supernaturally imposed purpose. ‘I am a tool’ is just a silly way of saying that identity is constructed in relation to other objects/people. I think some people might receive it in a ‘higher power’ way, which is fine. I talk about a lot of quite abstract things, so I try to leave space for people to fill in the gaps with their own meaning. Strategic vagueness.
The free agency question is a little tricky. In a way, What Does Stuff Do? is all about a certain kind of agency – the power that we all have to shape ourselves and our environments by recognising and selecting the systems which we are a part of. I dance around the ‘free will’ issue without ever coming down on one side, and that’s a deliberate choice, because I know going either way will lose some portion of the audience to annoyance or confusion. I think it’s enough that we feel like we make choices, and it matters what those choices are, and it matters whether we feel like our choices are important, to make it worth digging into the systems and relationships that shape those choices.
What came first the juggling or the science?
Juggling. I started training seriously when I was 19 and didn’t get into research until I was 27. I’ve always been interested in science though, and long before I seriously considered doing research as a job, I was reading lots of pop science and sneaking ideas I liked into shows.
Although your skills have a clear pedigree, and we are probably more familiar with popular books on science thanks to the Internet, you see your performance in any particular tradition?
The genre of What Does Stuff Do? is Circus Lecture/Demo (niche, but in good company: Circus Geeks, John Paul Zacharini, Kulu Orr). At the time I wrote it I was swimming in the TED-talks and science podcasts, so there’s a lot of SciComm influence (PhilComm?). I really like to mix performance and science in different ways, but WDSD is closer to the entertainment end of the entertainment/academia spectrum.
Robin Boon Dale is a professional juggler and research scientist. His performance career has included founding two circus companies, touring with the Best of BE Festival in 2017 &18, and performing with Gandini Juggling in their two most iconic shows: Smashed and Akhnaten (‘The Juggling Opera’). He works as a researcher in the medical imaging lab University of Birmingham, and has given invited talks on AI and neuroimaging at international conferences. His work increasingly blurs the boundaries between science and performance: working academic ideas into circus shows, giving performative talks and demonstrations at scientific conferences and festivals, and studying the brains of jugglers in the neuroimaging lab. What Does Stuff Do? is his favourite show to perform, and this is his Edinburgh debut.
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