Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Jo Reed: For the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed.

Since the Hulu series Interior Chinatown recently dropped on November 19th, I thought it would be a good time to revisit my 2021 interview with its author Charles Yu who won the National Book Award for the novel and served  as showrunner for the series writing the first and last episodes. It’s one of my favorite conversations and I hope you enjoy it…Here’s Charles Yu

Charles Yu:  I grew up in the '80s and '90s, watching-- basically never seeing Asians on screen, and when I did see them, it was often in these very kind of minor and very stereotypical roles. And, you know, I think the book was me trying to wrestle with what this does to-- both internally, but I think also what it does to everyone else as well. It can have a warping effect.

Jo Reed:  Charles Yu was a successful lawyer who was also a successful writer. What followed was a short story collection, a novel, numerous stories, book reviews, and essays in magazines. Then television came calling, and Yu found himself writing for the first season of the HBO series West World and has spent the last five years writing for and producing other series like Legion and Here and Now…and of course writing fiction.  I think the career trajectory is important when you consider the premise of his novel—the National Book Award winner Interior Chinatown.  Written in the form of a television screenplay Interior Chinatown is an insightful, funny, and searing exploration of Asian-American identity and representation in popular culture.  It’s the story of Willis Wu who is doomed to play various generic Asian characters in a TV procedural called “Black and White,” and that omnipresent television set dictates the roles of everyone in the book based on their race, gender, and age.  To call this limiting for the people involved is quite the understatement and at the heart of the book. Our hero Willis Wu wants more—he wants a story of a story of his own.

Charles Yu:  Willis's job at the beginning of the book is, you know, specifically, Generic Asian Man number three, slash delivery guy. So, he's kind of a utility player. He's very much a background, you know, character. He's the guy in the back delivering food or unloading a van, and he doesn't generally have any lines in the show. He doesn't have a story, to say the least, right? So he's just kind of there, as part of the scenery. And yet, you know, this book, what it-- I was trying to do was imagining a narrative from that person, who the story is very much not about. He exists in this show called "Black and White," which is, you know, a police procedural. If you imagine, you know, "CSI" or "Law & Order," some version of that. And it's called "Black and White," because there's one Black cop and one white cop, and they are the leads of the show, they're the heroes. And, you know, what Willis dreams of is actually being part of the show in a bigger way. The highest that he can-- you know, the highest level that he can attain, as an Asian in the world of "Black and White," is to become Kung Fu Guy, and use his sort of very specialized skills of Kung Fu to, you know, be part of the action, basically. And so, the book is about Willis trying to climb that ladder, and what happens when he gets closer to the top, and, you know, where that journey takes him.

Jo Reed: I know you spent a long time writing this book. How long? How many years?

Charles Yu: Yeah, it depends on how you calculate it, but I would say more than six, less than seven.

Jo Reed: Here’s the question. When you began this book, is this the story you were trying to tell, or did the story itself change throughout those years?

Charles Yu: That's a great question. I would say the latter. I think I didn't know what the story I was trying to tell was, and that was part of what took so long. I thought I knew, and I discovered, you know, it along the way. I think, in terms of the actual, you know, words, the prose, there were chunks of it that made it from the beginning to the end. Some of those kernels were like the backstories of Willis's parents were there pretty much from the first draft. But the story itself didn't have a form yet, you know? I just-- I didn't know how to write it. I couldn't hear the voice that it should be written in. And without those things, I just kept trying-- it's almost like I was trying on different outfits, you know, and none of them fit right. And so, it wasn't until more than four years into the process, where the current form actually sort of presented itself, for whatever reason. And that's when, really, the writing started to happen.

Jo Reed: When you decided, okay, I'm making this a screenplay.

Charles Yu: Yes. You know, it wasn't so deliberate. It was more like I heard the first lines of the book, and I thought, oh, you know, that's interesting. That felt like not me just, you know, rehashing the same things I'd been trying for years at that point. It felt like, oh, I can-- I hear a voice now. I got a sense of the tone and who Willis was. And then, from the fact that Willis was an Asian actor, you know, came a bunch of other choices. Like, well, if he's an actor, is he in a show? And if he's in a show, does that kind of dictate the form of the book?

Jo Reed: "Black and White" bears-- as you said, more than a passing resemblance to  "Law & Order." And, of course, we've all seen those episodes-- I don't know, how often do they happen, one every other year, it's set in Chinatown? Something like that?

Charles Yu: That was my memory. I mean, it felt like it-- yeah.

Jo Reed: And the cringe-worthy lines that Willis, when he's lucky enough to get a speaking part, is called upon to say, with an accent, even though, of course, he doesn't have one, having been born in the United States, we've all heard them, you know? I read them in the book, "It's a question of family honor," And anyone who has ever turned on a TV will find these cringingly familiar. And I want you to talk about that familiarity, because I do think, in a lot of ways, it's really at the heart of what you're talking about in this book.

Charles Yu: Yeah, it is, and I'm glad you highlighted that. It really was kind of the original thing that I was trying to get at, which was, you know, I grew up in the '80s and '90s, watching-- basically never seeing Asians on screen, and when I did see them, it was often in these very kind of minor and very stereotypical roles. And, you know, I think the book was me trying to wrestle with what this does to-- both internally for, you know, someone who has to watch that and say, okay, that's the representation of me or my family or my community, but I think also what it does to everyone else as well, which is, you know, when you only see certain groups in this kind of very limited like sometimes physical location, like a Chinatown setting, and you see them speaking with accents, or you see them doing martial arts, you know, and all of their storylines have to do with some sort of cultural difference or some sort of horrible secret, you know, that dishonored the family, it really skews the perception, right? I mean, for many people, this might be, you know, the main way they interact with Asian Americans, is through these stories. I mean, if you don't live in a big city where there's lots of Asians, you may think, oh, that's interesting, this is a sort of like window into this community. And I think, even if you do, it can have a warping effect, to only see this kind of story. So, you know, I think that's really what I was trying to do, is take that story and sort of investigate it from the inside.

Jo Reed: Right, because it's like the TV show that's America. And all of us having assigned roles, and some of us are at the center of the story, and, as you put it so beautifully, the light on the set hits our faces just right. And then, others remain the unnamed guests.

Charles Yu: Right, yeah. That partially comes from my actual experience on set, and partially comes from being a viewer. But I think, after having worked in TV, I even got a sort of more specific and deeper look into how much goes into making that reality, you know? How much attention is paid to how well the stars are lit. I mean, literally, most of the time you're sitting around on set is actually lighting setup, to make sure the shot looks beautiful, or looks how it's supposed to look. All of that attention is paid to these details. And then, you know, meanwhile, you're telling a story that isn't at all like reality, you know? So, that kind of disjunct is, to me, sort of both disturbing but also, in a weird way, amusing, that, you know, you can be paying all this attention to basically the plausibility of this fictional world, and, at the same time, be getting something else like egregiously wrong.

Jo Reed:  Exactly.  Your procedural is set in, of course, a Chinese restaurant, because why not, and it's called "Golden Palace." And Willis and his family live in an SRO above the restaurant. For those who might not know, what is an SRO?

Charles Yu: An SRO is single room occupancy, and it's essentially-- you know, you rent a room, maybe by the week, maybe by the month, and there's a shared bathroom down sort of at the end of the hall, and a shared kitchen area. Essentially, it's like a dorm, you know, for either individuals or potentially families.   You know, you see this sort of arrangement in Chinatowns. And it also functions, for me in the book in a kind of fictionalized way, as the place where all the Asians are kept, you know, when they're not being-- you know, when they're not playing the extras. It's like, okay, when you're done with your day of work as sort of the background players on this show, they all go live there. And it's very much backstage, you know, in this story, of like this is where they really are and they live their lives and they're human beings here, and then they go on-camera, and they're sort of playing these flattened versions of themselves, these roles as Asians.

Jo Reed: I really appreciated the scenes in the SRO, and the way the book explored the struggles of people and their poverty, and the various ways people in poverty cope. Because you don't see a lot of poverty in literary fiction. You just don't. Nobody ever has to work, as far as I can tell. And it's so important, I think, to understand economic struggle and the way it can compound racial inequity, and, you know, they're interlocked, frequently.

Charles Yu: Yeah, I agree. It's-- you know, I wanted to write about these characters in sort of all of their dimensions, and, you know, them as human beings, as bodies who have to eat and who have to clip their coupons and figure out, you know, what they've got left at the end of the month. I mean, those sorts of stories are-- it's-- at least up until very, very recently, it's sort of impossible to imagine telling that version of like the Chinatown story, of like what's it like for, you know, the shopkeeper who's actually worried about making the mortgage or-- you know, or paying the bills. And so, that was part of the kind of dimensionalizing of these characters as human beings.

Jo Reed:  We find Willis who wants to be Kung Fu Guy. That's really what he wants. And then, he's realizing, as the book unfolds  that Kung Fu Guy is really just another Asian stereotype. And, for him, deciding to be a father to his daughter really serves as his “Come to Jesus” moment with that, I think.

Charles Yu: Right. Yeah.  Yeah. I think the way you framed it is really helpful. It's essentially a decision between two roles, you know? As Willis gets more successful, you know, within the system that he's-- of "Black and White," he finds, one, that it's not all that it-- he maybe thought it would be, in terms of glory or feeling like he's made it. It comes with its own tradeoffs. And-- but, as you said, the key, really, is that it's just another role, you know? It ends up being-- even though, I guess, the pay is better, the visibility is better, he still very much has to play by someone else's rules, and he's still just as constrained as he ever was. And at the same time that's happening, another role is kind of emerging for him, which is to care about someone else, you know, to stop thinking about being-- and specifically, his daughter. So, the book-- even though it starts out in a place where Willis is very much trapped in a role defined by his race, I hope, and I think, it expands to incorporate so many other roles that he plays, you know? As a son, as a father, as a husband, as a member of this community.

Jo Reed: Yes, very much. Disappointing son, good son, you know, the son even has a multiplicity of roles.

Charles Yu: Right.

Jo Reed: You break out of the screenplay at moments, especially when we get the backstory of his mother and father. It's pretty much in narrative form, though it's framed by scene headings. And I thought that was a very moving part of the book. Did you do research as you wrote the story? I know your parents were both born in Taiwan.

Charles Yu: Yes, they were, and they did immigrate. And some of the, you know, I guess tangent points are somewhat very, very loosely based on, you know, stories they told me about their own time coming over, you know, from Taiwan to the US in the '60s. So, there was some research, I guess, just in the family sense, of like, you know, talking to them, interviewing my parents, and just trying to learn more about what it was like for them, what they felt, things that happened to them. And there was also, you know, some legal research, you know, especially towards the backend of the book, about, you know, as Willis goes deeper into the history, it doesn't just focus on his own familial history but, he learns more about kind of the long struggle of Asians in America, in terms of trying to secure rights. In a lot of these court cases, they're basically trying to figure out, (who) are Asians like-- you know, how can we analogize them? What minority group are they closest to? And so, for Willis, that's part of his education as well.

Jo Reed: Were you surprised by those laws? You have them in-- I want to call it a preface, it's called "exhibits," and it's before a court scene, and it's the timeline of laws. Were you surprised by this? Did you know about all these laws? Or was it a discovery for you as well?

Charles Yu: It was a discovery. I was surprised. I mean, I'd had a vague awareness of, you know, the major ones, like the Chinese Exclusion Act, and, of course, Japanese internment, and the '65 Act, which actually opened things up, because that's actually what allowed, you know, my dad to come over in '65. So I kind of knew some of the highlights, but what really surprised me was kind of the number and scope of so many of these laws, and also learning about a lot of the anti-Asian resentment that happened, especially along the West Coast, where basically Asian workers had been brought over as cheap labor. And it caused a lot of conflict, because they were seen as basically taking jobs from people. And so, there were massacres of Asians in Washington State, in California, elsewhere in the Western US-- over 100 years ago, this was already happening. So, yeah, as I got deeper into some of that, it did surprise me.

Jo Reed: You know, "Interior Chinatown" is a book that deals with, as we've talked about, very important issues, very serious issues, often in a tone that's really light and playful. Talk about that interplay and that juxtaposition.

Charles Yu: Yeah. I think, for me, that was important in the writing of it. You know, in order to keep writing it, I had to entertain myself first, you know? If I start to get bored, I definitely stop, because I think, if I can't keep my own interest, then what reader is going to want to stay with me?

Jo Reed: That's always a good rule of thumb.

Charles Yu: And so, for me, you know, I don't think of it as like I'm writing punchlines or trying to make someone laugh, but I am aiming for a tone, as you said,  one, to not take myself or the book too seriously, even as it gets into some heavier subject matter.  I think there's people better qualified to write the serious version of some of these things. I wanted to bring whatever sensibility I have, and also just experience, as a TV writer, just to kind of come at it from that direction. So, yeah, it was mostly just a practical thing of, like, this is how I know how to write, and so this is how it comes out.

Jo Reed: And, at the same time, though, you're not afraid of emotions or deep feelings. Because there are moments where it's funny, and I'm laughing, and then there are moments that are so piercing, it just took my breath away. When Willis was taking care of his aging father, and you have a line where he realizes that he's still his father but he's not his dad anymore. Oh my god. I mean, people of a certain age will absolutely know that feeling. It's so profound.

Charles Yu: Thanks. Yeah. I-- when you say people of a certain age, I'm like, yes, definitely. And I agree. My editor, Tim O'Connell, calls it kind of revving my engine, when I'm sort of just writing sentences but not really getting to the heart of the matter. And then, sometimes the gears actually engage. And it's usually when I'm writing towards something that hurts, you know? It's like, oh, I know why I was avoiding this. It's because I don't like the way this makes me feel, you know? And then I have to keep typing, because that's when the writing's actually starting to happen.

Jo Reed: Well, we mentioned it's a screenplay, but man, you really went the whole nine yards. It's formatted like a screenplay, it's even in Courier font.

Charles Yu: Yeah, right, which was, you know, a choice that I had some anxiety about, to be honest, because it's not the prettiest font. But I just felt like, to go the whole nine yards, it was all or nothing, you know? The form of this was so important to me in the writing of it, and I think, as a reading experience, for people to say, oh, I'm really in this, you know? And what it does sort of visually and what it does for the sort of narrative, to be able for Willis to jump in and out of the story quickly, right? And for the reader to follow Willis as he jumps in and out of the story.   I thought-- early on, can I really sustain this for a whole book? And-- but I knew I had to try, so.

Jo Reed: You've had multiple careers, and you began as a corporate lawyer. And I want to know how you made the shift to writer.

Charles Yu: Yeah. Slowly, and then all at once.  I was writing for most of the time that I was working as a lawyer, up until just a few years ago. I graduated law school in 2001, and I started working. And that's actually the same year I started writing fiction. So, I was publishing stories. I then got to publish a couple of books, and then, a few years ago, I was working in-house as a lawyer for a technology company, and I got a call asking if I'd come meet  for this job on a TV show. And, you know, it wasn't completely out of the blue, because I'd started working with an agent for like TV and film rights, but it was somewhat unexpected because I hadn't actually been thinking that I could make that shift. But for whatever reason, I think, they were looking for somebody who could tell a story in a more serialized way. And so I got the job. And my wife and I had to talk about it, because it was-- you know, it's a scary thing. We have kids and a mortgage, and would we have health insurance, all these kind of practical things were part of the decision. But, you know, I made the kind of decision to leave the law then, and I have since been lucky enough to keep working.  

Jo Reed: You've been doubly blessed by the National Book Foundation, first, obviously, for winning the award for fiction in 2020, but years ago, for it's program, 5 under 35, Richard Powers chose you as a writer to watch.

Charles Yu: That was an amazing moment for me. I, you know, still remember when I got the email. I was at work, and--

Jo Reed: You were lawyering.

Charles Yu: I was lawyering, yes. And at the time, we'd only had our first kid. She had just been born. And so, what happened was, a few months earlier, my first book came out as a short story collection. And, you know, as debut short story collections go, it did all right, and it got a couple of reviews in major publications, and I was thrilled. But, honestly, you know, after a few weeks, the book just slips under the radar as books do, right? And so, I was kind of thinking, will I actually ever write a book again? I was, you know, somewhat discouraged, because it just felt like, you know, a miracle that it had ever happened. And then, I remembered that I'd gotten a sort of negative review in The New York Times, which was a bummer, because I'd been so excited to find out the book was going to be-- anyway, all of which ended up to this sort of like doubt that I'd ever do it again, and then, I find out that Richard Powers had picked me for that, which was incredible, because I had read him in college, and I admired his writing greatly, and it was just this huge boost of validation, of like, okay, well, if Richard Powers believes in me, then the least I could do is try again. So, I did.

Jo Reed: Well, you were at HBO, and you worked on "Westworld," and you went on to work at other networks and other series, but I wonder, when you wrote "Interior Chinatown," were you thinking of those writer's rooms where you had been in, and sort of your position there, and were you able to advocate for a more nuanced or subjective representation for Chinese Americans in particular, Asian Americans in general?

Charles Yu: Yes and no, you know? I was thinking about it after it became clear, oh, I'm going to really try to do this in the form of a script. Then I was like all of the experiences that I've had over the last few years came in handy, you know? I could, with some limited sense of authority and more just knowing the specifics of how things actually work, what it's like when you're trying to make a show, what it's like in the room, the decisions that go into that, in terms of the writer's room-- and so that was fun, you know, actually getting to map one world onto the other, you know? And use all those tools, and forms, and techniques.  So, in terms of being in the room, you know, I'd had, generally, a pretty good experience, in terms of rooms being run by people that were interested in inclusion, in being sensitive to cultural authenticity, you know?  I've worked on some shows where people are really listening and well-intentioned and trying hard to make sure that they don't fall into some of the same traps that TV has in the past. But, that said, I think it's more structural, you know? It's like, these are all stories that I'm not the one who created it. I don't get to tell that story. And so, there's only so much I can do. I'm really writing in service of someone else's idea. So, yeah, I mean, it was a somewhat limited influence I could have in anyone else's room.

Jo Reed: Well, that leads brilliantly to my next question, which is about the differences in process of writing for television as opposed to writing fiction. I mean, TV is so collaborative, whereas, with a novel, there's you and a page, or the screen-- and I get there are editors, but it's really your work.

Charles Yu: Right. Yeah. It's both the kind of freedom and the terror of being completely in charge of, you know, the domain of my fiction. I mean, maybe not completely. I guess my editor would probably take issue with that. It’s collaborative in the sense that I have a couple of really trusted readers, my editor and my agent, but, yeah, other than the two of them. You don't have to think about, is this filmable? You don't have to think about budget or location or actors, you just think about where can this take me. It's language and it's ideas and it's spaces that don't have to be physical or tangible. And so, in that sense, it's a completely different kind of activity than, you know, the very real and practical activity of writing for screen.

Jo Reed: Did you miss the collaborative process that comes with television?

Charles Yu: I mean, I do. I miss that. I miss people. There's a lot of fun with it. I think there's this cool thing that happens sometimes in a room where you see someone pitch an idea, and you're like: where's that coming from? And then, it sort of gets kicked around, and a few pitches later, you realize that it's kind of grown into something, but only through group activity, the random walk from one mind to another, it ends up getting to a place you never would have sort of imagined. And so, that's really cool. I try to import that a little bit into my fiction, is like imagining the voices of some of my coworkers, sometimes. It lasts for a little while, and then, after a few weeks, I'm just left with my own voice inside. I'm alone again.

Jo Reed: Okay, and, you know, here's the question, what are you working on now? And you can say nothing.

Charles Yu: No, it's definitely not nothing. I'm working on a number of things. So-- one of which is the-- a TV adaptation of "Interior Chinatown." So, that's for Hulu. And, you know, I'll have to try to figure out if I can, you know, come up with a device or a bunch of devices that make the show work in the same way or maybe not in the same way the book worked, but in a way that, you know, translates it from page to a visual medium.

Jo Reed: That's great. Well, thank you so much for giving me your time. Thank you for writing this book. I really-- I liked it enormously. I thought about it a lot. And thank you.

Charles Yu: Well, thank you for reading it and for this conversation. I really appreciate it.

Jo Reed: That is writer Charles Yu we were talking about his National Book Award winner. Interior Chinatown. And as we know Charles succeeded in adapting the novel for television. It can be seen on Hulu. Charles was the showrunner and wrote the first and last episodes. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, This is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed.

Today, we’re celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday by revisiting my interview with Nick Spitzer. He is the 2023 Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellow, a Folklife Presenter, and the creator, producer and host of the award-winning radio program, American Routes. Trained as a folklorist with an anthropological lens and marked by the rhythms of radio, Nick’s work blends sounds, stories, and cultural insights to create unique narratives that resonate with a wide and diverse audience. 

With his early experiences in radio, and his groundbreaking fieldwork in Louisiana, Nick’s deep-rooted passion for music and culture has guided his career in exploring and presenting vernacular or folk culture. For example, he launched the Louisiana Folklife Program, he curated programs for the Smithsonian’s American Folklife Festival, he spent seven seasons as artistic director of Folk Masters at Carnegie Hall and Wolf Trap and created the American Roots Independence Day concerts on the National Mall.   Nick would go on to create, produce and host the acclaimed radio show American Routes, which for 25 years has been playing Cajun, Creole jazz, blues, gospel, country, Tejano, Latin and Caribbean music, roots rock, and soul along with insightful interviews with the artists. A long-time supporter of the National Heritage Awards, each Thanksgiving, Nick creates a special American Routes episode devoted to the music and interviews of the year’s recipients. In fact, from 1997 through 2014, Nick Spitzer was also the host of the National Heritage Fellowship Concert—which is how I met him. So in many ways, interviewing Nick was like having a conversation with an old friend—one who still has the ability to surprise. 

Jo Reed: Nick Spitzer, 2023 National Heritage Fellow. I've known you for years, and in preparing for this interview, I was shocked at how much I didn't know about what you do. So how do you describe your own work?

Nick Spitzer: Well, I'm trained as a folklorist from an anthropological point of view, but I also grew up through radio ever since college days, and I've continued to do radio. I see the sound recordings of people's personal narratives and conversations about culture as part of the way we exchange understanding of cultural difference and similarities, and a way to take deep understandings of culture, and with the addition of music and various environmental sounds and conversation, reach a really wide and diverse audience. So you could say I'm a public scholar, an engaged scholar, a public folklorist. I guess I'm a lot of different things, but most of the time I just see myself as somebody having a cultural conversation with somebody about the past and cultural continuity into the present, and what the possibility is for the future of culture's traditions in a creative sense and in a sense of maintaining continuities from the past to the future.

Jo Reed: Nick, where were you born and raised?

Nick Spitzer: Well, I was born in New York City in 1950, right at the middle of the so-called American century. I lived there until I was about three and a half, and then we moved out onto Long Island for a few years. But I really grew up formatively in a small town in Connecticut called Old Lime on the Connecticut River. And my mother, who was the single daughter of a suffragette always had a very strong sense of public culture and learning who people were around you and respecting them and so she made it clear to me all the time that, enjoy and watch, but don't say things unless you know what you're doingand I credit my mother introducing me to people and never being afraid to ask questions and just in goodwill try to build conversations. So that had a lot of impact on me as life went on and I grew up in this small town, Old Lyme. I just got a very strong sense of the totality of the town and learning to respect all the different people in the town and I just feel extremely lucky that I had that experience. 

Jo Reed: Where was radio in your life when you were a kid?

Nick Spitzer: I grew up just as we were beginning to get FM stereo on the radio and my brother is four years older than I and when we shared a bedroom, I'd be hearing Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Fats Domino, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill,” and I'm thinking, what thrill, what hill? What is it? Dion's there singing away with Doo-Wop and anyway, so listening to my brother's music, I liked that. But when we got FM stereo, all of a sudden, here's Bob Dylan. Here's the Beatles. Here's all the new music that's coming out. It’s 1965 and everything is going forward in a new way and so for me, radio was magic. So, by the time I left to go off to college in Philadelphia, I was already very attuned to what I loved on the radio, whether it was a hockey game from Montreal in French, a baseball game from out west or all these wild and crazy DJs and just especially the music. I just felt they were playing these songs just for me and so I felt very good about radio for a long time and I never stopped loving it and then I started actually producing it when I was in college at WXPN, the college radio station.

Jo Reed: Before we go there, because I definitely do want to go there, you went away to college. You went to the University of Pennsylvania. Did you even know there was a thing called Folkloric Studies when you went there?

Nick Spitzer: No, I didn't. At Penn, I was listening to my mother and father. My brother had been an environmental kind of wunderkind at the age of 14. He was being interviewed by the congressional panels on why ospreys were dying in the Connecticut River Valley and I was much more into art and culture side of life and so I started to, I guess, find my way. They wanted me in the Wharton School because they said, “Well, he's going to be in ecology and we need someone in this family who will have a real business.” Ecology wasn't seen as a science at that point. My dad was a scientist. So my mother was very tolerant of what she would call my creative side, and said, “Now, Nick, Wallace Stevens and also Charles Ives and I know you like Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens poetry you've been reading in school. Both of these men became insurance workers. They were businessmen and then once they'd made a decent living, then they did their work, poetry and music.” She said, “You should be like that. You should go to the Wharton School at Penn,” and my father said, “You better go to the Wharton School.” But within one semester, I realized I didn't want to be an insurance person. I didn't want to be a business person. I didn't want to be a lawyer or a doctor. I wanted to just have the freedom to enjoy the music that was now coming to me through the college radio station and also going out and hearing Coltrane's old band in Philly and hearing Doc Watson play on campus and Mississippi John Hurt and I was just being open to this whole wide range of music and it did turn out that Penn had a very well-respected folklore and folklife department and so I started taking courses there and in anthropology and one of my key mentors was John Zwide, who actually ended up being the person that nominated me for the Heritage Awards. He's still alive. 

Jo Reed: When or how did you connect your studies in folklife culture to the music you were playing at the radio station.

Nick Spitzer: I just opened up to the idea that avant-garde jazz could be understood as vernacular, like folkloric music and at the radio station, there's 20,000 records, this is the LP days and that wall of records was the sounds of people, their rituals, their festivals, their music. Their narratives and I stumbled onto two records in particular filed in the Caribbean bin that I said, “Well, this should be not in Caribbean because they're in Louisiana,” and there were two important records to me. One was the Ardoin family, Bois Sec, Ardoin, Alphonse Bois Sec, “Dry Wood” Ardoin accordionist, and Canray Fontenot, the fiddler and the other was Clifton Chenier, the big beat rhythm and blues Zydeco man and I said, “This music can't be in North America. This sounds Caribbean. That's why someone filed it here.”  And so that set me on a course of how much more diverse is America than I've been taught and I began to realize it's much more diverse, not just the culture areas, but urban ethnicities and migrations and all these things are flowing through my mind.

Jo Reed:  When you graduated from college you got a job in radio. How did that happen?

Nick Spitzer:  So there's not much you can do with a B.A. in anthropology right off the bat. But I could do radio. So I ended up at WMMR Philadelphia. It was a Metro Media FM that was doing stereo roots, rock, pop, very eclectic and I was the afternoon guy and I did it for two years until I began to realize this just wasn't for me for eternity. But I did get to interview members of the Grateful Dead and the Kinks and Bette Midler and just lots of different people, because when the artists would wake up after their gigs, they didn't want to do anything live on the radio till one or two in the afternoon. So I'd always get the interviews and I got used to interviewing people live. I was under some pressure to play all these British hair bands and I'd say, “Why am I going to play Foghead when I could play Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters? Why don't I play some modernist jazz and make that work with Randy Newman and then go to Ray Charles?” We were told we were given complete freedom, but I was increasingly under pressure to play the latest pop acts and I just thought it was sleazy and I also just didn't want to stay and keep doing, even though was hip and a million hipsters would have loved my job, I just wanted to go deeper and wider. 

Jo Reed:  Deeper and wider---How did you go about that? What did you do?

Nick Spitzer:  So I left there and I went on what I call my Jack Kerouac meets Woody Guthrie trip and went down through Virginia and I went to the Carter Family fold and I went to see Doc Watson at his house and I started doing interviews with people as I went and finally got down to the Gulf Coast and came along through Florida and Alabama. New Orleans for a day and I landed in Lafayette where I knew somebody and that that really set me on coming back to French Louisiana after that. But then I went to Austin, decided I would go to graduate school at UT Austin in anthropology and folklore. and I came back to Connecticut and basically packed up and moved to Austin and that's when I started grad school. And in Austin I did radio. I worked on what people called a hippie country station and I was the only non-Texan and they did make some fun of me, but I knew a lot of music they didn't know. Old Carter family and classic old country, certain types of blues. But they knew all the classic Texas stuff and I had to learn how much I liked Ray Price and Waylon and Willie and the Armadillo was going strong, the club there that became famous and since I was on Saturday nights because all the locals wanted to go out and party and I'd been working in grad school all week, to me, nothing was more fun than being up there with a friend or two and playing the music. Come midnight, the Armadillo closed. Who comes in the door? Willie, Waylon, Commander Cody, and I got to know those guys.

Jo Reed: Willie Nelson.

Nick Spitzer: Yeah, Willie Nelson. So I integrated myself into that world. But then the kind of new world of public folklore, my great hero was Archie Green, a labor folklorist and he and I started producing features for NPR. I did one on Folk Festival USA on Cajun and Zydeco.  I did a 90 minute documentary and I told all the people I was starting to meet, both Afro-French and Cajun, “This is going to be on,” and they got a huge response and I began to think, well, I can just use radio to reach all these people and support them in a public place and they don't have to go to the same bingo parlor or the same dance hall.. They can just all hear themselves, they'll be together on the medium.

Jo Reed: Because you went to Louisiana for fieldwork with Afro-French Creole music and that was really pivotal and I'd love to have you talk about that because that really opened up the music of Louisiana that's been central to your career.

Nick Spitzer: Well, it also opened up the idea that cultures aren't static, that cultures change and that there are cultures we don't even understand fully because the Afro-French people were neither fully French. They were not white Cajuns. They were not white colonial descendants, but they were somewhat separated from Black folks too. They were not Black Americans. They were Afro-French people and they used the term Creole and their music was a mix of French sources from West Africa and the Caribbean rhythmically, sonically in various ways and American blues. So I began to see that the lines between people and culture were not as static as I've been brought up to believe and one of my key teachers was Americo Paredes who I'd never known before. I was in grad school, but he was a border scholar, also a singer and he worked on the Texas-Mexican border and dealt with the culture that was neither fully Texas nor fully Mexican, but a place where a lot of different culture, music flourished and was very creative.

Jo Reed:  Okay-- you went back to Louisiana, to Lafayette—how did you connect with Alphonse Bois Sec Ardoin

By then I was starting to go all the time to little correo de Mardi Gras, Mardi Gras runs and all these little dance halls and I had met a Bois Sec Ardoin at Mariposa.  I went to this festival up in Canada, near Toronto. Alphonse Ardoin was there with his son.  I talked to him after his set and I didn't speak any French. I had only studied Spanish, but he said to me something I never forgot. He said, "Quand tu visites la Louisiane, visite nous à la maison." When you come to Louisiana, come see us at the house and so when I got to Lafayette, I told that to a couple of friends and then they sent me, said, “Well, go see Dewey Ball for the Cajun fiddler,” who, like Bois Sec, would become a National Heritage Fellow in the early 80s. and Dewey let me live at his house.  I lived out back in his outdoor kitchen and for breakfast and dinner and a place to sleep, I fed his cattle. I made sure the electrical fence was working. I harvested corn. I delivered insurance checks. He had a little insurance business. I helped him move furniture. He had a furniture store and one night, I came home and I said, “Dewey, I saw a sign that said the Ardoin family, Quatre Coins, ce soir, Four Corners Club tonight and he said, “Oh, Nick, you got to go there and see them. They're the best.” So I go there and there's Bois Sec, the man who told me, come see us at the house and by now I'd been learning pretty good. I had Louisiana French going. So I walked up to him and I said, "Monsieur Arduin, est-ce que tu te rappelles de moi? Moi, je suis un experte, on a rencontré longtemps passé." And he says to me, "Moi, je t'ai dit visite à la maison quand tu visites la Louisiane." I said, “Exactement, that's right. Come to my house,” and so he said, “Tomorrow, at my son's club, we'll have an afternoon fais do-do. You should come to that.” So I went, it was about 15 miles from where I was staying and I went there mid-afternoon and I went to this little club. I never looked back. I eventually moved there and rented houses there and eventually I would live in the Ardoin house for three months It was like the deal with Dewey except I was gardening and I was going to the store. I would always be there for family dinner. I shared a room with the youngest son who was a couple years younger than me. I really lived the life. I lived the life under a very strong matriarch of the family. Madame Ardoin took no guff from her husband or any of her guests.

Jo Reed: Let me just interrupt for a second. But in the meantime, you were able to record them and interview them and hear their music.

Nick Spitzer: Oh, yeah. I interviewed them and actually I got a grant from the NEA and I made sound recordings of the Ardoin family and many others. I recorded old Creole songs, old French songs and I did two albums. One called Zodico, Louisiana Creole music. That was a wide range of urban, rural, more French, more Afro and I'm in the process of getting all this stuff out. I never brought it out as CDs and then I did another one with the Lawtell Playboys. So I did those and I started doing more radio and once my grant ran out, I was substitute teaching in schools which was another way, great way to learn what's going on culturally somewhere. So on and off for a year and a half, I was there for months at a time. Go back to Austin to handle some formality or do something related to my graduate work. But basically I just lived it and loved it.

Jo Reed: You ended up doing work for the Smithsonian for the 1976 Bicentennial. What did you do for them?

Nick Spitzer: Well, I went to Washington as a presenter of Louisiana French and Creole. But also old-time country and blues and all the things that I knew something about and that's where I met Bess Lomax Hawes. Bess was the deputy director of the Office of Folklife Programs and she was very good friends with Joe Wilson, who ran this nonprofit National Council For Traditional Arts and Joe introduced me to Bess.  Bess was extremely excited that I had learned Louisiana French and had background in folklore training and wanted to do public work and was at the festival and was learning how to be on a stage and introduce people and do interviews and translate for publics and stuff.  So after that happened, she said, “We really want a state folklore program in Louisiana. If we post a listing, I hope that you will apply for that,” and I said, “Why wouldn't I?” So I finished all my coursework and the listing came up and I applied and she was close to Al Head, the director, he met me and we got along very well and so he hired me to be the state folklorist. So now I've moved from making recordings and public radio and doing the scholarly stuff towards a dissertation to suddenly being a Louisiana state official, if we could call me that. And I had pretty much free rein to lobby and I got pretty effective at it to where they started giving us money to do grants and projects and in that time we did a state recording series, blues, old time country, Cajun, Zydeco. We did a state guidebook, “Louisiana Folk Life Guide to The State”, like the WPA guides of the ‘30s, but focused on living traditional arts and culture and then the biggie, the World's Fair, Louisiana World Exposition. Russell Long and Carolyn Long got us a million dollars from the timber industry to run a pavilion in an old warehouse, a tobacco warehouse down in New Orleans and so we put a crew together and for six months by hook and crook, we ran a stage, a little nightclub inside this place called The Back Door by then I'd gotten an exhibit together called the “Creole State” and we had every Louisiana traditional artist we could find, the craftspeople, boatmakers, weavers, spinners, older ladies that sing cantiques, Cajun, Zydeco, Native American.  And within a month, we got a tremendous review in Newsweek, a full page review in Newsweek as the best thing at the World's Fair.

Jo Reed:  Congratulations! So tell me, first of all, how long were you in the position of folklorist in Louisiana?

Nick Spitzer: Seven years.

Jo Reed: You moved to  the Smithsonian, curating programs for the American FolkLife Festival—what goes into that work

Nick Spitzer: Well, the first one I did at the Smithsonian was before I was hired to be there. I did the Louisiana state program. What goes into that is doing a lot of field work, but because I've been doing the World's Fair programming and helping a great team of folks there and working all around the state, I already had a easily to find 120 people that we knew could go to Washington whether they were old time lace makers, fiddlers, French folk, African-American, Vietnamese, all the different people in the state, lots of Native Americans. We knew who would be willing and able to be out there for two weeks on the National Mall.  I had had some experience before that where I'd come in and helped, so I understood what the festival was more or less about and so that year, the two featured areas were the state of India, the country of India and Louisiana, and they seem to go pretty well together. There are both very strong differences of color and religion and magical rituals and festivals and music and it was a festival to remember and it was through that really time that it was cinched that I would come up there and so in the October of ‘78, I moved to Washington. I enjoyed my time at the Smithsonian and I did five years as a federal and then I decided not to stay and continue. But I said, I'll be an adjunct and so I became a research associate and then's when I really became independent.

Jo Reed: What was some of the work were you doing as an independent presenter

Nick Spitzer:  I started doing tours to the Seychelles Islands with Louisiana Creoles, Zydeco people out in the Afro French islands and the Indian Ocean and the most important thing for me was I did the Centennial of Carnegie hall with a series called Folk Masters and that was got me going with, how do you do traditional arts on proscenium stage with all the attendant stylistics of Carnegie Hall and that in turn led me to actually after that first year, just to come to Wolf Trap and do it there the next six seasons. And then in the middle of all this, from 1990 to 1997, we did the American Roots R-O-O-T-S Independence Day concert and I got it out live on NPR around the country, all stations that wanted to carry it and we could see 250,000 people from there, their bodies in front of us and I brought up Rebirth Brass and all these great New Orleans people that I knew and we had great Cajun music and Zydeco and traditional fiddling and over the years we had Carl Perkins and we had the Staples Singers and we had all manner of gospel. And the evening events from six to nine when the fireworks would start. Those were when we really laid it out and I co-hosted it with Fiona Ritchie and Georges Collinet and a lot of different people. But so suddenly this idea of concertizing on a big stage was outside a festival and then it was out on public radio and the Park Service just helped us at every turn. After doing that for all those years, I went to Santa Fe for two years to a think tank and then I said, “I'm going back to Louisiana. I miss that.”

Jo Reed: What led you back to Louisiana, Nick?

Nick Spitzer: Well, I said to myself, where is home in my life today? And I can't go back to Old Lyme, Connecticut. I'd left all that. I love Philadelphia, but I'm not a college kid anymore. I had moved to Louisiana twice.  I'd gone in to do my field work there. Then I worked for the state. And I said to myself, I will move to New Orleans where I always had loved it and New Orleans is a Creole city, deal with people called Creoles with a mixing and the mingling of Sicilian, French, African-American, Afro-Creole, it's a global city almost of the 19th century and through the Park Service, I had become friends with people at the University of New Orleans and they hired me as a folklorist there and I taught cultures of the Gulf South. I taught oral history. I taught Creolization cultures and Creoles and cultural Creolization and I did that through Katrina. 

 Jo Reed: You mentioned Creolization and the concept is pretty central to your work—say more about what you mean by it and how it drives your work

Nick Spitzer:  So you could argue that on one level, there's people called Creoles with a capital C here and other places in the Caribbean and parts of South America. But moreover, you could look at things that are Creolized and mixed and mingled. So from my point of view, the world is in Creolization. We're in constant contact where continuities of old culture are mingled with new creativities and new things emerge. The easiest example is Ray Charles. Ray Charles grew up, going with his mom to church and he also went to the j uke joint where he learned how to play blues piano with Wiley Pittman. He mingled the blues, the lonesome sound, the piano playing with the gospel shouts for joy and he ends up with a new music. We call it soul and so to me, soul didn't exist before. There was gospel over here and there was blues over there. So he made soul out of sacred and secular music around him and that's why we call him a genius. He wouldn't call himself a Creole, he'd call himself a Black American, but the music is a mix that represents something new based on the merging of traditions. So I'm really into that in American society, a creative society where we have to look at the future as much as the past and creativity from the past will lead us to more creative things in the future. So I see the world in Creolization and I don't look for the barriers between groups of people. I look for what they've done together.    

Jo Reed: And you created your radio show American Routes when you moved to New Orleans—I want that origin story 

Nick Spitzer:  Well, I also said to myself, if I go back, I'm going to start a new radio show and I can more efficiently reach more people if I do a post-produced show, not a live event and so I decided it would be called American Routes, R-O-U-T-E-S and in ‘97 is when I moved back and the university gave me financial support and allowed me to apply for grants and I was very dutiful. I wrote the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and said, "Look, we'll do all the background research on this to show you why we think it'll work." Because I was very wonky. They wanted all that information and they said, “Just send us a demo.” So I created a half hour demo. We sent it in and a week later, the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting called me and said, “We're going to fund this. We want you to do this for at least a year. Just do what you're doing. Everyone thinks the demo is fantastic.  It's what America needs to hear,” and I said, “That's what I think too,” and so we started on the air in April of 1998 with seven stations. Little by little, within about a month, we had 30 stations. By the end of the year, we had 60. A coffee company was underwriting us in Louisiana and life just went on producing the show out of an old bottling plant, water bottling plant in the French quarter and it just continued for 25 years to the current moment and in that time, we now have 385 stations. We had continuous support from the NEA and the NEH and local businesses and we made it to 25 years and just has continued to grow. We're one of the very few cultural performance programs left in public radio. We're the only thing on the air between Austin and Chapel Hill, North Carolina that could be understood as cultural programming, going to the national network and TV or radio and it's just been slow and steady. Keep going, keep going. 

Jo Reed: I know you received offers from television but you always stayed with radio. Why? 

Nick Spitzer:  I just felt radio is better for me because the microphone disappears. It's just your voice, somebody else's voice. We can record a live event. We don't need the lights everywhere. We can just have a conversation and people get comfortable and they go deep with their hopes, their joys, their sorrows, the why and what and how they make the music or do the craft they do. I just began to see the world more interconnected, more creolized and more capable of having the kind of eclectic program that argues for what Americans share, like country music and blues and jazz and gospel music and then what distinguishes regions. 

Jo Reed: For people who are unfamiliar with American Routes, how would you describe the format

Nick Spitzer:  These days I refer to American Routes format as a Gulf South by Southwest with sojourns to the Caribbean and all points across the country.  I feel like in New Orleans, there's a lot of pride that we're inclusive of something as eclectic as what we do. Something that many program directors said, “Oh, you can't do something when it's mixed like that.” Well, we've done it and we keep doing it and we're not the biggest show. We're not a news show, but we kind of commingled information in a newsy kind of way with culture and performance  What we try to do is find concordances in words, in mood in sonic things, contrasts and continuities that we can do segues, which is sort of the art form of radio flow of sound and maybe every third sound, every third song will be very familiar to somebody, but it might be a familiar artist with a song they've never heard him sing or a song that is quite familiar by a familiar artist, but not the one they might've expected to hear it sung by and so you're always messing with things that work together. You can play old time string band music and make it work with New Orleans traditional jazz. You can play blues and gospel and make it work with Klezmer. You can play country and make it work with Hawaiian. You can do all kinds of things based on the sonics, the semantics, the moods for the segues. That’s one thing we're proud of, that while we can narrate who the artists are and where they sang and a bit about the biography and the culture, we want people just to enjoy the show whether they're listening in the foreground or the background and so the eclecticism is not a barrier. It's an invitation.

Jo Reed: You’ve also, in the midst of everything, been teaching at Tulane now, first the University of New Orleans and now Tulane for many, many years. I wonder how teaching and radio come together for you. Somehow it just seems to me being around students and younger people has to be good for what you bring to American Routes.

Nick Spitzer: Well, , we have probably a half a million to three quarter million listeners each week, depending on the season and the show and whatever. I go to a classroom, I have anywhere from 10 to 40 people. I've done a couple of bigger classes, but in a funny way for me personally, radio is a lot easier to do. It's all post-produced, you can always do a pickup on a fix. I'm working with an engineer and co-producers and interviewing artists and trimming the interviews and mixing music. It's a team effort and when it's made into its one hour and 59 minute iteration for being sent out, I just feel great and I hear it on the radio. But I've done radio for so long and it's so common to me to do that. I don't feel pressured by doing it. I love the interviews and everything. But when I'm in a classroom I'm always trying to figure out how to reach students. It's very challenging, exhausting in some ways. At Tulane, more of the students are not from Louisiana though that's beginning to change. Now it's gotten to where there's more and more younger people who are hip to deep roots and especially blues and gospel and the sources of rap and hip hop and certain Black genres that are classic forms of Jubilee and this and that, and a lot more Cajuns and Creole descendants and so they're really excited to hear how the old music ends up as French rhythm and blues. They go along for the Creolization ride and discussion and enjoy it. But it is a lot to try to emote and intellectually work with audiences of students versus something where I've been knowing what I wanted to play and scripted and ready to go with the team. It's sort of an interesting balance between the worlds but it does take a lot of energy on both ends.

Jo Reed: You were also the host for many years for the National Heritage Fellowship Concert and I wonder first what your memories are of that experience, but then having been in DC as the recipient of the award.

Nick Spitzer: It was weird. The first ones Heritage were 1982 and who's getting the awards? My teachers in Louisiana, Bois Sec Ardoin, Canray Fontenot, Dewey Balfour, all these people, I wasn't the host then. Pete Seeger was hosting and there were many, many other hosts over the years. I see the people in the families where I lived as as much my teachers of folk and traditional arts and how to make policy and how to produce programs as anybody in the Academy that I learned from, more so. Those people were like my new family, a lot of them, especially in the Creole communities. But it was a huge moment for me to start going on stage in ’97 when the last host retired, they asked me to do it. And from ‘97 to 2014, I did it. It was a lot of fun to go on stage and improv with people and help them get comfortable for that moment and some of them were very shy and quiet but we always found ways to enjoy one another's company I tried to give them two or three days of fun, humor, what we could talk about and so I just loved these shows. They were just like group improvisation with a Ukrainian egg decorator, a shy older lady that did quilts in North Mississippi, people that you've never heard of, but also some of the greats of the culture, of cultures that we knew like B.B. King, and people that I'd always loved, all kinds of different blues people, Zydeco man, Boozoo Chavis, his family, just all manner of people, some of whom I'd already known well, but most of whom I'd never met before.

Jo Reed: But I also have to ask, the fact that you're given the Bess Lomax Hawes award has to be particularly gratifying because I know she was such an influence on your work. 

Nick Spitzer: Oh, definitely. There's a picture of myself and Bess that somebody took at the 1985 Smithsonian Festival. We were in the Louisiana area and we're both kind of smiling and talking and I remember how much she influenced me and made me feel that I could be a state official, that I could manage not just working in Louisiana, but that maybe one time I'd come to Washington eventually, that really everything I could do to better understand and present culture could flow from the work. and I saw her as kind of a matriarchal grandmotherly blessing figure in my life and so then it was named after her-- yes. It was very meaningful to me for it to happen that way.

Jo Reed: I could not be happier, Nick, that is the truth. So many, many congratulations on a well-deserved award and many years ahead for “American Routes”  I think that is a great place to leave it, Nick. Thank you for giving me your time.

Nick Spitzer: Yeah, thank you for asking me the questions.

Jo Reed:  That was folklife presenter and the  producer and host of American Routes, the  2023 Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellow Nick Spitzer.  To find out more about American Routes, check out its website, Am Routes.org. That’s a-m-r-o-u-t-e-s.org. And don’t forget to check it out on Thanksgiving when American Routes presents the music and interviews with the 2024 National Heritage Fellows. You won’t want to miss it.  We’ll have links to American Routes in our show notes.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating. It helps other people who love the arts to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Jo Reed: Welcome to Quick Study. I'm Josephine Reed. This is the monthly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, where we'll share stats and stories to help us better understand the value of art in everyday life. Sunil Iyengar is the pilot of Quick Study and he's the director of research and analysis here at the Arts Endowment. Good morning, Sunil.

Sunil Iyengar: Good morning, Jo.

Jo Reed: So what are we talking about today?

Sunil Iyengar: Dancing robots.

Jo Reed: Really?

Sunil Iyengar: Okay. So that was a little bit of clickbait. There is a part about dancing robots, but we'll get to it later. This is about the relationship between dance and cognitive neuroscience and how dance can help in the rehabilitation of those who suffer from chronic neurological disorders.

Jo Reed: Okay. So dancing robots will be on the docket later.

Sunil Iyengar: Promise. So Jo, this month there's a scientific article out by researchers from Emory University and Colorado State University who've done a review of current research on creative movement IE dance, and how dance improves structural connectivity in the brain and assists with a variety of cognitive processes.

Jo Reed: Okay. Well, I've heard of dance's exercise, so I can imagine it's useful for physical fitness and I know we have talked many times about music in the brain.

Sunil Iyengar: Yes. Right. We've talked about initiatives such as sound health and the research we co support with the National Institutes of Health, for example.

Jo Reed: That's right. So tell me about dance. How has this art form related to brain health?

Sunil Iyengar: It's an interesting story. Quite a lot of studies have emerged in recent years, even though as you suggest more is known about the neuroscience of music than of dance. But consider some basics. It should be obvious to anyone that dance involves and invokes really memory and attention. There's sequential memory and learning new steps, for example, but also spatial memory, moving around and relational memory. Then there's attention with a dancer, learning how to control posture and attend to music. The beat and partner cues. Speaking of dance partners, this type of movement calls on a whole new set of functions having to do with interpersonal communication and social cognition. So the article I'm referring to makes all these points

Jo Reed: As you're speaking about this, it makes perfect sense, and it really becomes kind of obvious that dance would do all those things.

Sunil Iyengar: Yes. But it's only quite recently that we've had the scientific tools to begin to measure these relationships and come up with evidence. For example, functional magnetic resonance imaging or FMRI has been used to look at what parts of the brain light up when expert modern dancers do their thing, or rather, even when they're in their resting state, we're talking about something called functional connectivity in the motor learning system of the brain. Also taking measurements of low body mass index or BMI researchers have found increases in the cortical volume and cortical thickness of expert dancers. But there's still a great deal of work to be done to fully understand these structural alterations in the brain and what they mean. Problematically, you can't very well dance in an MRI machine, at least not full on,

Jo Reed: Not this year anyway.

Sunil Iyengar: Yes, dance researchers hope for more advanced MRI methods to study creative movement. There's also a need to develop cognitive tasks that can better allow researchers to study the memory processes of dancers.

Jo Reed: This is all really, really fascinating. Can you talk about the implications for human health?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah. As you know Jo, we support dance therapy. The NEA does. Alongside other creative arts therapies, through a partnership with the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs called Creative forces for military connected populations suffering mild traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, and related psychological illnesses. The authors of this article point out that dance and movement therapy have been shown to decrease stress levels and enhance mood, have reduced depression, and have promoted social bonding. As for other benefits, we already know about dance's value and establishing routine physical activity for the purpose of exercise and all the benefits for the cardiovascular system, for example. But the researchers write that dance training as a form of exercise helped provide some of the first evidence for plasticity or recovery in the aging white matter of the brain. Finally, there's the possibility of using dance and neurocognitive and motor rehabilitation for patients with neurodegenerative diseases.

Jo Reed: Okay, give me an example of that.

Sunil Iyengar: Well, as it happens, we're currently supporting a research grant being led by one of the authors of this research paper, Madeline Hackney at Emory. The grant makes possible a series of studies of advanced program for Parkinson's disease patients. The program is called Adapt Tango, and it's an eight month intergenerational dance regimen. Tango, of course, as the authors of the article say, adapt tango has been linked to significant gains in mobility, balance, and health related quality of life. In particular, based on data so far, they write that adapt tango may help to improve cognition and delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias among older blacks or African-Americans who have a parental history of these conditions. I should add that it's also been shown apparently that dancing with partners and thus receiving tactile cues or cues through touch, not just visual or auditory cues, may be especially valuable for motor rehabilitation in Parkinson's patients.

Jo Reed: Tango sounds like a fun way to slow cognitive impairment. I mean, more fun than just medication anyway. Now what about those dancing robots?

Sunil Iyengar: I didn't forget them. So the article ends by exploring the potential of robots, which have already been used in some rehabilitation scenarios to maybe take the role of a dance partner. The researchers describe a study they had previously conducted showing that a robot could indeed be programmed to respond to touch cues by a human and could follow the timing and direction of dance steps further get this, the humans leading the dance steps. Said dancing with a robot was like dancing with a human. The authors report. Now, this is all early days, but it means we might be talking about a dance intervention that is scalable down the road and that possibly could be used in various rehabilitative care settings. Though as with so much in the art sector, I would be concerned naturally about what it could mean for the humans currently employed in this capacity.

Jo Reed: Yes, and maybe that's a good metaphor for humans and technology. It's a dance and who knows who's leading whom.

Sunil Iyengar: Well said. So that's it, Jo, but I wanted to tell listeners that if they want to know more about the science of dance, this article appeared this month and a special issue of the journal BMC Neuroscience. The issue is all about dance in the brain, and it came out of a National Science Foundation supported workshop back in 2022 on the neural and social basis of creative movement. The journal issue carries an editorial to which I contributed giving an overview of the workshop and providing perspectives from federal funders.

Jo Reed: Excellent. So I'll be sure to take a look at it. Sunil. Awesome.

Sunil Iyengar: Thanks a lot, Jo.

Jo Reed: Not at all. Thank you and I will talk to you next month. Next month. That was Sunil Iyengar. He's the director of research and Analysis here at the National Endowment for the Arts. You've been listening to quick study. The music is “We Are One” from Scott Holmes Music. It's licensed through Creative Commons. Until next month, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Nick Spitzer: These days I refer to American Routes format as a Gulf South by Southwest with sojourns to the Caribbean and all points across the country. I feel like in New Orleans, there's a lot of pride that we're inclusive of something as eclectic as what we do. Something that many program directors said, “Oh, you can't do something when it's mixed like that.” Well, we've done it and we keep doing it and we're not the biggest show. We're not a news show, but we kind of commingled information in a newsy kind of way with culture and performance What we try to do is find concordances in words, in mood in sonic things, contrasts and continuities that we can do segues, which is sort of the art form of radio flow of sound and maybe every third sound, every third song will be very familiar to somebody, but it might be a familiar artist with a song they've never heard him sing or a song that is quite familiar by a familiar artist, but not the one they might've expected to hear it sung by and so you're always messing with things that work together. And so the eclecticism is not a barrier. It's an invitation.