Limitations of Energy Theater

I am - as noted - a think-then-talker, so blogging this feels premature, but Sam insisted.

It seems in class we've been discussing some limitations and strengths of various metaphors and representations. So I'm curious about what strengths and limitations of the energy theater you see.

Strengths

• everyone has to participate
• enforces a particular ontology that we know to be useful
• easy to make some new research claims based on this data
• using the body forces you to take the perspective of energy. (I'm not sure that this is unique to energy theater.)
  
• requires some level of consensus that makes participants resolve differences (not sure this is true - or, again, not unique to energy theater.)

Limitations

• ephemeral - thinking of Latour and the role of inscriptions in creating science, there's a reason we use paper. I think this is the big one for me.
  
• there needs to be a 'director' and this might be the person most likely to speak up, rather than the person most likely to work towards consensus and engage everyone's ideas. So while consensus and participation are mentioned above, I don't see this happening in practice. Linda raised a concern that was entertained but not addressed; Joel could easily be replaced with a Cabbage Patch Kid (or other inanimate object).
  
• I tell my students that I don't write what I have learned, I write so that I can learn - writing it down helps me figure things out. I can imagine that a similar thing would happen in energy theater with moving bodies around -- it helps you figure it out -- but I would be too reserved to learn this way. I would rather play around with inanimate objects (objects that enforce an ontology but otherwise do not disagree with me or find me stupid). Then discuss those ideas - after I'd had a chance to form some ideas - with others.
  
• more mundane: the number of people can be limiting, the difficulty in seeing what everyone is doing simultaneously (when it actually runs I have trouble seeing what's happening)

I'm thinking of maps (Giere) -- no one map is the best (and then I think of Borges) -- a subway map is a terrible representation in cases when a terrain map might be useful, and vice versa. So what's the problem solved by the energy theater representation? What does this access that other representations don't?

I'm not sure I see its advantages as profoundly greater than, say, using dice with energy labels. As noted above, I'm still new to this and not sure how I will feel in a day or two, but since it seems that many of you are really sold on the energy theater representation, I'm curious what advantages you see that I haven't.