Don’t we all kind of love putting people into boxes? We take one look at someone or hear a few details about them, and suddenly we think we know that person. In a way, we actually need to do this: It helps us cope with the endless variety of human personalities by imposing a simplified and seemingly orderly categorization on them. But as a rule, we’re partly—if not completely—wrong when we make these judgments. People are often simply atypical. While assigning them to a category based on certain behaviors may seem plausible and offer an initial, apparent explanation, it usually turns out to be wrong later on. A real problem arises, however, only when we lump large groups of people into such categories and thereby apply general and simplified explanations to all of them—indiscriminately. As a result, we often draw completely erroneous lines between groups of people, making mistakes—sometimes fatal ones—when we have to interpret and deal with their actions accordingly.
In “Typical…,” we will take a closer look at these mechanisms and explore how we deal with stereotypes, archetypes, prototypes, antitypes, genotypes, phenotypes, and ecotypes on a daily basis—in a way that is typical for us, through dance.