DANCE

The DANCE Project

“Closing the eyes is needed to see the immeasurable spaces of a dream, to find images that open up to feelings coming from the least explored places of the brain, to experiment with forms of the visible derived by different sensorial configurations”
(J.Svankmajer, Touching and Imagining)

DANCE maps these thoughts into scientific and artistic research for investigating how affective and relational qualities of body movement can be expressed, represented, and analyzed by the auditory channel. DANCE aims at understanding the meaning of “closing the eyes”, the perception of expressiveness and entrainment in dance, the participation to the emotion conveyed by a sequence of movements in space, the understanding of the non-verbal language of bodies that communicate, imagining and questioning concrete ways to listen to a choreography, feel a ballet.

DANCE dimensions, strongly integrated and interacting, are the following:

Inclusion and rehabilitation. Interactive sonification and musicalization of choreutic movement (processing of sound spaces and ways of using affective music content in relation to the quality of gestures) investigates forms of sensory substitution: to see through listening. Testing new perceptual experiences of body movement in the dark implies the possibility of rapprochement and sharing (of spaces and emotions) between visually impaired and sighted people.
Scientific and technological research. Neuroscience studies on brain plasticity in sensory substitution at University of Maastricht will be combined with studies at Casa Paganini-InfoMus on technologies capable of seeing emotional qualities and social indicators of movement, interpreting them as techniques for searching data in digital archives (e.g. sound, music, visual archives), and with research on interactive sonification at KTH.
Artistic research and production. The choreography itself creates the music: dance can be conceived as musical composition (or re-composition, interpretation), changing its traditional dimension into an eminently or exclusively listening experience: Gesture, as an aesthetic object, is experienced as a sounding object.

Europa: Gestures of History, Dancing Science and Art not to forget EU identity

Europa: Gestures of History, Dancing Science and Art not to forget EU identity, is a scientific performance in Rome (March 23rd 2017). This performance took place in occasion of the dinner at the celebration of the Treaty of Rome, at “La Lanterna” in Rome, on invitation by the EU DG Connect. The objective was to tell metaphorically the narration of the birth and evolution of Europe by means of a short choreographic action, enhanced by an interactive sonification amplifying the qualities of dancer’s movement.

Esodi
Public performance at Museo di Palazzo Reale, Genoa - March 25th 2017