NEUROLIVE: PERFORMANCE IV Readings of what was never written

Matthias Sperling

Siobhan Davies Dance

A new performance from Matthias Sperling in collaboration with Temitope Ajose, Ben Ash, Iris Yi Po Chan and Katye Coe. Commissioned by NEUROLIVE.

Events Promo

Dance, science, and science fiction come together in this fourth and final performance from the NEUROLIVE project.

While the performers approach dancing as a process of ‘taking a reading’, intuitively interpreting their moment-to-moment embodied experience, this year, the NEUROLIVE team also stages an AI that augments this process. The AI is conceived as a system that reads multiple live data streams from the performers, the audience and the room to generate spoken interpretations of the emergent dance, like an interpretive oracle.

In this ritual-like, meditative performance, ‘taking a reading’ invokes associations with both magic and science at the same time: with the kinds of readings taken by scientific measurement devices, and more divinatory or magical readings, like the reading of palms, tarot cards, or tea leaves.

Readings of what was never written continues Sperling’s choreographic investigation into embodied ways of knowing as an intrinsic part of live dance experiences. For performers and audience members alike, this can span a generative meshwork of our bodily capacities for knowing that are variously ‘scientific’ (rational, languaged, explicit) and ‘magical’ (more-than-rational, felt sense, intuitive).

In their own ways, the performers, audience members, scientific team and the AI interpreter are all taking readings of what was never written.

* From Walter Benjamin’s On the mimetic faculty (1933), quoted in Georges Didi-Huberman’s Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science (2018), a text that has informed a series of choreographic works by Matthias Sperling.