As a child, all senior Marissa Miller wanted was an audience. When her sister, Michaela, was born in 1995, she was thrilled – finally someone to appreciate her skills of dancing, singing and shaking tiny maracas.
Almost two decades later, Miller still expresses herself through dance. Yet it’s not her major; she’s a dual degree candidate in psychology and journalism. It’s not really a hobby; she spends most of her time working in a child development lab or running events for the Reformed University Fellowship (RUF), the Presbyterian ministry on the campus.
Instead, Miller uses dance to convey her passion for all the other things she loves, especially her research on socially withdrawn preschoolers. For that, she won first place in this university’s first Dance Your Degree competition.
Dance Your Degree is modeled after Dance Your Ph.D., an internationally-known competition in which Ph.D. students in a scientific field turn their theses into dance and submit the videos to be judged on creativity and “scientific merit.” This year’s winner will receive $1,000, recognition in Science and an all-expenses paid trip to Belgium for the award ceremony held during TEDxBrussels, an extension of TEDTalks.
While Dance Your Degree is not as prestigious as Dance Your Ph.D. yet, Miller still received $100, and her video, which she posted on YouTube, was presented at the 2012 Spring Maryland Dance Ensemble Concert this past weekend.
In Miller’s video, dancers portray preschoolers who have varying abilities to interact with others, with Miller as the child who is afraid to play with others but eventually joins the rest of the group.
Miller first heard about Dance Your Ph.D. through a grad student friend and was hooked once she saw how “adorably nerdy” the men pretending to be ions and proteins were as they danced around microscopes in their videos. When the announcement for the spin-off Dance Your Degree competition was printed in the Honors College listserv, she knew she would enter – both for fun and for the opportunity to explain her work.
“When I was working in infant lab, people don’t understand how labs work so I would get questions like, ‘Wait a minute, there’s an infant lab? Do you guys have babies in test tubes and stuff like that?'” Miller said. “Like no! That’s not ethical at all; there are ethical standards we have to abide by. And what would you even be studying with a baby in a test tube?”
Since she moved from infant lab to the Lab of Child and Family Relationships last January, Miller has been involved with an eight-week program that attempts to induce preschoolers to engage more in “group play” rather than “solitary play.” In Miller’s video, she shows the progression and different elements of the study: Three dancers perform a synchronized routine together to represent “group play,” different parts of the routine while facing away from each other for “solitary play,” and different parts while facing each other to perform “parallel play,” in which they are not necessarily playing together but still interacting.
Miller’s character, the child with limited social skills, has trouble learning the dance. Once she is taught the steps and masters them, however, she’s able to participate in the synchronized routine with the others.
This story line mimics the results of the study Miller and her colleagues have been conducting: The children in the pilot study went from spending all of their time in “solitary play” to far less and no time in “group play” to almost half their time in “group play.” She will be presenting her research Wednesday during Undergraduate Research Day in the Grand Ballroom of the Stamp Student Union.
Assistant Artist in Residence Adriane Fang came up with the idea for Dance Your Degree to show the variety of ways in which people express themselves creatively.
“Basically, we chose Marissa’s video because she presented a clear interpretation of her research in a really fun and engaging way,” Fang said. “She also demonstrated an ability to manipulate choreographic elements well, using canons and compositional form to structure the dance. Her work was well-thought out and creative, and her cast looked rehearsed and committed.”
Junior secondary education major Ali Bibby, who starred in Miller’s video, said the video not only explains Miller’s research well but also who Miller is as a person.
“By playing the part of an intervention child herself, you can see how she understands socially withdrawn people, despite this being the opposite of her actual personality, which really shows how she is able to sympathize with and reach out to people,” Bibby said. “Near the end when her character starts really getting into the dancing and just having fun, that is how you’d see her all the time in real life.”
Miller said her research is based on the theory that social withdrawal at a young age can lead to more severe problems, such as low self-esteem and depression. She works on this intervention study because seeing children become happy as a result of her work drives her own happiness.
“There’s just something about childlike wonder and discovery and the fact that they’re not afraid to have fun and do stuff,” Miller said. “I feel like once you hit middle school basically, it’s like, ‘Oh, what are people thinking about that?’ I think that in seeing the way they react to things and just enjoying their joy, you get something really amazing and fun out of that.”
She plans to pursue a doctorate in school psychology at the University of South Carolina, fully prepared thanks to her membership in the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, in which she has already written a thesis.
Journalism has become a secondary priority for Miller, although she interned at the Baltimore Sun in the past. Freelancing might be a possibility, but for now, she said she’s content with whatever God has planned for her. To Bibby, that infectious optimism is why Miller stands out.
“You know how people say they wish life was a musical, and people would just burst into song and dance?” she said. “Well, Marissa is the one-woman incarnation of that wish.”
mcfischer@umdbk.com
