A dance that bridges gap between science, art

Imagine a dance form through which you can visualise the movement and interactions between particles in a human cell. Sounds absurd? Welcome to the world of bodystorming.

“Bodystorming is a way of using the body to understand the world around us. The body is not just a site of knowledge but also a medium of communication,” said Dr Darius Koester, biophysicist, contemporary dancer and a research fellow at the National Centre for Biological Studies (NCBS).

The dynamics of the dance form help scientists or any average person visualise the movement and interactions between the particles in a cell, he added.

Koester has worked with bodystorming artists from the Black Label Movement (BLM), a dance company led by Prof Carl Flink and Prof David Odde, a biophysicist from the University of Minnesota. He now wishes to give the science community in the City an opportunity to practise the dance form.

NCBS has invited the BLM group, with the help of a grant from the Wellcome Trust, to conduct an intense bodystorming workshop that will bring the dance and science community together.

Dancer Aparna U Banerjee who heads the Science and Society programme at NCBS, said: “As dancers, we have experienced through the body what the mind cannot.
Bodystorming is an attempt at experiencing such non-verbal knowledge and physically committing to an idea. The form lends itself to various subjects. If you are an architect, instead of visualising a space through a blueprint, you experience the space with your body.

 It is an alternate way of imagining basic concepts and it throws light on things that you would have missed otherwise.”

Workshop
As many as 25 professional dancers will work with artists from BLM as part of a two-day workshop that will be held on April 25 and 26.

This will be followed by a 10-day residency programme for dancers and scientists at the NCBS.

Further, two public presentations will also be organised. The first on April 26 at the National Gallery of Modern Art at 11 am before the workshop. A final public presentation and performance will be organised after the residency on May 2.