Archived events
Dance & SpectacleSociety of Dance History Scholars Annual Conference
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moves10 - Programme Launch & moves Night
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Annual Conference of Performance Studies InternationalPSi 16 Performing Publics
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Intelligence and Action II – New Perspectivesin Dance and Cognitive Science
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Movements between Hearing and Seeing
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Manchester Dances: Natural Movement 1900-1930
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Dance Ethnography Forum
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October 08 2008: THE WATCHING DANCE CONSULTATIVE FORUM
The Watching Dance Consultative Forum on 10 October was a great success, engendering new inter-disciplinary relationships and promoting a healthy dialogue around the key issues of research.
We would like to offer our sincere thanks to everyone who came along.
The day began with a short introduction by Dee Reynolds, principal investigator, who introduced the project team and outlined the key terms, research questions, project aims and methodology in some detail. Dee also addressed some of the questions and challenges raised by the combination of neuroscience and audience research.
'I don’t know if its going to be possible or even desirable to iron out all these differences’ said Dee ‘Rather we need to work with area of meaningful intersection, and highlight points of difference for discussion’
Principal Investigator Dee Reynolds addressing the Forum.
There was a short question and answer section following Dee’s presentation.
This was followed by a presentation by project investigator Marie-Hélène Grosbras on fMRI which focused on the project’s first neuroscience study ‘Motor Resonance when Viewing Live and Recorded Dance’. She presented a design of the study as well as some preliminary data acquired in the pilot period. Vincent Walsh gave a response to Marie Helene’s presentation, and this led on to an open Q&A session
Frank Pollick gave a presentation on TMS with the aim of addressing both the scientists and non-scientists with some details and slides explaining the neuroscience methodology. Lawrence Parsons responded to Franks’ talk and this was followed by an open Q&A on the topic of TMS
After a short break Matthew Reason presented on the topic of Audience Research, its methods, benefits, limitations and variations, and how the subjective loading of emotion and meaning onto movement relates to dance and kinesthetic empathy. Martin Barker responded by discussing his experience of researching audience responses to film and the particularities of the methodology.
As Susan Melrose was unable to join us for her scheduled response, we concluded the morning session with a Q&A session on the topics discussed so far.
After lunch there were open Q&A sessions on the key areas of research in the conference room. The group split off into four topic-related groups and were encouraged to break away from their own specialist areas of research to discuss TMS, fMRI and audience research/dance. This section of the day was extremely successful and stimulated some involved and valuable dialogue.
We proceeded back to the main room for a series of presentations from leading academics and practitioners relating their work to kinesthetic empathy.
The first presentation was from Scott DeLahunta and Kate Stevens, who talked about their own audience response research and showed footage of specially choreographed dance pieces.
Daniel Glaser from the Wellcome trust followed with a presentation about his experience of working with the intersection between arts and science. This was followed by a presentation by dancer and choreographer Jane Bacon.
Lastly Rachel Davies presented her work as a dance filmmaker, showing clips from 4 pieces. She talked about conveying kinesthetic empathy to a screen audience, both on small screen and in installation / live performance.
