The performance on December 13 at 7:00 PM is an open rehearsal of the show. Tickets are available at the price of PLN 40 (1/3 of the price of a regular ticket for a standard show).
Can an audience of a few hundred people simulate a human brain with all its synapses and connections?
The legendary dance company Sasha Waltz & Guests meets Rimini Protokoll, a group specializing in documentary theater. They have more in common than you might think – both companies are known for creating performances in unusual places and spaces. Spiegelneuronen (Mirror Neurons) is their first joint project.
Brain researchers do not believe that our nervous system is centrally controlled, but instead that many different parts of the brain communicate with each other on an equal footing. This is comparable to a computer network in which the algorithms are decentralized rather than linear and react to their context as they collect and process information. However, even neurologists can only speculate about how
exactly this happens.
This is where the documentary research for this dance performance comes in: during the evening, the audience listens to and then replicates neurological analysis from the world of brain research in a way that is not only theoretical but also extremely tangible, using their own bodies and the community gathered together in the auditorium. It is conceivable that a large group of people in a small space can be interconnected in a similar way to a brain—but how do a few hundred people function as a whole when,
instead of talking to each other, they dance?
Losing oneself in the dancing crowd and coming together hormonally, gesturally, rhythmically, and euphorically is the utopian dream of dance culture, whether folk or rave. Inducing this state, or at least reaching an approximation of it, requires the mediation of mirror neurons as well as music between the dancing bodies. Can this be reconstructed and reflected—both physically and rationally—in a front-facing auditorium?
In this project, the audience represents a sprawling brain made up of hundreds of communicating synapses: this is what is known as a superorganism in entomology. Social insects such as ant or bee colonies communicate non-verbally via hormonal neurotransmitters (pheromones). In this performance, the dancers’ gestures and movements will function in the same way, stimulating different sections of the audience and gradually being relayed to other sections.
The relationship of the individual to the greater whole, and of the individual to the collective, thus becomes a physical reflection on society on the one hand and on the multiple selves in our consciousness on the other. For where many are one, one is also many.
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A production by Sasha Waltz & Guests in collaboration with Rimini Protokoll. A co-production with the Salzburg Festival, Tanz Köln and Kampnagel - Internationales Zentrum für Schönere Künste.
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Please note that partially bright lights will be used during the performance.
Spiegelneuronen is a participatory theater experience. This means that there may be times when you are in close proximity to the people sitting next to you. If you feel uncomfortable with this, we suggest choosing the seats at the sides.
All audience members are visible in the mirror – especially in the seats in the 1st row.
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Fot. materiały Sasha Waltz & Guests
