TEDx returns to Charleston with two Daniel Island residents lending their talents

Brian Sullivan will be the Master of Ceremonies and Annaliesa Gowe will perform two dance solos

Since 2013, TEDx Charleston has been providing the Lowcountry with the TED model of “ideas worth spreading.” This year will see the usual wide variety of speakers including orthopedic surgeon Jay DeMarco, LGBT advocate Melissa Moore, and rapper Benny Starr. Two Daniel Island residents will also lend their talents to the day of intellectual conversation starters on April 10, but both will break from the typical format. Annaliesa Gowe will perform two dance solos and Brian Sullivan will emcee the event. BRIAN SULLIVAN Brian Sullivan is no stranger to the TEDx Charleston stage. In 2017, the clinical psychologist gave a presentation about the importance of emotive tools for people to make connections between each other. “I’ve lived in Charleston for nearly 25 years and TEDx Charleston 2017 was among my top 10 days in Charleston,” Sullivan said about the event two years ago. “The opportunity to be surrounded by so many intelligent, thoughtful, caring, passionate people—and I mean the volunteers for the event, as well as the speakers—that was irreplaceable.” It left such an indelible impact on him that he was looking for volunteer opportunities, when he was presented with a chance for a more hands-on role. “I would have been happy to arrange chairs or get the coffee, so when they asked me to consider being the emcee, I immediately opened up my voice notes and started dictating for myself the exuberance that I was experiencing,” Sullivan exclaimed. As the Master of Ceremonies, the island resident will introduce speakers and engage the audience with the topic. In preparation for this task, Sullivan has spent time getting to know each of the presenters and “empathizing” with them. “My effort is to get to know each speaker as an individual, and also familiarize myself with their topic from their point of view,” he said. Sullivan’s status as a TEDx alumnus gives him an advantage when understanding the 2019 speakers. Seeing himself go from giving a presentation to hosting the entire event seems like a surreal experience for Sullivan. “It’s anxiety-provoking and it’s exciting,” he stated. “Obviously, I want to do an outstanding job of doing justice to the topics and to the speakers who are presenting them. I want to be able to help the audience really enjoy their experience in general. And these folks set a pretty high bar for performance, so I’ve got a lot to live up to here.” Attendants will have a chance for enhanced engagement using a technology Sullivan created called Morphii. “Morphii is a digital medium to help capture, more accurately and more engagingly, specific types and intensities of moods, emotions, physical sensations like pain and other subjective experiences,” Sullivan explained. “This is done through graphical displays that are user adjustable.” Imagine exaggerated and flamboyant emojis. Users select a general emotion, like fear, joy, or sadness, then move a sliding pointer until the cartoon face is expressing the extent of the emotion. According to Sullivan, this runs counter to the frequent model where patients select a number to describe their pain or feeling. “The quantification happens in the background,” said Sullivan. “You’re never looking at numbers. You’re just looking at a reflection of your internal experience.” Audience members will be asked if they want to use Morphii at the beginning of the event and those that volunteer to participate will utilize it on their phones. The technology could “give the TEDx folks really rich, enhanced data, so that they can have good measures of ‘are we stimulating curiosity, are we impacting emotionally, are we getting people stimulated to start and continue conversations?’” added Sullivan. ANNALIESA GOWE Daniel Island resident and Oceanside Collegiate Academy student Annaliesa Gowe is performing two dance solos, one classical ballet and one contemporary dance, at TEDx this year. “It most definitely is very exciting,” Gowe stated. “I’m so grateful for this opportunity, and it will be great exposure for myself and also for my dance studio.” At the age of 15, Gowe shows incredible determination in her pursuit of a career in dance. She claims that she regularly puts in between four and five hours of practice at her studio, the Charleston Dance Conservatory. “I get there at 1 and sometimes we don’t leave until 6, 6:30 depending on the day,” she said. The theme for 2019’s TEDx Charleston is “Currents.” Gowe’s choreography for the show was built from the ground up with that idea guiding the creative process. “We started with listening to music that inspires and drives that theme,” said Gowe. “That’s where we started and then we kind of slowly built up from there.” From the beginning, the process has been hard work, but the young woman still describes it all as a lot of fun. “It’s amazing to work through the process of being choreographed and finalizing all of the different steps and making sure that everything’s perfect,” she said. “Especially since this is going to be something that I’ve never done before, there’s a lot of pressure, but it’s a good kind of pressure.” With experience in live performance already, Gowe doesn’t show too much anxiety about the show. “There are always nerves going into a performance, but I’m more excited than nervous,” she said. “I think by the time that the show rolls around, I will have done it enough times where I feel confident in my solos.” Gowe was chosen to perform at TEDx Charleston after she sent a video of a solo she performed in The Nutcracker to the organizers. She hopes that her solos will be a great opportunity for her budding career as a dancer, which she says is her goal in the future. “I have wanted to do that since I was very little and it’s just always what I’ve wanted to do,” Gowe offered. “I love to perform and I love working hard to get what I want, so I think it’s just kind of what I feel like I’m meant to do and what I have to do.” After school, Gowe wants to audition for dance companies around the nation, adding that Miami City Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet are two that she has in sights. For more information on this year’s TEDxCharleston, to be held at Charleston Music Hall on April 10, visit https://tedxcharleston.org.

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