MENTAL DANCE
Intersecting dance, interactive sound design and psychiatry an Empathy Machine.
Mental Dance explored the intersection of dance, interactive sound design and psychiatry through the novel concept of an Empathy Machine.
is an art-sci collaboration inspired by neuroscientific research into our ability to adapt to new situations. Drawing on case studies of dancers Lucia Joyce and Vaslav Nijinsky, both of whom suffered from mental illness at the height of their dancing careers, the project seeks to demystify the language surrounding psychiatric diagnoses through a poetic mapping between language, voice, music and movement using wearable sensor and AI technologies. Through experimental and speculative practice in the context of a digitally augmented 'laboratorium,' choreographer Carol Brown and sound designer Monica Lim in collaboration with two dancers and a singer, improvise with neuroscientific concepts including predictive coding and neural networks. These concepts have emerged from their dialogues with neuroscientist Marta Garrido and research being undertaken through the Cognitive Neuroscience and Computational Psychiatry Lab.
Moving sound and sounding movement through a soma-technic system, the research performance tests the potential for a poetic calibration of neuroscientific concepts within an experimental performance system. Three performers; Jordine Cornish, Luigi Vescio and Austin Hayes become an empathy machine: Moving sound through gesture, currents of sensation shift perceptions marking threshold moments of change.
Moving sound and sounding movement through a soma-technic system, the research performance tests the potential for a poetic calibration of neuroscientific concepts within an experimental performance system. Three performers; Jordine Cornish, Luigi Vescio and Austin Hayes become an empathy machine: Moving sound through gesture, currents of sensation shift perceptions marking threshold moments of change.
Collaborators — Carol Brown (Choreography & Artistic Direction) & Monica Lim (Interactive Sound Design)Performers — Jordine Cornish, Luigi Vescio and Austin HaynesCommisioned By— Science Gallery MelbourneFunding — Creativity and Wellbeing Hallmark Initiative
Research Funded by Creativity and Wellbeing Research Initiative, University of Melbourne.Then the photographs.
BREATH TRIO
A music-dance improvisation responding to the architecture of Montsalvat and the exhibition 'Through Her Breath' celebrating ancestral breath, placing women, whose bodies are the source of our first breaths, as the inscribers of embodied legacies of past and present.Montsalvat Barn, Eltham, Victoria, Australia. Photography by Bronwyn Kidd.Carol Brown (Dance & Score); Emma Redding (Dance); Monica Lim (Music & Performance); Susan Dimasi (Costume); Virginia Dowzer (Exhibition Curation); Bernadette Fisers (Make Up & Hair).
A performance response to the photography exhibition, 'Through Her Breath' (Bronwyn Kidd).
Breath Trio
Collaborators — Carol Brown (Choreography & Artistic Direction) & Monica Lim (Interactive Sound Design)Performers — Jordine Cornish, Luigi Vescio and Austin HaynesCommisioned By— Science Gallery MelbourneFunding — Creativity and Wellbeing Hallmark Initiative