Feedback Loops
28 October, 3:00 pm
Performance | Dance, Health & Medicine, Music, The Mind
Feedback Loops
Oxford Playhouse, Beaumont Street, Oxford, OX1 2LW
Dance meets tech, communicating invisible inner lives, when words alone cannot always describe thoughts and feelings.
The stage premiere of Feedback Loops reveals lived experiences of mental and physical health conditions. Music is created in response to movement revealing hidden but vital stories, during a mesmerising contemporary dance performance. Breaking down the boundaries of performance art, this pioneering production offers insights on living with depression, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis – conditions that come with their own changing patterns, or “feedback loops” – where a lot of symptoms are invisible.
A dancer wears a medical device that tracks movement, pulse and electrodermal activity and these biometrics write the music live in the rhythm of ambient electronica. This ground-breaking approach to music creation with generative systems offers an exclusive experience that can never be the same, keeping alive that element of the unknown.
Expect to leave inspired, empowered, and touched.
“empowering and engaging” The Psychologist
“visceral and affecting” SEISMA Magazine
Read related feature
Suitable for teenagers and adults.
The performance is followed by a panel discussion and Q&A.
Alina Ivan is a creative producer pushing the boundaries between arts and science to reveal human experiences and build empathy. Her work expands across mediums: performance art, animation, science presenting, writing, and podcasting. With a background in mental health, she wishes to raise awareness of intimate stories that can be hard to understand through words alone.
Anna Spink is a contemporary dance artist, specialising in multidisciplinary collaboration and composition. Spink views life as an intricate dance: with movement a fundamental instrument of curiosity, exploration, discovery, connection and expression. Fascinated by the vulnerable and intuitive immediacy of improvisation, Spink finds it an important choreographic tool for developing authentic and introspective movement vocabulary.
Dan Wimperis is a musician, data scientist and mathematician. Blending data, generative compositional systems, modular synths and cassettes Wimperis uses improvisational recording, editing and overdubbing to create music with emotional intent that explores the areas between traditional genres, writing instrumental music for a variety of emotional and practical concepts.
Sally Marlow is a Professor of Practice in Public Understanding of Mental Health Research at King’s College London, as well as a BBC radio broadcaster specialising in mental health. She works with clinicians, researchers, experts by experience, artists and charities to devise and deliver projects and documentaries.
The Festival reserves the right to modify event formats and manage the audience in accordance with the Festival’s Attendance Policy: https://if-oxford.com/about/policies/attendance-policy/
