"Science on the Dance Floor" workshop-labs

upcoming series of workshop-labs for dancers, choreographers, movement artists, actors, athletes and everyone interested in movement

Exploring the intersection of neuroscience and dance practices with a special emphasis on motor awareness - how we consciously experience and assess our own movements - and how well we can do so.

Dancers study movement every day - in studios, on stage, and in everyday life. Meanwhile, cognitive neuroscientists are investigating in the labs how our brains perceive, control, and remember movement. Each field is generating insights, yet they rarely meet in dialogue. This workshop is an invitation to bring them together.

We will explore what neuroscience currently understands about movement, awareness, and bodily control; and just as importantly, what remains unknown. We’ll engage with the questions: What does it feel like to move? How does the brain know how the body is moving? What is conscious, and what remains unconscious in observing the moving self? 

We will move, introspect on the way we move, and learn (some) scientific terms, using them as tools to deepen our understanding. Together we will explore how our subjective experience relates to what science describes. Equipped with a shared vocabulary, we will discuss whether we, as dancers and  movement practitioners, through our training, have gained a particularly clear sense of our bodies in motion. And how could we sense, articulate and teach that to others?  

Ultimately, what we set out to do is not to find answers, but to help shape a kind of interdisciplinary research culture, that values exchange and brings  together different forms of expertise.