Part of Oxford Science and Ideas Festival, this dance explores medical feedback technology. It looks at how wearable tracking devices make the experience of illness visible, using a physical-technological language to give intense insight into internal experience of long-term, sometimes invisible, health conditions.

Director Alina Ivan’s dance-tech performance transforms live body data into music using techniques developed by a major medical study which investigated how wearable technologies and phone apps could support depression, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis (RADAR-CNS: Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse – Central Nervous System). The routine explores illness through dance and music interaction with a wrist-worn tracking device.

Music and data sonification is enabled by composer Dan Wimperis, using code, synths, tapes and other devices to create a sonic generation unique to each performance. Created as a collaboration between signals from dancer Anna Spink’s wearable device (the Empatica E4 wristband), the technology tracks her biological data to operate the sound and direct the movements of the dance. This iterative process creates an involving and claustrophobic space of intense introspection, the exhausted micro-movements of illness amplified into the dim stage space, resonating, transforming and resisting, tracing the inexorable and unpredictable course of illness.

The dance/research team spoke movingly of the importance of working respectfully and carefully, and in the post-performance discussion the insightful contributions from lived experience experts Patrick Burke and Sarah Thorpe were a pleasure to hear.

The dance itself, iterative and hypnotic, the signalling activity of the dancer generating music which drives the movement, interrupted by explosions of exhaustion and interruption in the dark stage space of long term illness, augmented and extended the health research with “intimate stories hard to understand through words alone.” It’s a striking technical achievement, but also a sensitive and careful exploration of the irreproducible individuality of illness and suffering.