The felt cold on my scalp and I had to forget how silly I must have looked because we were in the middle of some serious science. Anyway, it was back in 2021, still in the land of anti-bac and face masks – I’d long since gotten over looking a little silly in public in the name of science. The dance center Siobhan Davies Studios in South London were turned into a science lab, and I was fitted with what looked like an elaborate swimming cap. It had electrodes all over it to measure my brain activity, and the gel pushed into the holes helped the connection between electrode and scalp.
I played a small role in a pioneering five-year research project, Neurolive. Run by cognitive neuroscientist Dr Guido Orgs and choreographer Matthias Sperling, it brings together neuroscience and dance to explore what happens in our brains when we watch live performances. The audience/guinea pigs, of which I was one, filed into the studio with backpacks full of technology and watched a duet called Detective Work, where two performers danced an abstract mystery dressed in pure green suits. I was very aware that I was being monitored. I’m a dance critic, and it felt like I was being tested. Would my brain do the right thing?
Dance neurology is a young field of study, partly because of the obvious difficulty of putting a dancer (or audience member) in a brain scanner – although some have tried: one study had a dancer move in tango poses while lying in a 3D 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. simultaneous.
When we met to discuss the project in October of this year, Orgs tells me that the idea first came about when the first affordable virtual reality systems emerged, with technology that claimed to be “as good as the reality, or better”.
“Well, from a scientific perspective, we don’t even know how good reality is – we can’t measure it,” Orgs thought. So he and Sperling tried to understand “aliveness”, using dance as their subject.
In Detective Work, Orgs were looking for inter-brain synchrony, when people’s brain activity is aligned, indicating they are focusing on the same thing. The piece’s choreographer, Seke Chimutengwende, was asked to predict when these moments of sharp focus would occur, and the data showed that he was almost spot on across all three performances (one takeaway: choreographers do know what they’re doing). What was unexpected was that they imagined seeing that activity in the alpha band, a relatively fast frequency of brain waves associated with attention (for example, in a lecture), but what they saw was the very slower delta waves. “Delta band activity is associated with internal concentration, meditation, and attunement to one another during social interactions,” Orgs says, suggesting the experience was like “collective daydreaming.”
In addition to having our brain waves measured, participants filled out a questionnaire afterward about what we saw. A common response was “confusion”, contemporary dance is an art form that some find opaque. But what’s fascinating is that whether people loved or hated the performance, knew what was going on or not, or thought a dance critic about things, their brains all followed a shared pattern. The study also found greater synchronicity between people who attended the same performance versus those who sat in the same seat at the next show. As any performer will tell you, the energy in the auditorium can feel different every night, even when the show is the same, and the data proved it. “In other words, getting the most expensive seats might not be that important,” says Orgs. “What matters is attending a dance performance live and with others.”
I only took part in the first performance, but since then Neurolive has partnered with dance collective Dog Kennel Hill Project and choreographer Jia-Yu Corti, and – one I’m sad to miss – put on a 16-hour show, mastermind by choreographer Jo Fong and with 50 dancers over two days, where the audience wore eye movement sensors as well as EEG caps. The data from these phases has not yet been fully crunched, but the feedback after Fong’s performance suggested that, much more than whether or not someone is technically a “good” dancer, what matters is connection. “Literally, the more I look at you, the more connected I feel,” says Orgs.
Those delta waves Orgs talked about come up again when I video call New York butoh dancer Vangeline to discuss another performance created in collaboration with neuroscience, The Slowest Wave. Butoh originated in Japan in the 1960s, a dance form mostly associated with white-painted faces and bodies and almost painfully slow movement. Vangeline will tell you it’s much more than that. It is a dance generated from within the body (rather than steps imposed from the outside) 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 because she wanted to know if science had delivered. What actually happened in her brain?
Rather than tracking the audience, this time it was the dancers; the first time five were measured simultaneously (Vangeline brings a solo version, minus EEG, to the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle on 23 November). Navigating the practicalities was half the challenge; the fact that sweat can interfere with the connections, and how to wear the hardware safely. “Every single thing on our head was worth $150,000,” says Vangeline. “It was like, Don’t break it!” The data is still being cleaned (a huge task, to remove eye blinks and head movements), but as it happened, they were able to show synchrony between the dancers in real time. “You might have a feeling that you’re connected to someone,” says scientist Sadye Paez, who collaborated on the study, “but we can show that this magic actually happens.”
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Once the results are complete – a frustratingly slow process – Vangeline is keen to expand the research. She would like to work with aged butoh masters in Japan. “It would be amazing to have an archive of the brains of our teachers, for future generations,” she says. But as well as artistic curiosity, she is interested in the health applications of this research, the possibility of using butoh to “calm the nervous system of a really hyper-excited, over-stressed society”. After teaching and working with people with PTSD for 22 years, she says, “it’s clear to me that there are huge healing benefits”.
When Orgs says, “I really want to showcase the power of dance,” he means both in an aesthetic sense and also for well-being. One area where there is promising progress, for example, is dance interventions for people with Parkinson’s. “And there are a number of studies showing that dance is more powerful than exercise and medication in alleviating depressive symptoms,” says Orgs. The trend in science, he adds, is to research simpler things like walking or running, because they are easily controlled. “But these are not the most powerful interventions, so there is a need to better understand the complexity through projects like this.”
There is so much more to learn. “Even though the technology is so advanced, it’s still only able to access a fraction of what we actually experience,” says Sperling. Paez notes: “If we can’t describe dance with the help of science, that’s an indication to me that science is the problem. There are different ways of knowing, and just because we can’t describe it using the scientific method doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid truth. We just haven’t developed the technology or methods to do it.”
The final Neurolive show, which takes place this month, is a piece by Sperling called Readings from What Was Never Written. It is based on the idea of ”reading”, in both the scientific sense and the more magical sense, such as reading palms or tarot cards. Sperling isn’t advocating tarot over science, but he sees how certain kinds of knowledge—rationality, logic, language—are valued, and hopes that this project will show that dancers have different kinds of embodied intelligence and intuition that can be fair. so exactly
As someone who writes about dance for a living, I know the feeling of revelation when you watch a performance and things suddenly seem to fall into place, their secrets materialize. And I also know the struggle of putting it into words after the show. The “knowing” can happen in the moment; it’s something you sense, which bypasses language. I would like to see how that process plays out in my brain. Handy, neuroscience is on the case.
Readings from What Was Never Written is at Siobhan Davies Studios, London, 7 to 9 November, as part of Neurolive.
