Thinking with the body: Mind and movement in the work of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance

Thinking with the Body was an exhibition at London's Wellcome Collection, offering a glimpse into Wayne McGregor | Random Dance's interdisciplinary research and the impact it has in the rehearsal studio. Staged in the run-up to the first performances of Atomos at Sadler's Wells (Oct 2013), the exhibition featured the results of over a decade of interdisciplinary research into choreographic creativity which has been applied in the studio, in dance education, and to increase public understanding.

Wellcome Collection is a free visitor destination exploring the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future. Wellcome Collection is part of the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving improvements in human and animal health.

The exhibition finished on 27 October 2013, but the film exhibits are still available to view online.

Can social dancing prevent falls in older adults? a protocol of the Dance, Aging, Cognition,Economics (DAnCE) fall prevention randomised controlled trial

Background:  Falls are one of the most common health problems among older people and pose a major economic burden on health care systems. Exercise is an accepted stand-alone fall prevention strategy particularly if it is balance training or regular participation in Tai chi. Dance shares the ‘holistic’ approach of practices such as Tai chi. It is a complex sensorimotor rhythmic activity integrating multiple physical, cognitive and social elements. Small-scale randomised controlled trials have indicated that diverse dance styles can improve measures of balance and mobility in older people, but none of these studies has examined the effect of dance on falls or cognition. This study aims to determine whether participation in social dancing: i) reduces the number of falls; and ii) improves cognitive functions associated with fall risk in older people.

Methods/design: A single-blind, cluster randomised controlled trial of 12 months duration will be conducted. Approximately 450 participants will be recruited from 24 self-care retirement villages that house at least 60 residents each in Sydney, Australia. Village residents without cognitive impairment and obtain medical clearance will be eligible. After comprehensive baseline measurements including physiological and cognitive tests and self-completed questionnaires, villages will be randomised to intervention sites (ballroom or folk dance) or to a wait-listed control using a computer randomisation method that minimises imbalances between villages based on two baseline fall risk measures. Main outcome measures are falls, prospectively measured, and the Trail Making cognitive function test. Cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analyses will be performed.

Discussion: This study offers a novel approach to balance training for older people. As a community-based approach to fall prevention, dance offers older people an opportunity for greater social engagement, thereby making a major contribution to healthy ageing. Providing diversity in exercise programs targeting seniors recognises the heterogeneity of multicultural populations and may further increase the number of taking part in exercise.

Choreographer-mathematician collaboration: developing machine segmentation techniques for motion capture analysis of dance

This paper/presentation focuses on the science of human movement, motion capture and cognition in action, and examines the necessity of choreographer-mathematician collaboration in developing appropriate analysis techniques.

Learning to dance with a human

Artificial neural networks are an effective means of allowing software agents to learn about and filter aspects of their domain. In this paper we explore the use of artificial neural networks in the context of dance performance. The software agent’s neural network is presented with movement in the form of motion capture streams, both pre-recorded and live. Learning can be viewed as analogous to rehearsal, recognition and response to performance. The interrelationship between the software agent and dancer throughout the process is considered as a potential means of allowing the agent to function beyond its limited self-contained capability.

Community organisations and the dance of good and bad risk

This paper is concerned with an element of contemporary society that forms. the backdrop for some of the contradictory expectations and practices that currently bedevil community organisations in Australia. This element is the idea of risk, or more pertinently, the construction of the idea of risk society. The argument presented is that there are two different interpretations of risk, risk as threat and risk as opportunity. Each interpretation is examined to reveal the ways in which it affects community organisations in Australia. The paper concludes with the view that both ways in which risk is constructed are being used as part of the rationale for new forms of control.

Modern dance, domestic life and civil society

In her book The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (2000) Seyla Benhabib uses the concept of an ‘alternative genealogy of modernity’ to help her both to understand Arendt’s political philosophy and to rethink the potential for civil society to become a progressive political force at the beginning of the twenty first century. The idea of an alternative genealogy of modernity refers to a heterogeneity of social and political forms, spaces and acts that might be used to remap and redefine a modernity whose dominant topology has been shaped by the binary division between so-called public and private spheres. Alternative modernities have already been elaborated and explored from a range of different perspectives including feminist and postcolonial ones: for example, in Rita Felski’s Gender of Modernity (1995) and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe (2000). In this paper I want to elaborate upon the idea of an alternative genealogy of modernity from my perspective as a dancer. Thinking through the sociality of art and, more specifically, of some historical dance-making practices can make visible alternative spaces and processes of the (potentially) political. In the West, the modes of art-making form part of an as yet not fully explored arena of the social and of social practices. Modernist and Romantic ideologies have tended to preclude attention to the specific sociabilities of art-making. On the one hand Modernist ideology and art discourses have promoted the idea of an art work’s ‘autonomy’: its radical separation from the social relationships, the bodies and the conditions of its making. On the other hand Romantic ideology, still pervasive in popular conceptions of art practices, construes creation as interiority and individualistic expression. Socialist feminist and Marxist discussions of art have emphasized the social conditions of art-making but these have tended to be concerned with the social inequalities instituted within the public/private split rather than seeking to destabilize that division itself by posing questions of differences within the social. In my discussion below I draw on aspects of early modern dance practice and creation in taking up Benhabib’s concern to mobilise an alternative genealogy of modernity towards a renewal and reactivation of civic life. This project involves unsettling clear distinctions between the so-called ‘public’ and ‘private’ but, at the same time, as Benhabib cautions ‘the binarity of public and private spheres must be reconstructed and not merely rejected’. (2000:2006)

Mathematical and pedagogical understanding as situated cognition

One mathematics lesson was planned by two Grade 2 teachers together. TheirSeparate teaching of it was videotaped. and each teacher was interviewed before and after her lesson. The "same" lesson resulted in different sets of worthwhile learning outcomes. In this research report. the notion of situated cognition is used as a tool for analysis of how this divergence seemed to happen. It is agued that the teachers' development and uses of mathematical concepts were mediated by the social situations.

Poesis in diegesis : real-time interactive dance performance

This paper describes the processes of creating a hybrid experience of live performance and virtual imagery in 1 + x: Mid-range Projections, a dance work that uses real-time processing of live feed video to create a duet between dancers and their virtual images. 1 + x is about creating experiences of interiority and intimacy, ironically, through the juxtaposition of virtual images of performers with their real selves. This paper examines how the ideal of reinserting intimacy, humanity and 'presence' into a technologically generated image space, in the case of 1 + x, depends on the precise and delicate manipulation of live-feed video in collaboration with the audience's experience of interactivity. The result is a performance work that creates a poesis of 'presence', through a diegesis that melds real and virtual images on the same screen and the same conceptual and spatial plane - a 'becoming virtual'.