Dance and Science
Moving towards new approaches in dance through a synergy of social-science and movement

This autumn, Dylan Newcomb is working with a broad team of collaborators, using movement as the key way to research and develop new, more embodied approaches to psychology and sociology. The first phase of the project will research how different personality types move through different stages of development, and how that is all influenced by their natural body-type. The second phase is to develop a dynamic, visual online ‘personality test’ that allows people to see how these three major aspects of their life – personality type, stage development, and body type are interacting. Typically, psychology tests are researched and designed through written language. This ambitious project aims, by observing and experiencing the moving body in a wide variety of different situations, to build a new approach to the matter of personality-mapping using the body-awareness of dancers.

The key to this project lies in finding a dynamic synergy between allowing for the uniqueness of each individual taking the ‘test’ and finding a meaningful, useful relationship of that uniqueness to the bigger picture – We are looking for healthy balance between psychology and sociology, and between free expression and comparative analysis. To find this balance, we need to work with both art and science in equal measure… Visual artist Rozemarijn Lucassen will be joining the project for three weeks. Her role is to churn out hundreds of little drawings of elements, which provide a visual lexicon of the key words and images used in the test. Adam Apollo, the designer and programmer of the interface, will use Flash and Ruby on Rails to bring all these elements together in the website in a dynamic fluid way. We imagine that the user of the interface is choosing/assembling/arranging constellations of the images or icons Rozemarijn created, as they go through the test, picking out the relevant pieces in the puzzle of their life and assembling them together in their own collage. Then - a good part of the meaning that emerges for that person will be HOW the interface then positions these images in a moving relationship to each other. In other words, you are making your own animated collage/self portrait, and placing that in a landscape of your current situation. And at the same time, you have the ability to then take distance from that, to zoom way out and see the bigger picture - see how your individual experience/profile/situation relates to the range of total possibilities.

• Symposium 20/21.12 december in Theater Zeebelt
• Photos
  
  
• Newsletter based on this project
• Video documentation of the research by Bas Noordermeer
  Short version (8min)
  Long version (27 min)
• See other video impressions