Arriving late, from across town where we had been visiting Elaine Whittaker's Cc:me exhibition, Gail Lotenberg, the artistic director of LINK Dance Foundation, and scientist Dr Mark Winston, a Professor of Apiculture and Social Insects at Simon Fraser University, were sharing the outcome of their collaborative engagement.
The dance/science performance titled EXPERIMENTS: Logic and Emotion Collide was shown as part of Subtle Technology Festival.
The performance, which we attended later that evening, attempted to connect processes of dance and science to understand the world around us.
Inspired by non-verbal communication of animals, the performance focused on the interactions between both disciplines - i.e. Dr Larry Dill, a scientists, performs (not dancing but speaking about his research) live alongside three dancers or using 3D space of dance rather than graphs to convey abstractions of real phenomena. EXPERIMENTS: Logic and Emotion Collide was a very literal way of communicating science using the medium of dance and visa versa.
"EXPERIMENTS embodies a dialogue that has been happening since 2007 between a company of artists and a handful of behavioral ecologists, driven to expand public interest in science. There is no easy narrative to follow in the dance because in the spirit of science and art, EXPERIMENTS aims to ignite the thinking mind rather than offer answers. Watching dance is like a behavioral ecologist or a choreographer observing non-verbal communication through movement: The mind receives stimuli and constructs meaning (an interaction between what actually unfolds in front of the eyes and the stories that play out behind them). This is the process of creating dance and the process of formulating a hypothesis. Now, it’s your turn." – Gail Lotenberg