Rhythmicity: health and wellbeing | Cambridge LASER talks

Description

Co-hosted by Satinder P Gill and Chrysi Nanou.

The third in our series on rhythmicity will focus on health and wellbeing.

Recent pandemic years have seen us become increasingly dependent on communications technologies and social media, impacting how we connect as social and empathic animals. Stress and feeling overwhelmed also places such pressure on us, for example, for those working in the care and therapeutic services where being empathic is vital for care.

Research from music and science and the experiences of artists working with communities, reveal that when we are able to move our bodies and voices in rhythm together, we feel better about ourselves and those around us, even boosting our immune system, and enabling us to engage empathically with the differences between us.

In this LASER discussion we bring together a neuroscientist and three very different artists who use their skills in professional clown technique, in dance, and in sound and media art, to engage with communities through participatory and collaborative art processes that involve play, bodily movement, and sound. In doing so, they contribute to a broader pattern of social priorities as they provide spaces that foster a positive experience of oneself and of other, enable acts of creation and self-realisation and shape inclusive dialogue.

Speakers

• Filipa Pereiras-Stubb
  Cambridge-based dance artist, dance teacher, and creative practitioner with thirty years experience in dance & health and in community arts. Her current core projects include ‘Dance for Health’ at Cambridge University Hospitals, and ‘Dance at the Museum’ (Fitzwilliam Museum). She bridges subjective, phenomenological perspectives of the body, and naturalist and normative approaches to medicine, health and wellbeing.
• Amanda Kelleher
  Describes herself as Performer, Clown, Shape Thrower, Music Magpie, overall loud mouth.
  She is Artistic Director/CEO of Good Mood Creative, a new performing arts charity that delivers dynamic performing arts projects in the community and carries out research with academics and scientists on groundbreaking approaches to arts and health interventions in the community. She is also a contemporary theatre fellow at Birkbeck University, London.
• Jorg Fachner
  Co-director of CIMTR (Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research) and Cambridge-PI of the EPSRC funded project Radio Me. He uses brain research and music technology for analysing and evaluating music therapy processes and outcomes, and has been involved in music therapy driven social neuroscience research projects funded with EU and national grants in Germany, Austria, Finland and the UK.
• Stephanie Loveless (she/her)
  Director, The Center for Deep Listening, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
  She is a sound and media artist whose research centers on listening and vocal embodiment. Her recent projects include a mobile web-app for geo-located listening, and sound works that channel the voices of plants, animals, and musical divas.