Performance: MENTAL DANCE is an art/science collaboration undertaken through the Creativity and Wellbeing Hallmark Initiative at the University of Melbourne. Through experimental and speculative practice in the context of the studio-gallery-theatre, sound designer Monica Lim, choreographer Carol Brown and neuroscientist Marta Garrido work with movement, music, instruments and data to create an intermedia performance laboratory.

Moving sound and sounding movement through a soma-technic system, the lab will test the potential for a poetic calibration of neuroscientific concepts within an experimental performance environment. 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. Audience and workshop participants are invited to attend to emerging and eruptive atmospheres, moods and effects and to play within the system.

Post-Performance Talk: The neuroscience of dance and music is an emerging field with important applications related to health, well-being and creative development. In this Talk, a neuroscientist, a choreographer and a composer discuss their art/science collaboration that brings together different mental spaces to realise complex couplings of brain and body. This Talk follows the performance MENTAL DANCE and the Workshop, Mind, Movement & Music.

Photograph by Yin-Chi Lee.