Schedule

Session 1: The Cultural, Anthropological, and Evolutionary Biology of Creative Movement
Session Organizer: Nicky Clayton (Cambridge University)
Introduction to the wide range of creative movement paradigms found through cross-cultural studies and evolutionary origins, both in humans and across a wide range of other animals

Nicky Clayton (Cambridge University) and Mark Baldwin OBE (Mark Baldwin Studios): Dance as a Metaphor for Memory and Mental Time Travel: Exploring the role of Embodied Cognition.

Aniruddh Patel (Tufts University): The evolutionary biology of human creative movement: insights from cross-species studies.

Coffee Break

Tecumseh Fitch (University of Vienna): Creative movement and Meter - Unpacking the Role of Rhythm in Movement.

Erich Jarvis (Rockefeller University): A relationship between vocal learning and creative movement across species.

Session 2: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Dance
Session Organizer: Aga Burzynska (Colorado State University)
Session surveys how dance serves as models for learning and memory, representation, mental imagery, and multimodal sensory-motor integration

Aga Burzynska (Colorado State University): The effects of dance on brain structure, function and cognition.

Steven Brown (McMaster University): The neural basis of creative movement and partnering.

Virginia Penhune (Concordia University): Dance, Music and Brain Plasticity: What we learn and when we learn it.

Coffee Break

Peter Keller (Western Sydney University): From sensory-motor to social influences on group music making and dance.

Madeleine Hackney (Emory University School of Medicine): Effects of dance training in Parkinson’s disease, older adults, and people at risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

Lena Ting (Emory University and Georgia Tech): Brain-body interactions for movement control across motor skill rehabilitation.

Session 3: AI, Robotics, Technology and Creative Movement
Session Organizer: Jose Contreras- Vidal (University of Houston IUCRC BRAIN)
Explores the interactions and mutual benefits between Neuroscience, NeuroTechnology and Creative Movement, and the range of technologies available now for mobile brain-body imaging during creative movement. Recordings are harnessed for development of mathematical models of creative movement and balance, of new mobile neural interfaces, and for noninvasive artistic closed-loop brain-computer interfaces (BCI). This session will also discuss challenges and opportunities at the nexus of creative movement, music, and science in the context of LiveWire - an innovative longitudinal art-science collaboration between scientists, musicians and dancers who will wear noninvasive EEG skull caps (brain waves recording caps), while performing a new work centered around a new string quartet by artistic director Anthony Brandt, set to choreography by Andy and Dionne Noble.

Anthony Brandt (Rice University), Jose ‘Pepe’ Contreras-Vidal (University of Houston), and Andy and Dionne Noble (Sam Houston State University; Co-Artistic Directors, NobleMotion Dance): The Making of LiveWire: An art-science collaborative performance-study commissioned for a public performance/research study on April 10 at the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts.

Anthony Brandt will discuss the neuroscience of theme and variations in LiveWire as a window into the creative mind.

Andy and Dionne Noble will discuss the challenges and opportunities for studying creativity and skill learning in the LiveWire longitudinal collaboration.

Pepe Contreras-Vidal will discuss the neural interface technology, decoding algorithms, and visualization in LiveWire and their deployment to study the creative process in action and in context.

with Evelyn Toh and Shohei Iwahama from NobleMotion Dance Company, the Musiqa String Quartet (Bree Ahern, Evie Chen, Jacob Schafer, and Sebastian Stefanovic), Bryan Ealey (Lighting Design), and the University of Houston Noninvasive Brain-Machine Interface System Team (Mauricio Ramirez-Moreno, Nishant Rao and Komal Kukkar).

Rima Peddi, Amit Rogel and Gil Weinberg (Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology) : FOREST is collaborative project between Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology and Kennesaw State University Dance Department. This NSF-supported project aimed at enhancing trust between groups of humans and robots through emotional driven sound and gesture.

Coffee Break

Christopher Fangundes (Rice University NEA's Research Lab): Mind-body impact of creativity engagement: Implications for cognitive aging.

Aston K. McCullough (University of Massachusetts Amherst, NEA Research Lab): Methods and sensors for quantifying dance exposures.

Session 4: Creative Movement for Health
Session organizers: Citlali Lopez-Ortiz & Mark Hallett (UI Urbana-Champaign & NIH).
Neural basis of normal movement, neurological disorder of movement; Efficacy of creative movement for Parkinson's patients and other clinical groups; Creative movement and social, behavioral and cognitive benefits for human well-being; Creative movement therapy; Alexander technique.

Mark Hallett (NIH): Neural basis of normal movement, and the neurological disorders of movement.

Citlali Lopez-Ortiz (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Targeted dance programs for motor rehabilitation, examples in cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis.

David Leventhal (Dance for PD at Mark Morris Dance Group, Brooklyn): Approaching Parkinson's with the mind of a dancer.

Coffee Break

Christina E. Hugenschmidt & Christina T. Soriano (Wake Forest University): Effects of dance on mood, balance and brain in Alzheimer’s disease.

Lavinia Teixeira-Machado (Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Brazil): TALT dance program for communication and social reciprocity in autism spectrum disorder.

Gregory Youdoin (Brown University): Huntington Disease and Dance Interventions.

Peter Wayne (Harvard University): Tai Chi for Fall Prevention in Older Adults: Contributions of ‘top-down’ affective and cognitive processes.

Session 5: Embodied Cognition, Learning of Creative Movement
Session organizers: Guido Orgs (Goldsmiths, London)
In the execution of creative movement, the human body is used and assessed as an instrument. This session will focus on aspects of pedagogy in this process, and examine the role of mimicry and “mirroring” of creative movement. It then addresses how creative movement is acquired and the implications of this talent for learning theories and systems of dance notation such as learning to “read” dance. Another key focus of the session will be presentations on how creative movement can play a significant role in STEM learning and education, led by Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts. Through interactive engagement, practitioners will demonstrate strategies and arts-integrated instruction applied in early childhood learning environments which support children's learning of math and science concepts, vocabulary, and habits of mind, as well as performing arts skills and concepts.

Beatriz Calvo-Merino (City University, London): Dance, Brains and Emotion.

Guido Orgs (Goldsmiths, London) + Demonstrations: The neurocognition of dance and choreography.

Akua Kouyate-Tate (Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts): Early Childhood STEM Learning through Dance: The Interchange between Practice and Research.

Lise Worthen-Chaudhari (The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center):  Feasibility of social dance as a dual task training paradigm for adults with persistent post-concussive symptoms: a pilot study of symptoms, neuromotor control, and central myelin integrity.

Lunch Hour Demonstration: Heidi Latsky – ON DISPLAY (lunch provided in Pavilion). Participate here: link

It began as a series of free and public installations throughout NYC in honor of the 25th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act in partnership with Lincoln Center, Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, and Dance/NYC. It has grown into a social justice movement worldwide with a cast that is inclusive with respect to ethnicity, race, body size and shape, and age.

As a commentary on the body as spectacle and society's obsession with body image, this human sculpture court exhibits performers as they claim their space as sculptures and allow the audience to view them in all their fierceness and vulnerability.

“On Display/Boston is everything I want from a work of art: It is thoughtful and makes you think. It provokes reflection. It is full of spirit. It is full of beauty. It is inclusive. And it takes you deep inside yourself even as it expands the world around you.” David Henry, Bill T. Jones Director of Performing and Media Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Art

Session 6: Creative Movement as cognitive neuroscience, as an epistemological model, as an enactive laboratory
Session organizer: Asaf Bachrach (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – CNRS)
The session will integrate all topics covered in the previous sessions so as to explore how creative movement and dance can by themselves serve as educational paths for scientific endeavors and not just “objects” of science.

The presentations will be constructed as a space for dialogue between cognitive neuroscience and creative movement. Though scientists and dancers use very different tools or paradigms, they often ask very similar questions ‘about the brain’, relating to the dynamics of multimodal sensory-motor integration, motor control, empathy, attention, agency, affect and ultimately the nature of consciousness and the self.

A group of the invited participants (an assemblage of scientists, creative movement professionals, and philosophers) will also spend a few days together before the workshop to prepare an innovative hybrid platform for trans-disciplinary perspective sharing and body-storming based on Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Score practice. Simple tools/scores from participatory improvisational dance will be used to forged shared experiences as a base for a conversation (among all participants of the workshop). The ‘empirical’ focus of the session will be on how we come to make sense of each other and together, and how to convey educationally these notions and exploit them in science education.

Asaf Bachrach (Performer/spectator interactions): Synchronization, Attention and Transformation in Creative Movement and joint improvisation and in Virtual Reality.

João Fiadeiro: https://www.numeridanse.tv/en/dance-videotheque/de-la-composition-en-temps-reel-joao-fiadeiro

Margit Galanter: https://margitg.wordpress.com/

Lisa Nelson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nelson

Nara Figueirdo (Center of Logic, Epistemology and History of Science): https://sites.google.com/view/naramfigueiredo/

Julien Laroche (The Center for Translational Neurophysiology of Speech & Communication at the Italian Institute of Technology)

Joe Dumit (University of California, Davis)

Larke Johnson (Ladybug): Larke Johnson will be performing a 1.6 min choreography that she created for this event. The title of the piece is Ladybug, Larke’s childhood nickname.

The music was composed by Claudia Brent,  inspired by her young student Larke. Larke C. Johnson (age 17) a Chicago native, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at 10 months old. Her diagnosis did not hinder her desire to be a ballerina. She began taking ballet lessons through an adaptive program with Shirley Ryan Ability Lab (formerly RIC) at age 5. In 2016, she secured a role in Joffrey Ballet’s Nutcracker. After that production, she began to take  private lessons at Joffrey and continues to perform with the company. In the summer of 2019, she served as a student volunteer in a class for young dancers with autism. In addition to ballet, Larke enjoys horseback riding, swimming, and running.

Grégoire Blanc is a young French musician, mostly known for his work involving the theremin - this very unusual musical instrument invented in the 1920s by the brilliant Russian scientist, Лев Термен.

Holding two Master’s Degrees, one from the leading engineering school of Arts et Métiers and another one in sciences applied to music offered at Sorbonne University by IRCAM he decided to pursue a career in music.

With its characteristic sound and its astonishing expressivity, the theremin has a huge potential, from classical music to contemporary creations, film scores, etc. Grégoire Blanc is renowned as a promising artist, and is regularly invited to perform in various contexts: orchestral performances, classical concerts, lectures, studio recordings, all around the world, from Canada to Kazakhstan. https://www.gregoireblanc.com