This conversation presents interdisciplinary choreographic, dance movement psychotherapy and neuroscientific practice, research and activism conducted with young onset dementia sufferers and their families. Informed by feminist new materialism and cognitive neuroscience, Beatrice and Jon explore, alongside dancers Luke Birch, Takeshi Matsumoto, Sabrina Gargano, Maria Palliani, and Aneta Zwierzinska, the ethics and politics of creating dance not only for an audience but with and through audiences. As such, they propose ‘moving kinship’ as an integrated artistic practice that enables us to think about human and more-than-human-bodies and worlds simultaneously. This includes performative vignettes as ways to think through kinship with/in the choreographic process, performance and everyday life.
This talk was part of Crossing Borders 2018 and was presented in partnership with the University of Roehampton.
Beatrice Allegranti’s experience is influenced by several intersecting identities as independent choreographer, UKCP Reg. dance movement psychotherapist, writer/researcher and educator, with an interdisciplinary PhD in performance, feminism and psychotherapy. Her choreography and film work has toured internationally (France, U.S.A, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Hong Kong, Poland). Beatrice’s clinical experience includes private practice and the NHS (in adult mental health and dementia services). Her embodied practices focus on the ubiquity of body politics as a way of understanding, challenging and re-shaping the way we relate in the world. Her book Embodied Performances: Sexuality, Gender, Bodies (Palgrave Macmillan 2011/2015) speaks to these themes.Beatrice shares her political imperative with longtime collaborators: composer, Jill Halstead and neuroscientist, Jonathan Silas.
Jon Silas is a senior lecturer at Middlesex University. After completing his doctoral research into the social function of a mirror neuron system (Roehampton University), his post-doctoral research fellowship (University of Pennsylvania) explored olfactory function and the link to sub-cortical dementia. Jonathan is co-founder of the Jones & Silas Lab: a new centre for cognitive neuroscience research at Middlesex University. Research interests include sensorimotor aspects of cognition and the methods used to understand brain functioning. Jonathan’s collaboration with Beatrice has extended his interests into the epistemological nature of science and how it can be informed by and inform, socio-political, artistic and psychotherapeutic issues of embodiment.
Adapted from bios published in 2018
