Jad Abumrad is an audio journalist and composer. Annie-B Parson is a choreographer.
For the past year, the choreographer Annie-B Parson and I have been running a peculiar experiment. We invite groups of strangers into a dance studio, ask them to have a conversation, and then tell them how we want them to move through the room while they talk. Annie-B has spent decades moving bodies on stage, most famously in the musician David Byrne’s Broadway show “American Utopia.” I’ve spent two decades getting people to talk into microphones, first on the public radio show “Radiolab,” and then on the podcasts “Dolly Parton’s America” and “Fela Kuti: Fear No Man,” among others. We wanted to see what would happen when you put those two crafts together. The short film that accompanies this essay is the result.
But first, let me and Annie-B tell you how we arrived at the project documented in this video.
— Jad Abumrad
Jad: Here’s how it happened: You know that voice in your head that whispers to you all day long about how you’re a fraud and everyone knows it? That voice got really loud for me in 2021. I’d been interviewing other humans for two decades — scientists, authors, lawyers, cosmologists, priests, you name it — but seemingly out of the blue, I’d run into a long string of really bad interviews. Conversations that were lifeless and flat. “Aren’t you supposed to be good at this?” my inner critic sneered. (I call this voice the Sword Master, after a Zen tale about an aspiring swordsman being constantly tormented by an old master.)
To hit the reset button, I called a few colleagues to ask for tips. But it turns out we journalists all deploy the same tired techniques. I expanded to therapists. Gestalt therapists, psychoanalysts, a couple Rogerian types. I was fascinated by the way each school of therapy so diverged from the last. So I expanded even further, interviewing dozens (and then hundreds) of conflict mediators, lawyers, kindergarten teachers, psychologists, shoe salesmen. I spoke to two hostage negotiators. I kept widening and widening. But it wasn’t until I met Annie-B that this project came to life.
What brought me to Annie-B was a simple observation: So many professionals in the “talk trades” describe conversation using the language of dance. They talk about the “choreography” of conversation, “turn taking,” and how important it is to not “step on each other’s toes.” Around this time, a friend handed me Annie-B’s book “The Choreography of Everyday Life” and I was bewitched. I immediately called her.
Annie-B: For a few months, every week or so, Jad and I would hang out in a little bakery on Smith Street in Brooklyn, eat cupcakes, and talk about how we might experiment with the “choreography of conversation.” We started with the premise that when we take a walk with a friend, that conversation, which occurs in motion side by side without eye contact, is different than a conversation that we have across a table. I relayed to Jad an incredible moment I’d seen in a documentary about the great biographer Robert Caro. Caro was interviewing Sam Houston, brother of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He asked Sam to sit alone at the dining room table where his family ate when he was young. Caro then placed his chair directly behind Sam, asking questions to Sam’s back and leaving Sam alone with his memories to answer. The interview struck me as radical, fertile and — choreographic!
We traded stories like these, and in the process, we generated about a hundred ideas.
How would standing back to back, or shoulder to shoulder affect a conversation? What if one person stood behind the other, like an interrogator, or like a shadow, or like Robert Caro?
Could a person conduct an interview without any words at all? (My favorite.)
Jad: Mine too!
Annie-B: What if a group interviewed one person in unison? What if the follow-up question was a group decision?
What if we danced an interview?
We wrote each idea on a yellow card in red and blue pencil. The cards made the ideas feel solid, worth taking seriously. That was the bet we were making about conversation: that if the form felt unfamiliar, people might treat it with more care.
In the back of our minds, this question continually inspired us: Can an interview have visual interest? Can an interview be beautiful?
Jad: One day, I’d like to figure out a way to actually study these physical positions. Do these shifts make a measurable difference in the quality, color, or emotion in how two people communicate? I’ve spoken with colleagues at Vanderbilt, where I teach, about this. But that’s for another day.
Annie-B: Now we had this stack of yellow cards. And over many cupcakes, we limned things down and saved the ideas that we felt had energy or visual interest or held mystery or strangeness. And then I called Daria.
Daria Walcott works in theater, and she’s organized many of my performances. We entrusted Daria to take on the task of casting. We needed people who were serious and playful simultaneously (is there a word for that quality?), open and curious, plus a little bit brave. She interviewed dozens of participants and assembled the cast of open-hearted nonperformers that you see in this video.
We ran the workshop twice, in the spring of 2025. Twenty people each time.
All of this was made possible by Duettist, a wonderful nonprofit organization — launched in partnership with another nonprofit, Unlikely Collaborators — that supports creative collaborations like this.
Jad: The video you see focuses on just a few of the dozen exercises we tried. In some, we had participants sit at a long table and interview each other while doing tightly choreographed movements with their hands and specific shifts of weight and focus. In others, we set up chains of relays where a conversation could only happen through surrogates. In one, participants asked Annie-B questions and she danced the answer, which they then had to mirror.
Annie-B: We tried walking and talking patterns, we played with compositional ideas of repetition, proximity, and time. We tried interviews using mirroring, and interviews with slow-motion actions, abstract gestures, and Greek choruses.
Since the studio had these beautiful large windows, we even decided to add a group meditation, where everyone spent 10 minutes observing the world outside the window. Then pairs of people walked slowly toward each other, simply describing what they saw, until they passed each other, their voices fading out, creating an ambiguous atmosphere of memory and aloneness.
Jad: Did it all silence my inner Sword Master? Not entirely. He’s still there.
But his sneering led me to Annie-B and eventually to a dance studio full of strangers. And to a new expanded idea of what a conversation can be.
These days, when everyone has a podcast, and two mics at a table is the standard “set” for every conversation, I find myself thinking about new backdrops. New geometries. New constraints. What if the important conversations in our lives had to happen while dancing to Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell”? Would we talk about the same things? Would we fight the same wars?
I’ve even tried Annie-B’s “wordless interview” in rooms of several hundred people. It’s magical to watch.
That’s what this workshop left me with: a sense that the languages and forms we’ve settled into for the things that matter most — democracy, protest, dialogue, listening — have quietly gone dead on us. What this project attempts, in its very small way, is to reanimate a few of those forms through movement. A small first step toward a new way of talking about talking.