The choreography of Merle O’Brien’s PhD
For six months of the year Merle O’Brien lives in rural Bhubaneswar, India. The rest of the
time she spends in South Africa. She seems to thrive in the position of traversing two worlds
in more senses than one, made so much more apparent in her choice of PhD where she
explores creativity through the form of an ancient dance to showcase principles of art and
science for a creative economy and what it means for Africa.
O’Brien is the first PhD student at the UCT School of Dance exploring a transdisciplinarity
study entitled ‘The dance of Creativity’ under the guidance of an academic and technical
supervisory team which includes UCT Graduate School of Business Director Prof Walter
Baets. She is also the first African scholar to be permitted into the Parampara-shishya
tradition to study the spiritual Indian classical dance form called Odissi; according to the
lineage of gurus, this was performed historically by Maharis for thousands of years as part of
their devotion to cultivating consciousness.
O’Brien is bringing the old and the new together, pairing dance with business, discipline with
free creative expression, science with art, as she traverses two worlds – from the plush
suburbs of Cape Town to one of India’s poorest regions; Orissa state where she travels by
bicycle, bathes in a bucket and studies daily under the direct guidance of acclaimed dance,
music and ancient wisdom gurus.
She is well accustomed to these striking dualities. She’s lived the corporate high life in
Johannesburg as a very successful entrepreneur; she founded a marketing firm, BlackRock,
which handled huge accounts such as Brand SA and organised international events, the
World Summit on Sustainable Development 2002 being one of them. But there’s been
another life. She grew up on the Cape Flats where she dreamed of using her talents to do
socially relevant work. Throughout university she was on the ground working for COSATU for
the rights of labourers and she’s been in the top seat, as the President of PRISA, the Institute
for Public Relations and Communication Management for Southern Africa. She’s had a corner
office on the 33rd Floor of Times Square Plaza, New York, and she’s lived on a farm in
KwaZulu Natal where she grew veggies for three years and did rural development work.
She’s done Ballet, and she’s done Karate – junior SA champ by the way. She’s studied
drama, and she’s studied philosophy, and has a masters in future studies with a specialisation
in the field of creativity
While the dualities in her life have not changed, her general direction has totally transformed.
In 2007, she returned home to be with her family in Cape Town, complete her masters thesis,
take lessons in Indian dance at an Indian dance academy and a special course in sculpture at
the UCT Michaelis School of Fine Arts.
“I had reached the point in my life that I realised a transformation was needed. What I had
become, was not what I set out to be,” she says.
While researching her masters’ thesis in creativity, Merle studied the ancient wisdom of the
Chinese, Indian and san Bushmen. She went to live in the Kalahari Desert among San elders
and at the ashram of The Art of Living, in rural Karnataka, Bangalore; where she received the
direct guidance of acclaimed spiritual leader and humanitarian, Sri Sri Ravishankar.
At the ashram, she was tutored in yoga, meditation, Indian art and philosophy and did (seva)
volunteer work. There is only one rule followed at the ashram apparently, and that is: you can
go to the ashram carrying the weight of innumerable concerns, but you cannot take them with
you when you leave.
“It was in 2008 that my dance school co-hosted an Odissi Dance workshop with the Indian
Embassy where I witnessed for the first time the incredibly beautiful, powerful and spiritual
Odissi dance. The dance synthesised my entire world and I knew from the core of my being
that this was my path. It seemed to me that who and what I am was somehow choreographed
into the performance,” she says.
Merle immediately wrote to a few of India’s acclaimed Odissi Gurus and since then has
studied Odissi dance under the direct guidance of the esteemed guru Smt. Yogini Gandhi and
Odissi singing from maestro Dr Sangita Gosain at the Odissi Research Centre in Orissa.
Odissi is recognised as the oldest of India’s nine classical dance forms.
“The focus of her PhD research project is to understand the timeless principles of creativity
through the form of Odissi dance in order to explore the fields of art and science in a creative
economy as two sides of the same coin,” she says. “Based on my research, no PhD
transdisciplinarity dissertation has been written outside of India that researches the creative
principles of Odissi. It is one of the world’s oldest codified forms of creativity which can be
traced by archeo-choreology to the Harrapan civilisation of 4500 B.C and was sculpted
around the temple walls of India’s ancient temples and caves. I believe there may be locked
up knowledge that can be unearthed and parallels drawn between an ancient creative time
and a modern creative economy. Creativity’s principles are timeless.”
Presently, the fields of art and science are moving toward a common space into the creative
economy. This new economy is being mapped by United Nations Creative Economy Reports
on value creation models in relation to intellectual capital.
“Creativity is the central driver of the fields of art and science,” she says, “and Africa’s
capacity for agency in the creative economy must not be underestimated,” says O’Brien.
“Creativity is an innate human ability and is accessible to all; regardless of race, creed,
culture, gender or education. All forms of human endeavour, not only the arts, use creativity –
choreographing a dance uses the same neurological processes as designing a human
resource strategy to enable physical beings to work together. Likewise, to structure a
company organogram or develop architecture for software codes uses the same neural
pathways to design a house,” she says.
“It is my view that the approach to the emerging creative economy must be based on an
understanding of creativity as an interdisciplinary life-science, with principles and policies that
apply to both art and science,” says O’Brien. The ancient art form of Odissi, for her, embodies
this two-sided principle of creativity.
A major task lays ahead for her but she is confident that Baets is the perfect person to help
her as she does an academic dance of creativity across different disciplines in a language
that is accepted by the fields of art and science.
Baets after all is a great advocate of transdisciplinarity, himself a business school director and
author as well as an ayurvedic practitioner and musician. His academic work revolves around
rethinking value using a cross section of disciplines; a perfect sounding board for O’Brien.
“I am humbled and honoured to be working with Walter. He is an evolved leader with the
creative, spiritual, intellectual, physical and emotional quota to work with and influence my
thoughts as a woman leader of the 21st century.
“I think he is intrigued by the non-mainstream thinking I bring to business, novel creative
theories and their potential to create a shift in thinking. He stretches my mind as we explore
business principles, frameworks and economic implications of my work on the flipchart in his
office. At times, I amuse him with my creative licence as a qualified futurist, professional
dancer, academic and entrepreneur.
These are new waters for the both of us. South Africa is yet to refine a response strategy to
the global creative economy so there is a sense that we’re doing globally important, locally
relevant, economically transformative and spiritually rich work,” says O’Brien, “and this makes
us both tick.”
Ends.