Neurolive is an interdisciplinary research collaboration that brings together artists, scientists and audiences to study what makes live experiences special.
Liveness is vital to dance, theatre and music performances – and to many other kinds of events, including political rallies, sports events, reality TV and university lectures – but what exactly sets live experiences apart from recorded, streamed or simulated ones?
NEUROLIVE takes an intrinsically interdisciplinary approach to investigating and interrelating different ways of practicing, conceptualising and measuring liveness. It combines practices of artistic research and performance making, theories from dance, theatre and performance studies, and methods from cognitive neuroscience including mobile neuroimaging.
Throughout the project, artists and scientists work collaboratively on the design of artistic and scientific studies, while at the same time maintaining the full distinctness of their respective practices. Artistic research will help to shape the experimental design of psychological studies in the lab, while scientific principles and methods will feed into the making of dance and choreography in the studio and on stage.
NEUROLIVE is structured along three research streams. The artistic research stream of the project is conducted in close collaboration with Siobhan Davies Studios and performing artist and choreographer Matthias Sperling as the Artistic Director of the project. It involves the development and delivery of five one-week workshops exploring principles of contemporary performance making. These workshops are facilitated by invited guest artists and explore the role of liveness in performance making. The concepts and materials developed during these workshops form the basis for the the scientific research stream, a series of experiments conducted in a traditional laboratory setting. These experiments will primarily assess components of the live experience that can be studied with recorded materials, such as the availability of social feedback from other audience members. Using carefully controlled experimental designs as well as behavioural and mobile neuroimaging methods, the scientific research stream aims to characterise the experiential and neural correlates of experiencing liveness across a wide range of performative situations, not limited to the performing arts. Finally, artistic and scientific research is combined in the four live productions commissioned by the project. Here we systematically vary the most powerful performative tools as identified through artistic research, and assess their effect on audiences using the quantitative methods developed in the scientific research stream.
NEUROLIVE engages investigative artistic approaches to performance-making to examine a range of core elements that influence live experiences including performative space and time, the role of improvisation or the role of social influences such as the size and composition of the audience. The projects aims to acknowledge the multi-faceted and culturally-specific nature of liveness in different contexts and proposes that the experience of liveness is quantifiable as behavioural, psychophysiological and neural entanglement between performers’ and spectators’ minds, brains and bodies.
