The Choreography of CRISPR

“The Choreography of CRISPR,” a dance film embodying and illuminating CRISPR gene editing, was commissioned by the MIT Museum for the “Gene Cultures” exhibition in 2022. CRISPR has been compared to “rewriting the book of life” and is often explained in word-processing metaphors. Choreographer Gabrielle Lamb used its choreographic drama instead as the prompt for movement research with her New York City-based company Pigeonwing Dance. The words used to describe CRISPR — twisting, cutting, inserting, copying, repeating, palindromes, clusters — became the vocabulary of an intricate dance of spiraling and folding patterns. Life is movement, and movement is life, whether at the cosmic, the human or the molecular scale. Following the film’s screening, Lamb discusses her creative process, its intersections with the sciences and the importance of improvisation prompts in generating new work.