The Science of Making Dances:  report on Choreography and Cognition event at Winchester Festival.

Published in Dance Gazette. Issue 2. 2004, pp. 16-19. http://www.rad.org.uk

By Catherine Hale

Where does a glissade end and a pas de chat begin? It might seem obvious in a ballet class or a classical ballet like Sleeping Beauty, but with today’s choreographers, like Christopher Wheeldon or William Forsyth, you might be hard pressed to identify precise steps among their wriggles, quirks and jagged lines. Move away from ballet altogether and contemporary dance is a continuous stream of movements with no individual names. How does the viewer, or the dancer, divide such dance into units or phrases in their mind? And if we understood movement perception better could it help a choreographer – whether ballet or contemporary – make better dance?

Cambridge scientist, Dr Alan Blackwell and celebrated UK choreographer, Wayne McGregor, thought it might. For this and other such musings united the worlds of dance and science at a recent high-profile discussion at the Winchester Festival of Art and the Mind. The outcome of months of collaborative research, its theme was Choreography and Cognition, or as McGregor, who’s also a formidable spokesperson for dance, put it, “the science of making dances.” McGregor was joined by performance researcher and former choreographer, Scott deLahunta and two of the team’s scientists to present their preliminary findings. Also present were two dancers from McGregor’s company, Random Dance, who have been doubling up as research subjects in this unique and exciting venture.

Science has always fascinated McGregor. From his debut choreographies of the early 1990s like Cyborg, where he imagined himself inhabiting the body of an artificial intelligence robot, to his latest work for dancers of the Royal Ballet, Qualia (meaning “perception”), technology and neuroscience have been his inspiration. 

Science, with its basis in reason over intuition, might seem an odd bedfellow for dance, the quintessentially non-verbal art form associated with emotion and feeling. But for McGregor the distinction is false. For at the source of both language and intellect, feeling and sensation is the brain. It relays highly complex information along the body’s neuromuscular circuits with much greater sophistication than any computer technology. In fact, the body is technological, claims McGregor. And he sees his job as choreographer like that of a scientist exploring its boundaries: “My daily life involves exploiting the potential of the human body to do extraordinary things…challenging, exploring and rediscovering its potential.”
	
Whether he’s working with his own contemporary-trained company, Random, or with dancers of the Royal Ballet or English National Ballet, McGregor never gets his dancers to execute pre-determined steps. He wants to probe their brains into making movement decisions and to re-route familiar muscle pathways. The basis of his choreography is a cerebrally highly demanding form of improvisation that makes his dancers look sharp as predators. 

About three years ago, McGregor met Scott deLahunta and you could say brain chemistry sparks flew as they discover their shared passion for dance, technology and the old grey matter. Back in 1996 choreographer and performance researcher, DeLahunta, pioneered debates about how choreographic principles of time, space and body are affected by the introduction of digital technologies in dance. But not content with merely reading scientific journals in their quest for answers, the pair went knocking on academic doors and invited eminent scientists from fields such as experimental psychology, cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience, as well as social anthropology, into their dance and choreographic practice. After months of meetings and discussions to determine their common ground, the scientists set up camp at Random’s home at Sadlers Wells, transforming rehearsal studios into experimental laboratories. The aim was for McGregor and the dancers to benefit equally from the exchange. This has been one of the first real collaborative investigation of its kind and its results are still forthcoming.
The opportunity to study dancers was hugely exciting for Dr Roz McCarthy, experimental psychologist from Cambridge University, and Prof Alan Wing from the School of Psychology at Birmingham University. They usually study people with brain injury and motor impairment. Because dancers have such a highly developed “body memory” or kinaesthetic awareness, they can shed light on the brain’s control of complex movement, they explained, and offers clues for rehabilitation. 
Dr McCarthy went straight to the philosophical heart of this inquiry, asking What is the relationship between language and dance? Can we talk and dance perfectly at the same time or do the two activities interfere with each other’s performance? And does dance need a verbal language, or vocabulary of steps, to support it at all? Her investigative tool is the “duel task” experiment and she got the dancers to imagine a sequence of dance movements at the same time as carrying out various other tasks like naming colours, pointing to squares and repeating words. She explained that all these tasks involve a different component of our “cognitive toolkit”. However, some components or skills share a similar area of brain activity and the tasks in the experiment that most interfered with the movement imaging were revealed as the ones that overlapped the most with that particular area in the brain.

Her preliminary results confirmed our suspicion – that the part of our brain used in verbal language is indeed relatively independent from that used in muscle co-ordination. In other words, language and movement involve very different skills. Yet, as McGregor pointed out, we can’t dismiss language as an accessory to dance, at least not yet. 

As we’ve seen, the old French ballet terminology has withstood the centuries and still underpins the art. And in contemporary dance, which constantly creates its movement units afresh, language is equally fundamental because a choreographer needs to stimulate a dancer’s creativity through words. 

McGregor explained: “When I choreograph I generate a vocabulary for movement that in some way challenges, exploits, explores and rediscovers the potential of human body. With the dancers we generate a physical alphabet that’s different from one piece to next. Then I create the composition.”

“But my tasks, although necessarily spoken, try to stimulate parts of brain related to spatial awareness.” Spatial awareness, as Dr McCarthy experiments confirmed, is one of our cognitive tools that’s closely related to dance. He and Random dancers, Laila Diallo and Matthias Sperling, gave us a vigorous demonstration of his “nine point system” by way of example. “Imagine the space around you and on your body and mark it out with nine different points”, he told them. “Now you have a geography around you, a map of physical co-ordinates that you can point to. This enables you to articulate your body in different ways by putting your head, or elbow in point number one for example. You can also draw between points, so developing a movement grammar. And you can draw with different parts of your body.” 

Still, McGregor longs to stimulate physical creativity in his dancers without any linguistic input at all. In the past he’s experimented with technology to feed dancers’ imaginations directly with virtual choreography from a computer screen. Prof Wing’s research may just provide him with another such tool.

Wing displayed the full battalion of gadgetry he uses for measuring the exact co-ordinates of peoples movements in space. He had DeLahunta wired up to a computer which fed out images of his movements on to a screen as he made them. Wing explained that a more sophisticated, wireless, version of this technology allows him to track a dancer’s precise movement trajectory and then create a kind of join-the-dots computerised model of the dance sequence. When a dancer repeats the same sequence, the difference of timing and position in space between the two computerised versions gives a measurement of their accuracy. What is being tested here is co-ordination and the accuracy of muscle memory. Unsurprisingly, dancers’ ratings proved extremely high. Wing’s interest was in the factors that affected accuracy ratings, such as being blindfolded. These provide him with clues as to the relative importance of the various sensory functions – such as vision and proprioception - that go together to produce movement.

What fascinates McGregor, though, is not the prospect of enhanced accuracy in dance, but rather than he might play around with Wing’s computerised model of a dance sequence to discover new movement possibilities. Perhaps he could even devise a computer programme that would recombine the sequence in exciting and unpredictable ways by itself. “I’m interested in how we could make a “random generator” that spits out information which we can work with in improvisation”, he explained. Which would give a whole new weight to the name he first gave his company in 1992
	
His latest work for them is Ataxia. It was conceived and brought to life amidst this historic interchange between science and dance, but will it bear evidence of its scientific scrutiny? 

“I wanted to make piece about disorder, about being uncoordinated. My question was, how can you make a highly skilled body be genuinely uncoordinated? The question connected with Roz McCarthy’s experiments about interferences. How could we set up interventions or confusions that would prevent the dancers from being able to exercise the facilities they’re trained in?”

We’ll have to wait for the premiere at Sadler’s Wells in June to find out McGregor’s answers to his questions.