‘It’s like collective daydreaming’: the giant study showing how dancing affects our brains
The gel felt cold on my scalp and I had to forget how silly I must have looked, because we were in the midst of some serious science. This was back in 2021, anyway, still in the land of anti-bac and face masks – I’d long got over looking a bit silly in public in the name of science. The dance hub Siobhan Davies Studios in south London had been turned into a science lab, and I was being fitted with what looked like an elaborate swimming cap. It had electrodes dotted all over it to measure my brain activity, and the gel being squeezed into the holes aided the connection between electrode and scalp.
I was playing a small part in a pioneering five-year research project, Neurolive. Run by cognitive neuroscientist Dr Guido Orgs and choreographer Matthias Sperling, it brings together neuroscience and dance to investigate what’s happening in our brains when we watch live performance. The audience/guinea pigs, of which I was one, filed into the studio wired up to backpacks full of tech and watched a duet called Detective Work, where two performers danced out an abstract mystery dressed in suave green suits. I was very aware of being monitored. I’m a dance critic, and it felt as if I was being tested. Would my brain do the right thing?
Dance neuroscience is a young field of study, partly because of the obvious difficulty of putting a dancer (or audience member) into a brain scanner – although some have tried: one study had a dancer move their legs in tango positions while lying in a 3D body scanner. Most research has relied on subjects watching videos, but the advent of mobile electroencephalography (EEG) has opened up the possibility of capturing the brain’s electrical activity in situ, and Neurolive is the first study of its type at this scale, measuring up to 23 brains at once.
When we meet in October this year to discuss the project, Orgs tells me the idea first occured when the first affordable virtual reality systems emerged, with technology that claimed to be “as good as reality, or better”.
“Well, from a scientific perspective, we don’t even know how good reality is – we can’t measure it,” Orgs had thought. So he and Sperling set out to try to understand “liveness”, using dance as their subject matter.
In Detective Work, Orgs was looking for inter-brain synchrony, when people’s brain activity aligns, signalling that they’re focusing on the same thing. The piece’s choreographer, Seke Chimutengwende, was asked to predict when these moments of tight focus would occur, and the data showed he was almost spot on across all three shows (one takeaway: choreographers do know what they’re doing). What was unexpected was that they imagined seeing that activity in the alpha band, a relatively fast frequency of brainwaves associated with paying attention (in a lecture, for example), but what they saw was the much slower delta waves. “Delta band activity is associated with internal concentration, meditation and tuning into each other during social interactions,” says Orgs, suggesting the experience was like “collective daydreaming”.
As well as our brainwaves being measured, participants filled in a questionnaire afterwards on what we’d seen. A common response was “confusion”, contemporary dance being an art form some find opaque. But what’s fascinating is that whether people loved or hated the performance, knew what was going on or not, or were a dance critic overthinking things, their brains all followed a shared pattern. The study also found greater synchrony between people who attended the same performance versus those who sat in the same seat at the next show. As any performer will tell you, the energy in the auditorium can feel different each night even when the show’s the same, and the data proved it. “In other words, it may not be so important to get the most expensive seats,” Orgs says. “What matters is to attend a dance performance live and together with others.”
I only took part in the first performance, but since then Neurolive has collaborated with the dance collective Dog Kennel Hill Project and choreographer Jia-Yu Corti, and – one that I’m sad to have missed – hosted a 16-hour performance, masterminded by choreographer Jo Fong and featuring 50 dancers across two days, where the audience wore eye-movement sensors as well as EEG caps. The data from these phases has not been fully crunched yet, but the feedback after Fong’s show suggested that, much more than whether someone is technically a “good” dancer or not, what matters is connection. “Literally, the more I look at you, the more connected I feel,” Orgs says.
Those delta waves that Orgs was talking about come up again when I video call New York butoh dancer Vangeline to discuss another performance created in collaboration with neuroscience, The Slowest Wave. Butoh emerged in Japan in the 1960s, a dance form most often associated with white-painted faces and bodies and almost painfully slow movement. Vangeline will tell you it’s a lot more than that. It’s a dance generated from inside the body (rather than steps imposed from outside) with performers tapping into emotional and transformational states. “It became obvious to me that butoh is a different state of consciousness,” she says. She instigated the project, wanting to know if the science bore that out. What was actually happening in her brain?
Rather than tracking the audience, this time it was the dancers; the first time five had been measured at once (Vangeline is bringing a solo version, minus EEG, to the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle on 23 November). Navigating the practicalities was half the challenge; the fact that sweat could meddle with the connections, and how to safely wear the hardware. “Each thing on our head was worth $150,000,” says Vangeline. “It was like: Don’t break it!” The data is still being cleaned up (a huge job, having to remove eye-blinks and head movements), but as it was happening they were able to show synchrony between the dancers in real time. “You might have a sense that you’re connected with someone,” says scientist Sadye Paez, who collaborated on the study, “but we can show that this magic is actually happening.”
Once the results are completed – a frustratingly slow process – Vangeline is eager to expand the research. She’d love to work with ageing butoh masters in Japan. “It would be amazing to have an archive of the brains of our teachers, for future generations,” she says. But as well as artistic curiosity, she is interested in the health applications of this research, the possibility of using butoh to “calm the nervous system of a society that’s really hyper-aroused, overly stressed”. Having taught for 22 years, and worked with people with PTSD, she says, “it’s obvious to me that there are great healing benefits”.
When Orgs says: “I really want to showcase the power of dance,” he means both in an aesthetic sense and for wellbeing, too. One field where there is promising progress, for example, is dance interventions for people with Parkinson’s. “And there are a number of studies showing that dance is more powerful than exercise and medication to alleviate depressive symptoms,” says Orgs. The tendency in science, he adds, is to research simpler things like walking or running, because they’re easily controlled. “But they’re not the most powerful interventions, so there is a need to better understand the complexity through projects like this.”
There’s so much more to learn. “Even though the technology is so advanced, it is still only able to access a fraction of what we’re actually experiencing,” says Sperling. Paez notes: “If we can’t describe dance using science, to me that’s an indication that the science is the problem. There are different ways of knowing, and just because we can’t describe it using the scientific method doesn’t mean it’s not valid truth. We just haven’t developed the technology or methods to do it.”
The final Neurolive show, which takes place this month, is a piece by Sperling called Readings of What Was Never Written. It’s based on the idea of “taking a reading”, in both the scientific sense and the more magical sense, like reading palms or tarot cards. Sperling is not advocating tarot over science, but he sees how certain types of knowledge – rationality, logic, language – are held in highest esteem, and hopes that this project will show that dancers have different kinds of embodied intelligence and intuition that can be just as precise.
As someone who writes about dance for a living, I know the feeling of revelation when you’re watching a performance and suddenly things seem to fall into place, its secrets materialising. And I also know the struggle to put that into words after the show. The “knowing” can happen in the moment; it’s something you sense, bypassing language. I would love to see how that process pans out in my brain. Handily, neuroscience is on the case.
Readings of What Was Never Written is at Siobhan Davies Studios, London, 7 to 9 November, as part of Neurolive.
