Readings of what was never written_Photo by Hugo Glendinning
Readings of what was never written (2024)
In Readings of what was never written, dance, science and science-fiction come together. Commissioned by NEUROLIVE, the work is created by Matthias Sperling in collaboration with Temitope Ajose, Ben Ash, Iris Yi Po Chan and Katye Coe, with live sound design by Joel Cahen.
“To read what was never written.” …
“Reading before all language”… occurs in the “entrails, in the stars, or dances.”
Walter Benjamin *
In this ritual-like, meditative performance, the five performers approach dancing as a process of ‘taking a reading’, intuitively interpreting their moment-to-moment embodied experience. Simultaneously, the performance stages an AI that augments this process: the AI is conceived as a system that reads multiple live data streams from the performers, the audience and the room to generate spoken interpretations of the emergent dance, like an interpretive oracle.
For Sperling, ‘taking a reading’ invokes associations with both magic and science at the same time: with the kinds of readings taken by scientific measurement devices, and more divinatory or magical readings, like the reading of palms, tarot cards, or tea leaves.
This work continues Sperling's choreographic investigation into embodied ways of knowing as an intrinsic part of live dance experiences. For performers and audience members alike, this can span a generative meshwork of our bodily capacities for knowing that are variously ‘scientific’ (rational, languaged, explicit) and ‘magical’ (more-than-rational, felt sense, intuitive).
Created as the final commission of the 5-year NEUROLIVE interdisciplinary research project (which Sperling is Artistic Director of), the performance integrates artistic research and scientific experiments into the same event. During each of these performances, half of the audience members wore measurement devices that recorded their brain activity, eye movements, breathing, heart rate, skin conductance and temperature. Members of the scientific team also collaborated on the staging of the AI Interpreter system conceived by Sperling.
In this performance, in their own ways, the performers, audience members, scientific team and the AI interpreter are all taking readings of what was never written.
* From Walter Benjamin's On the mimetic faculty (1933), quoted in Georges Didi-Huberman's Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science (2018), a text that has informed a series of choreographic works by Matthias Sperling.
Created by Matthias Sperling in collaboration with Temitope Ajose, Ben Ash, Iris Yi Po Chan and Katye Coe
Live Sound Design: Joel Cahen
AI Creation: Jamie Forth and Mirko Febbo
Costume Design: Annie Pender
Lighting Design: Marty Langthorne
Technician: Mike Picknett
Filmmaking: Ana de Matos
Producers: Kat Bridge, Iris Chan
Commissioned by NEUROLIVE, supported through funding from the European Research Council (ERC), a partnership between University College London, Goldsmiths University of London, the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and Siobhan Davies Studios.
Performances: 7-9 November 2024, Siobhan Davies Studios (London, UK)
‘...mystically logical and frantically controlled, interplaying the disciplines of science and performance.’ Read a review of Readings of what was never written by Florence Nicholls for Dance Art Journal.