On the list of phrases I didn't know existed before coming to Stanford but now can't go a day without hearing, "design thinking" easily takes the top spot. Lesson one: Everything is—or can be—designed. This philosophy applies not just to cars and expensive jeans, but also one's life goals, the experience of eating sushi, even social dance. A poster child for design thinking if there ever was one, dance division lecturer Richard Powers's Waltz Lab is a modern-day extension of New York City's Savoy Ballroom in the early 20th century, where new styles of dance were born as couples watched each other experiment with variations on traditional moves.
The Stanford twist is to take this collaborative innovation that has always lent spark to social dance and put it on the Internet. The process begins each Monday night in Roble Gym. The basic dance is a cross-step waltz, a form chosen for its current popularity and the wide range of possibilities it offers. Each week Powers, MS '70, presents the dancers with a different challenge: to incorporate salsa moves, or to create variations for three people, or to work with music in nontraditional time signatures.
When a pair invents a move they'd like to share with the rest of the group, they perform it in the center of the dance floor. A videographer is on hand to capture each variation, and the clips are uploaded to the Waltz Lab website. The class has a dedicated following from 44 states and 31 countries. Some of these viewers, in turn, create their own variations to share. Nearly every week, dancers from New Haven, Conn., Portland, Ore., and Seattle upload videos, along with a smattering from San Diego, Austin, Texas, and Lexington, Ky., to name a few.
The Monday night sessions are an ideal time to test and improve upon these variations as partners are expecting to act as guinea pigs for each other. "It's much more pleasant if they know you're going to try something weird," says Lucas Garron, '12. "That way, they're also paying attention to what happens, and can help you improve the idea. Perhaps it's easier to lead if you start earlier, maybe you should hold hands differently, maybe you should change the footwork."
Powers sometimes draws diagrams on a blackboard, mapping out possible ways to change up the steps. "We do analyze it," he says. "We talk about some of the specifics of how to make a figure work." As for how much of Waltz Lab is art and how much is engineering, "It's not 50 percent/50 percent; it's 100 percent/100 percent. It's really all design analysis and it's all art and expression and lines and flow and music at the same time."
This combination of artistic and technical pervades the Waltz Lab: Timmie Wong, '11, MS '12, composes electronic music that is used during lab sessions, and Garron, a master's student in computer science, coded an online tool to aid the innovation process.
"Someone had started the joke going that Richard's teaching catchphrases could be converted into a stereotypical GPS voice that would give ironic driving directions," he recalls. Garron decided to try it, and what emerged was the Random Dance Move Generator, which suggests a new move to try with each click of the button. "I put it online and sent the link to Richard, expecting perhaps a chuckle, but he was very excited by it." Powers incorporated the app into the last weeks of the spring quarter lab, where it provided inspiration for a few serious and not-so-serious dance moves.
Even a not-so-serious move could plant the seeds for a major shift in the dance world—and based on what Powers refers to as the "century effect," such a shift is due at any moment. "We tend to see changes about 10 to 15 years into every century," he says, citing the emergence of the waltz and quadrille around 1815, and the tango and foxtrot in 1912 and 1914, respectively.
That's why he gets excited when he sees Waltz Lab participants taking their dance moves in a different direction. "If all of a sudden someone puts up something in a different time signature—not quite waltz—and excites everybody else, and the whole thread goes in that direction, it's a success as far as I'm concerned. That's how dancing evolves."
Helen Anderson, '14, is studying abroad at Oxford.
