 The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, which is a modern dance company located near Washington DC, created this amazing dance performance related to the human genome. You take a form like contemporary dance, which is a little hard to understand. You take genetics, a little hard to understand. You say, let's put them together, and everyone will understand. It's like, how's that going to work? But actually, it does. After seeing Ferocious Beauty Genome, members of the Dance Exchange and the NHGRI got together and created this idea for a workshop that would explore genomic science through dance, specifically for high school students. So the NIH team composed of educators and researchers, along with the Liz Lerman dancers and choreographers, decided to pull together and create choreography or activities around subject matter that the students were already familiar with. The idea was to make it unique and something different from the way they were normally taught in the classes. The main goal is to teach the science through the dance and through the arts and really how that connection can be made. About a month later, 70 students arrive at the Atlas Theater in Washington DC. The students will have to choreograph one of four topics in the groups they get split into, one of which is mitosis. We've talked about mitosis as the dance of the chromosomes because, again, it's just like a production, right? We gave the students an overview of mitosis, taking them through the various phases, and then we asked them to choreograph movement that depicted each of those phases. At the center, I like the coil to shape. I like that idea of the mirroring of the drag. Can't go wrong with the coil. I started to just implant places about speed. We gave the students few parameters to work within. The idea was for them to create something that was totally their own. Hopefully the students will create something that their peers will enjoy, but that also their peers will gain a new understanding of the science, and in this case, it was mitosis. Break and down. You guys stay. Let's start. Break. Break. No, no, no. You break. You guys will be dragged. Okay, I'm wrong. You break and drag. The students have about two hours to learn the major concepts of mitosis, explore those concepts through dance and movement, and then create brand new choreography that essentially will teach other students those major concepts in mitosis. After they're done creating their choreography, they'll have the opportunity to perform it for their friends and other students who are part of the workshop. There we go. Now we have two identical. Our students are dancing mitosis, if you can believe that. They're dancing what happens when mitosis happens right, and when it goes awry. I die because I'm the protein. I'm the protein that dies in the cell, and then afterwards they become corrupted, and they become cancer cells, and they die eventually as well. Excellent work. In 15 minutes, you have two very different representations of mitosis. You worked as a team, you know, it's not exactly easy to collaborate with seven other people to make something especially in such a short amount of time. So awesome. Now it's performance time. You can tell the students are excited and probably a little bit nervous to show what they've done, what they've created for the other students and for their friends. I'm really excited for the students. They've put together two very creative and unique performances that depict mitosis. I wanted them to see biology in terms of how it relates to them, not just what they're reading from the textbook, and how other people actually are interested in science. It's not just the geeks and the nerds who like science. You have dancers now who are interested in science. One of the comments that one of my students said was that she said it was much freer than being in the classroom. You got to actually explore something, an explanation and a different means of explaining a concept that they knew already about and just learn from a book or from a microscope. I want them to have a new way to learn science and something they can have fun with and maybe learn something new about science that they didn't know before or take something they learned in the classroom and expand on it. I think what surprised me was initially the students were very tentative about doing this but by the end of it they really got into it. I mean they really were visualizing what mitosis looked like through dance and I'm so impressed with them because all the inhibitions were gone.