Today, we're in Queens, New York outside of Topaz Arts, a creative development center that hosts a dance studio, where we'll be meeting with Ryan McNamara.

Ryan is a performance artist whose work explores what it's like to be a person today in our largely media driven and saturated world.

Past performances have seen him learning to dance of the course of five months in front of the public at PS1, or buried in the ground up to is neck, singing love songs.

He performs, but he also choreographs the movement of others, creating works like Meem, a story ballet about the internet, or Misty Malarky Ying Yang, which used President Jimmy Carter's 1979 malaise speech as a point of departure.

Ryan's work creatively upends expectations, as well as the traditional separation between audience and performers.

So let's go talk ti Ryan and see what he's cooked up for us.

Hi.

I'm Ryan McNamara.

And this is your art assignment.

[music playing] So I'm not a dancer, don't claim to be a dancer.

I-- the project your talking about was at PS1 a few years ago, called, Make Ryan a Dancer.

Yeah.

I had people come to the museum every day and teach me a different kind of dance, and ballet to stripping to contact improper-- kind of just a wide array of things.

It was embarrassing, at first.

But then there was something very liberating about it at the end.

I don't film myself dancing that often.

And that was fascinating to watch, because we see ourselves in the mirror but we don't see us.

So that was just amazing, like watching someone else dance.

So that was really weird and exciting.

So, yeah.

That actually was very helpful to be like, oh wow, that's how my body does it.

And then for me, I just thought, well, rather than-- I'm not trying out for a part on Broadway.

So rather then try to sort of correct those things, I just said, well, I'll just lean into those sort of idiosyncratic movements that had.

And that's all actually when I'm working with performers and dancers.

I think they have that, as well.

That's why I work with them, because they have-- their personality is reflected in the way they move, rather than just being able to have the perfect pointed foot.

I'm much more interested in that kind of personality shining through.

And it does.

So your assignment is to find a clip of movement on the Internet, something around a minute or less, just anything that you respond to.

And I want you to watch it once.

Then I want you to film yourself replicating that movement.

Then I want you to forget about the original video, and just watch the video you just made of yourself.

And I want you to replicate the movement that you see in that, and film it.

Then I want you to forget about the first video made, and watch the second video.

And try to replicate the movement that you did in that, and film that.

So it's like a game of movement telephone.

So Sarah, have you ever seen the video, "Tortoise upside down is ignored by his friends".

(LAUGHING) No.

[video playback] [chatter] [playback ends] Because I think that would be great for this.

Would you like to do that?

I will totally do it.

Well, I haven't seen it.

So why don't you demonstrate?

I'll do it.

And then you can get do it based on what I do.

OK. [giggling] Well, that was humiliating.

Yeah, definitely.

But it did make me think about memes, and the way that as people make things, they change.

Right.

And Ryan has done this performance that's thought about this before.

But this assignment gets to the essence of how things transform in interpretation.

Right.

I'm sure there's art historical precedent for that.

Well, sure there is.

You can think about the many people who have painted the Madonna and Child over time, or sculpted it.

I have seen a lot of those when you have made me go to museums.

But that is not actually what I want to talk about today.

I think we should go back to the origin of the term, meme And do know where that comes from, John?

I do.

Yeah, Richard Dawkins.

Your favorite person?

My favorite person.

Yes, from his book, The Selfish Gene from 1976.

Let's look at what he exactly said about this.

[video playback] A new kind of replicator has recently emerged.

It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup.

But already is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind.

The new soup is the soup of human culture.

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation.

Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root.

But I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene.

I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

It could alternatively be thought of as related to memory, or to the French word, meme.

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or a building arches.

Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body by a sperm or eggs, so do means propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brace by a process, which in the broad sense can be called imitation.

[playback ends] I've been doing this process now, with 20 dancers, of watching something and kind of making it our own.

And I think that we've always used it.

I think it's really interesting to use it as a guide-- you know, something really basic-- and then allowing yourself to inhabit it in a way, I think.

That's what I find really interesting.

I'll always find that more interesting than someone who can just replicate it perfectly-- someone who kind of owns it themselves.

So that would be my advice is really just make it your own.

I mean, it's going to be much more exciting process for you.

This is not about getting frustrated, or anything like that.

It's sort of about an exploration.

OK.

So to demonstrate the assignment, I've invited Mickey Mahar here.

He's a New York based performer, who I've worked with for about the past year.

And we've chosen a video clip that actually Mickey has never seen before.

And while Mickey is a professional dancer, this is not necessarily the genre that he's used to dancing.

In fact, we're going to be looking at a video of two orangutans playing.

So we're going to watch about 30 seconds of it.

All right.

You ready.

OK. Go.

[music playing] Now, Mickey is going to forget about the first video, and just replicate the movement of this one.

Look at the hold at the end.

Yeah.

That's nice.

OK. All right.

You ready?

Yeah.

[music playing] Forget about that one, and now we've got a new one coming our way.

K. Got it.

OK. [music playing] Perfect.

Your such a good orangutan, Mickey.

Thank you so much.

Thanks.

I practice.

[laughing] [music playing] The great thing about YouTube is they give you suggestions right after.

So you have ten choices right after.

Yeah.

The great and bad thing in that there's the rest of your afternoon.

[music playing]