TThe gel felt cold on my scalp and I had to forget how stupid I must have looked, because we were in the middle of some serious science. In any case, it was 2021, still in the land of anti-bacs and masks – I had long since stopped appearing a bit stupid in public in the name of science. The dance pole Siobhan Davies The south London studios had been transformed into a science laboratory and I was fitted out with what looked like an elaborate swimming cap. There were electrodes everywhere to measure my brain activity, and the gel pressed into the holes made the connection between the electrode and the scalp easier.
I played a small role in a pioneering five-year research project, Neurolive. Led by cognitive neuroscientist Dr Guido Orgs and choreographer Matthias Sperling, it brings together neuroscience and dance to study what happens in our brains when we watch a live performance. The audience/guinea pigs, of which I was one, entered the studio, plugged into backpacks full of technology and watched a duet called Detective Work, where two artists danced to an abstract mystery dressed in suave green costumes . I was very aware that I was being watched. I’m a dance critic and I felt like I was being tested. Would my brain do the right thing?
Dance neuroscience is a young field of study, in part because of the obvious difficulty of placing a dancer (or audience member) in a brain scanner – although some have tried: one study showed a dancer to move his legs in tango positions while lying in a 3D environment. body scanner. Most research has relied on subjects watching videos, but the advent of mobile electroencephalography (EEG) has opened up the possibility of capturing the brain’s electrical activity in situ, and Neurolive is the first study of its kind on this scale, measuring up to 23 brains. immediately.
When we met in October this year to discuss the project, Orgs told me that the idea was born when the first affordable virtual reality systems were emerging, with technology that claimed to be “as good as reality, or even better.”
“Well, from a scientific point of view, we don’t even know how good reality is – we can’t measure it,” Orgs had thought. So he and Sperling attempted to understand “living character,” using dance as a subject.
In Detective Work, Orgs researched inter-brain synchronization, when people’s brain activity aligns, signaling that they are focusing on the same thing. The piece’s choreographer, Seke Chimutengwende, was asked to predict when these moments of narrow focus would occur, and the data showed that he was nearly perfect in all three performances (one thing to remember: choreographers know what they do). What was unexpected was that they expected to see this activity in the alpha band, a relatively fast frequency of brain waves associated with attention (in a lecture, for example), but what they saw was much slower delta waves. “Delta band activity is associated with internal focus, meditation, and listening to each other during social interactions,” says Orgs, suggesting the experience was like a “collective daydream.”
In addition to measuring our brainwaves, participants then completed a questionnaire about what we had seen. A common response has been “confusion”, with contemporary dance being an art form that some find opaque. But what’s fascinating is that whether people loved or hated the show, whether or not they knew what was going on, or were overthinking dance critics, their brains all followed a common pattern. The study also found greater synchronization between people who attended the same show and those sitting in the same seat at the next show. As any artist will tell you, the energy in the auditorium can be different every night, even when the show is the same, and the data proves it. “In other words, it may not be so important to get the most expensive seats,” says Orgs. “What matters is seeing a live dance performance with others. »
I only attended the first performance, but since then Neurolive has collaborated with dance collective Dog Kennel Hill Project and choreographer Jia-Yu Corti and – a performance I’m sad to have missed – hosted a 16-hour performance, orchestrated by the choreographer Jo Fong and featuring 50 dancers over two days, where the audience wore eye movement sensors as well as EEG headsets. The data from these phases has not yet been fully analyzed, but feedback after Fong’s performance suggests that, much more than whether someone is technically a “good” dancer or not, what matters is is the connection. “Literally, the more I look at you, the more connected I feel,” Orgs says.
Those delta waves Orgs talked about return when I video call New York butoh dancer Vangeline to discuss another performance created in collaboration with neuroscience, The Slowest Wave. Butoh emerged in Japan in the 1960s, a dance form most often associated with white-painted faces and bodies and almost painfully slow movements. Vangeline will tell you that it’s much more than that. It is a dance generated from within the body (rather than externally imposed steps) with performers tapping into emotional and transformational states. “It became clear to me that butoh is a different state of consciousness,” she says. She started the project, wanting to know if the science supported it. What was really going on in his brain?
Rather than following the audience, this time it was the dancers; the first time that five had been measured at once (Vangeline offers a solo version, minus the EEG, at Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle on November 23). Navigating the practicalities was half the challenge; the fact that sweat could interfere with the connections and how to wear the equipment safely. “Each item on our head was worth $150,000,” says Vangeline. “It was like: Don’t break it!” The data is still being cleaned (a huge job, as you have to remove blinks and head movements), but gradually they were able to show the synchronization between the dancers in real time. “You might feel like you’re connected to someone,” says scientist Sadye Paez, who collaborated on the study, “but we can show that this magic is actually happening.”
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Once the results are in – a frustratingly slow process – Vangeline is eager to expand the research. She would love to work with aging butoh masters in Japan. “It would be great to have an archive of our teachers’ brains, for future generations,” she says. But beyond artistic curiosity, she is interested in the health applications of this research, in the possibility of using butoh to “calm the nervous system of a really hyper-excited, over-stressed society”. Having taught for 22 years and worked with people with PTSD, she says, “it’s obvious to me that there are great healing benefits.”
When Orgs says, “I really want to show the power of dance,” he means both aesthetic sense and well-being. One area where progress is promising, for example, is in dance interventions for people with Parkinson’s disease. “And many studies show that dance is more powerful than exercise and medication in relieving depressive symptoms,” says Orgs. The trend in science, he adds, is to look for simpler things like walking or running because they are easy to control. “But these are not the most powerful interventions, so there is a need to better understand the complexity of projects like this.”
There is so much more to learn. “Even though technology is so advanced, it still only provides access to a fraction of what we actually experience,” says Sperling. Paez notes: “If we can’t describe dance using science, that indicates to me that science is the problem. There are different ways to know it, and just because we can’t describe it using the scientific method doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid truth. We simply haven’t developed the technology or methods to do this.
Neurolive’s final show, which takes place this month, is a piece by Sperling entitled Readings of what has never been written. It is based on the idea of ”doing a reading”, both in the scientific sense and in the more magical sense, such as reading palms or tarot cards. Sperling isn’t advocating tarot over science, but he sees how certain types of knowledge – rationality, logic, language – are held in higher esteem, and hopes this project will show that dancers have different types of embodied intelligence and intuition that can be right. so precise.
As someone who writes about dance for a living, I know the feeling of revelation when you watch a performance and suddenly things seem to fall into place, its secrets materialize. And I also know the difficulty of putting that into words after the show. “Knowledge” can happen in the moment; it’s something we feel, bypassing language. I would like to see how this process takes place in my brain. Fortunately, neuroscience is on the case.
Readings of what has never been written is at Siobhan Davies Studios, London, November 7-9, as part of Neurolive.
