Emma Crichton-Miller:  020 7582 7108/07833 656 484

DANCE AND THE BRAIN
 
In a darkened theatre in Winchester a choreographer arranges his dancers on the stage and gives them a few instructions.  They each respond, producing short streams of connected movements, turning their bodies this way and that, using their limbs to describe the space around them, to a roughly tapped rhythm.  A few adjustments, and within minutes a new dance by Wayne McGregor takes shape in front of our eyes.  It's a thrilling moment, and in the audience we feel we've been in at the birth of a new work of art.  

Moments later a huge bat appears on a screen, and beside it the philosopher Thomas Nagel's famous question - What is it like to be a bat?  Roz McCarthy, an experimental psychologist from Cambridge University, taps her computer, and the next questions pop up:  What is it like to be a dancer and what is it like to create a dance?  Questions like these form the core of McCarthy's work, which is to use science to approach the analysis of extreme forms of subjective experience.  What is it like not to be able to recognise your mother's face?  How can someone confuse a pineapple with a lemon?  What parts of his brain does a dancer use when he improvises a new sequence?  Another click of her power point presentation and McCarthy shows us the birth of a new experiment, a way of interfering with a dancer’s natural physical ability, with measurable consequences, which will help her, as a scientist, probe McGregor’s exotic world.      

McCarthy and McGregor are physical opposites - female, medium build, abundant hair; male, willowy, bald - and inhabit entirely different professional worlds, but in a sense they share they same questions. What goes on in McGregor's head when he dreams up a dance?  How does he communicate that idea to his dancers?  How does a dancer's experience of the world - the four dimensional world of space-time - differ from that of the rest of us?  Do dancers understand and read movement differently from the rest of us?  Together with six other scientists and an independent arts researcher, Scott deLahunta, they have come together through a grant from the Arts Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Board just to see what happens.  They are working together not just so McCarthy can produce new science, nor just so that McGregor can find inspiration for new dance, but to see what can emerge from people at the forefront of their own disciplines robustly coming together to wrestle with each other's language and principles.  

Normally indulged in only by consenting adults in the confines of their own studios and labs, what we have seen presented at this first ever Winchester Festival of Art and Mind is a sci-art collaboration.   Sci-art is a recent and still controversial phenomenon.  Seen by some as mere window dressing for an otherwise haughty and inscrutable scientific establishment, by others as a grant-grabbing exercise for artists of no distinction, the genre’s most outspoken critic is Lewis Wolpert, Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine at University College London, who insists that it is wrong-headed in principle to suggest any possible common purpose between professional artists and scientists, and certainly folly to fund it.    

In the last ten years, however, at first on the margins of what was perceived as mainstream contemporary art and cutting-edge science, but increasingly in the public eye, these acts of love-making across borders have grown hugely in popularity.  Suddenly they are everywhere.   No longer displayed apologetically in a corridor of an alien institution, the art they have inspired is on show at major galleries - think of Marc Quinn’s portrait in DNA of Sir John Sulston in the National Portrait Gallery or Helen Chadwick’s exquisite and disturbing work inspired by in vitro fertilisation currently on show at the Barbican.  This summer alone you can you can admire Mark Fairnington’s and Giles Revell’s Fabulous Beasts at the Natural History Museum, huge photographs of microscopic insects, exquisite, monstrous creatures born out of the artists’ contemplation of the scientific processes involved in minute observation.  At the Camden Art’s Centre, as part of their ambitious commitment to experimental contemporary work, you can use a joy-stick in a darkened room to navigate the beautiful virtual world of Jennie Pedley, Memory Island.   Created in collaboration with psychologists, 3-D specialists, a social anthropologist and several mentally and physically disabled children, Pedley has animated the autobiographical memories of the children, from the basis of their own drawings, but has transformed them into a creative whole in a style inspired by Giotto.  Next door American painter Alexis Rockman’s mutated farm animals show a gene pool in flamboyant chaos.         

In Manchester, West Bromwhich and other cities, you can take part in Blast Theory’s mixed reality computer game and physical performance, Uncle Roy All Around You.  The result of many years joint research with the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham, it involves audience members on the street using hand-held computers to follow clues to find Uncle Roy in a city location while audience members at home follow a different set of clues through a virtual city on their computer.  The two groups communicate via email.  Meanwhile, street performers offer additional clues and distractions.  Whom should you trust to direct you truly? 

It has got to the point where Sandra Kemp, director of research at the Royal College of Art, finds that “Sci-Art is no longer a meaningful term”.  Every student in her institution is perforce involved in sci-art, so inextricable have technology and new media become with all forms of artistic creativity.  Up on the walls of her study are the materials she is collecting for a study of the human face - portraits, masks and film stills take their place beside forensic facial reconstructions and anatomists’ models.  Rather than an eccentric diversion, here sci-art seems a state of mind.       

But this hasn’t long been the case.  For many years C.P.Snow’s potent 1959 image of a literary, artistic culture in embattled confrontation with an uncomprehending world of science seemed a licence for the two areas of human endeavour to turn their backs on each other.   For a long time it was left to a few maverick polymaths – the Oliver Sackses and Jonathan Millers of this world – to remind us that this divided sensibility was a contemporary fiction and a damaging denial of basic human curiosity.  

There were of course always individual artists - Susan Hiller, Cornelia Parker, Andy Goldsworthy,  Damien Hirst, to name only a few recent figures - interested in straying across boundaries and a few institutions - Bristol-based Interalia, the Laboratory at the Ruskin School of Fine Art in Oxford,  - interested in facilitating such forays.  But a key moment came when, in 1993, Nicola Triscott, a physics-trained arts administrator, went travelling in Southern Africa.  There she saw artists vigorously engaging with the rapidly changing contemporary world around them - with politics, with medicine, with social action - and she came back to England determined to foster a similar energy of engagement between art and the world she knew best - research physics.   “I was all fired up to encourage art that was about something.   At first nobody knew what I was talking about - ‘Computer art?’ - but now the field has grown so big I can’t keep up.”  Some of Triscott’s earliest projects were funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.   

At the Foundation’s headquarters near Regent’s Park, Siân Ede reminds me of that time.  ‘My background is entirely the arts - theatre and so on - but I was reading popular science books and hearing science items on the news and a whole new world opened.  The scientists were using phrases we thought belonged to us - “the meaning of life”, “the nature of the self” - and also words artists had  rejected - “beauty” and “elegance”.  I wanted to encourage artists to engage with this new thinking in science and technology.’  With the  small but, to artists, significant research funds at the Foundation’s disposal, Ede has become a passionately committed marriage-broker, identifying artists and scientists she want to partner-off, facilitating residencies, offering seed-money for research and then helping fledgling projects find further money to fly.  “Of course it’s a problematic area.  Some work is very literal, and a lot of science is invisible - data collection, data analysis - a huge dry side that it is hard to make interesting.  I am interested in promoting art that is not directly about science but is addressing it tangentially - that provokes the audience to go away and think about the science.”   So fruitful have these research residencies proven for her protégées that established sculptor Richard Deacon is taking up the opportunity this year to work in the laboratory of Professor Frances Ashcroft, a leading microbiologist, looking at the cellular structure of diabetes.         

It is these small amounts of money that have made all the difference.  Siân Ede’s long-term ally and opposite number in this project is Ken Arnold,  Head of Exhibitions at the Wellcome Trust.  Arnold is himself a committed polymath - with a first degree in science and a second in history, with interests across science, history and art.  In charge both of exhibitions and of the Wellcome Trust’s “public engagement with science” remit,  Arnold has steadily used his financial clout to open science to art.  “I feel that if you get artists talking to scientists and scientists talking to artists then both will be more comprehensible to the general public.”  The original Sci-Art Award scheme, started in 1996, calling for projects from artists and scientists interested in working together, stimulated an extraordinary 240 applications, and each subsequent award scheme has continued to generate huge interest.  At first artists took the lead, hungry for an engagement with science’s rich subject matter and strong methodology, lured by the urgency of the moral, social and ethical issues it raises.   But increasingly scientists have seen the advantage of talking to a suspicious public through a friendly mediator and have even begun to enjoy the process. “Very few scientists are prepared to put their heads above the parapet to say they benefit from these projects.  But that is partly because there is an issue in the world of science about how you score.  You don’t score points if you work outside the box.  You are paid to work in the box.  I say, don’t look at the science, look at the psychology of the scientist for the real value of the encounter.”  

Arnold has always been sceptical that these marriages might produce work that is a true hybrid - or a form of creativity that is a kind of third-way of working between both art and science.  “In the end it is crucial that the artists remember that they are artists and that the scientists are scientists, that they retain the integrity of their own discipline.”   And sometimes the work remains resolutely decorative and subservient.  “But every now and then you get a masterpiece, a work that lifts off, that has gained its own spirit .”

I can think of several pieces that fall into this category, but one was certainly Annie Cattrell’s beautiful piece “The Two Senses” in the ground-breaking sci-art show “Head On” in the Wellcome Wing of the Science Museum in 2002.    Expanded to five senses for a subsequent exhibition, “From Within”, at the Royal Institution, this work was a collaboration between teams of neuroscientists, in Oxford and London, and used a combination of functional magnetic resonance brain scanning techniques, laser technology and 3D computer technology.  In these mysterious cubes of resin, with their merest suggestion of heads and the exquisite floating wraiths of gold leaf representing the patterns of brain activity that correspond to each of the senses, is compacted an entire history of human fascination with our own consciousness.  Yet the pieces themselves have an effortless rightness and simplicity.  Somehow, through her dogged fight with difficult concepts and even more complex technological processes, Cattrell has loosed a poetic image that resonates long after you have forgotten the science.

So what is it, at the end, that all the various parties get out of these encounters - the artists, the scientists, and the audience?   Roz McCarthy, who trained as an artist before becoming a scientist, is in no doubt that these collaborations are immensely stimulating, “Seeing how other people work and operate challenges my own way of working.”  The work with McGregor has mapped directly onto other interests she has in the representation of meaning in the brain, and has enabled her to collaborate unthreateningly with other scientists who share her interests:  “For Phil Barnard, Alan Wing, Alan Blackwell and the others it gave us common ground but neutral ground, that is nobody’s exclusive territory, where we could test the limits of the questions we were asking.  It was like a play space - though very hard work!”

For McGregor, too, “it’s opened up new territories for investigation.”    McGregor’s interest as a choreographer has always been in disrupting the traditional hierarchies of dance movement, in pushing to the limits notions of beauty and grace, whilst still retaining dance’s visceral power to move.  He has worked in the past with new technologies to extend his creative reach.  This recent work on the extraordinary functioning of a trained dancer’s brain has inspired him to choreograph a piece about AtaXia, about uncoordination, the literal loss of motor control through brain disease.  “What I have found particularly interesting is that Roz will define disfunctionality as a body with an extended behaviour whereas I have always understood disfunctionality as the body in trauma.”  In the rehearsal room it is like watching the birth of movement itself.  One dancer uncurls her plastic body to discover a foot.  A threesome experiment with different kinds of disturbing, ungainly and flailing movement.  In making these extended behaviours tell in a new work,  McGregor has added the first person perspective of Susan Seddon Jenner, a woman who has ataxia, and who, while demonstrating its physical consequences in the studio, has also been exploring with the dancers its psychological consequences - the trauma that she lives with. 

The night I go to see the ballet, Sadler’s Wells is heaving with a mixed audience of dance fans, scientists and the occasional person with ataxia  - three very different perspectives from which to watch the new piece unfold.   A thrilling, violently multilayered score and dramatic lighting accentuate the impact of a piece of dance that shows us dancers stretched to the limit of their ability to move.  Twisted and torn by impossible commands, their movements appear to collapse, fall apart, twitch into new life.  At a certain point movement gives way altogether to a jittery filmed dream sequence.  And yet the performance - McGregor insists it is “a marker in time and not a result” - has all the assurance, the perfection of accomplishment that you would expect.   It is neither a portrait of AtaXia nor a scientific disquisition on movement - it is the birth of a new world, and you become so engaged with its peculiar beauty that the occasional effortless arabesque comes as a shock.  

It is this in the end that is the audience’s gain - new work, of sometimes inspiring depth and seriousness; an alternative angle from which to approach both new science and new art; and finally, maybe most pleasurably, a chance to recuperate a perhaps lost self and sensibility, abandoned at some turning point.