Have you ever seen a brain dance? You can at the Ackland this Sunday

"Brain-Inspired Dance” is back at the Ackland Art Museum on March 24 for Family and Friends Sunday. The performance includes a workshop geared toward children and families to interact with the art. 

The Ackland is displaying 80 of Cajal's drawings. The art exhibit, titled "The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal" will remain at the Ackland until April 7. 

Killian Manning and her performance company, No Forwarding Address, will host the dance performance, inspired by Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s famous drawings of the human brain. The first performance will begin at 2 p.m., followed by the participatory dance workshop. After the workshop, the dance company will perform once more around 3:30 p.m.

Manning, a choreographer for the Ballet School of Chapel Hill, has been involved with dance for many years. She taught dance at UNC from 1989 until 1995. She said she has choreographed countless dance performances throughout her career and that she takes a special interest in choreographing performances that reflect a microcosm of all the human experiences. 

In order to create the piece, Manning studied Cajal’s dream journals and found inspiration in his writings. Manning said No Forwarding Address has been rehearsing since October for the original performance in February and continued rehearsing for the March performance.

Manning found seven composers from Cajal’s time frame and paired their music with his drawings to help narrate a story for the audience to experience. The exhibit is sectioned off in different shapes to represent the different aspects of neuroscience from cell structure to physiology. 

Manning said the added workshop creates a new dimension that the Ackland and its viewers haven’t seen before. 

“We're going to try to make the shapes and then do a ricochet simulating the electronic relay of messages through the nervous system,” Manning said. 

Dance and neuroscience may not seem to have many intersections for the average person, which is why Manning and the Ackland museum wanted to showcase their commonalities. 

Meredith Haggerty, one of Sunday’s performers, said she thinks art and science are both ways of exploring and investigating the world, as well as learning new things about the world without it becoming overly complicated. 

“It feels quite natural that we would make things at the intersection and that juncture of art and science,” Haggerty said. 

That sense of “natural” is exactly what Manning and Sunday’s performers will try to convey during their performances. 

The intricacies of the brain, neurons and pathways seem daunting for many people to try and understand. Haggerty hopes Sunday’s performance breaks that mold for the audience to be able to interact with the space, art and performers in a way that feels universal.

Heather Tatreau, a member of the academic advisory committee at the Ackland, said that Manning’s previous work around the Chapel Hill area caught her eye and sparked her interest in bringing Manning’s performance to the Ackland. 

Tatreau described Manning as thoughtful and in-depth. 

“She really dives in deep to what something is about and making work in response to that,” Tatreau said. 

Tatreau expects the viewer to connect more with the artwork displayed in the gallery by interacting with the performers and the workshop. 

“(The performance) will highlight things about the artwork that the viewer can wander through the galleries in and explore a little bit more deeply,” Tatreau said. 

@jsimp24

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