Hybrid Encounters. Art Meets Science

Great Britain’s leading choreographer Siobhan Davies puts on a night of dance and conversation together with the renowned neurologist Prof. Dr Arno Villringer

24th of November 2017, 7-9 pm
UdK-rehersal hall, Bundesallee 1-12, 10719 Berlin (U-Bahn Spichernstr.)
Performance & talk. Free Admission.
Talks are given in english language.

With “Hybrid Encounters”, the Hybrid Platform and the Schering Foundation begin a new series of events devoted to the dialogue between art and science in hybrid forms of presentation. Eminent international guests from the arts and sciences get a carte blanche to organise an evening event with a Berlin personality who is either artistically or scientifically active in a way that is complementary to their own background.

The opening event is organised by the choreographer and dancer Siobhan Davies and the neurologist Arno Villringer. They inquire into the interplay between body and brain, into embodied knowledge and the emotional effects of neuronal functions.

The starting point for the evening is the performance “Figuring” by Siobhan Davies and Helka Kaski. They present three choreographic situations in which the focus is on their own embodied archives of knowledge and the “gestural language” that is inherent to the latter. 

Siobhan Davies, one of Great Britain’s most influential choreographers, is herself a crosser of borders. Trained as an artist, she first worked as a dancer and in 1988, she founded her own dance company, Siobhan Davies Dance. Today, she is active not only as choreographer, but also as visual artist and her dance performances, for instance, also take place in art exhibits sometimes. Her works have been shown in, among others, the Barbican Centre and the Victoria Miro Gallery (London), the Kunstbau im Lehnbachhaus (Munich), and the Leopold Museum (Vienna). They are distinguished by the wide repertoire of artistic and interdisciplinary approaches used to tear down the border between stage and public. In recent times, she has been intensively dealing with the connection and separation of body and brain, including in exchange with neuroscientists.

Prof. Dr Arno Villringer Member of the Board of Directors of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and Director of the School of Mind and Brain in Berlin. Due to his international reputation as an expert on issues surrounding strokes, it can sometimes be overlooked that he also has an eye on the emotional element of our cognitive and neurological actions. Thus his research topics include the interaction between music and strong emotions (“Blame it on the bossa nova: Transfer of perceived sexiness from music to touch” and “The Band Effect – Physically strenuous music making increases aesthetic appreciation of music”). He also considers the neural processing of emotions in terms of physical properties, as well as analyses of eating habits. At the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Villringer conducts research on other topics in collaboration with scholars in the humanities and social scientists.

The format »Hybrid Events« are organized and realized by Hybrid Plattform – a project platform of the Berlin University of the Arts and the Technische Universität Berlin – and Schering Stiftung.

 

Here you can find the documentation of the Hybrid Encounters.