Within the field of dance studies perceiving and acting have often been split, creating false division between the dancer and the dance. This binary limits choreographic understanding and the understanding of why people like to dance. It has grown out of outmoded physiological and neurological understandings that held sensory perception to be primary and reduced motor skills to a mechanical afterthought. And it has led to an abiding suspicion of the choreographic as being an authority imposed from the outside, less authentic than felt movement. Neuroscience and anthropology are now undoing this sensing/doing split, moving towards a view of motor cognition, patterning and bodily memory as an essential part of communicating, imagining and anticipating the world. Part of this paradigm shift understands movement memory to be central to the very act of perception. 

In the first of a planned series of public online conversations inviting cross disciplinary meetings between choreography and anthropology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, music, poetry, mathematics and magic, choreographer Jonathan Burrows and performance theorist Bojana Cvejić will exhange their research on the role of motor cognition in imagining, communicating and anticipating movement with Dr. Guido Orgs, neuroscientist and former dancer, and Rosalind Goldberg, choreographer and PhD fellow at KHIO.

Dr Guido Orgs is an expert in the cognitive neuroscience of dance and choreography. He is a reader at the Psychology department at Goldsmiths. https://www.gold.ac.uk/psychology/staff/orgs-guido/

Rosalind Goldberg is choreographer and dancer. She currently engaging a PhD research at KHIO Choreography as a meaning-generating aggregate

 Jonathan Burrows is choreographer and Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University.

Dr Bojana Cvejić works in philosophy, performance studies and dramaturgy. She is Professor of Dance and Dance Theory at KHIO.