Dancing back down to New Zealand

Dancer and neuroscientist Emily Cross came to New Zealand as a Fulbright US Graduate Student in 2002, completing a Master of Science in Psychology at the University of Otago and performing with Dunedin modern hip-hop dance company Slightly Synthetic throughout her stay. She has since completed a PhD at Dartmouth College investigating functional changes within dancers' brains as they learn complex new sequences of movements, and joined the college's Dartmouth Dance Ensemble. In March Emily was fortunate to return to New Zealand with the Ensemble in tow, to perform, collaborate and report on her research findings.

Emily Cross

n August of 2003, I was incredibly reluctant to begin the voyage that comprised a mind-numbing string of five flights across the Pacific and the expanse of North America and would convey me from Dunedin back to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, after 19 spectacular months in Aotearoa. I remember thinking that I was leaving behind a lab where I made some of my first autonomous (and thrilling!) research discoveries, an inventive dance company where I was able to create and perform dance, many dear Kiwi friends, and three islands of achingly beautiful landscapes. In short, I knew I was moving away from the most amazing months of my life to begin a new adventure as a PhD student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

When I began my PhD studies, I wanted to continue a line of work I had begun as an MSc student in Dr Elizabeth Franz's lab at the University of Otago. There I had looked into how knowledge for language and actions (including gestures and actions associated with everyday objects, such as tools) interacts. During my doctoral studies, I hoped to take this line of work further by investigating how such interactions are represented at the neural level. I began by learning the ropes of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at Dartmouth, a methodology that enables scientists to examine not only the anatomy within the human cranium, but also how different parts of the brain respond when perceiving images or feeling emotions.

The real breakthrough in my doctoral research came halfway through my second year as a PhD student. The Dartmouth Dance Ensemble, the modern dance company I had danced with since my first term at Dartmouth, began learning a work called Skylight by dance luminary Laura Dean. As rehearsals began, I was struck by how complex and new the movement vocabulary was. That first week, I approached my PhD advisor and explained to him that my dance company was learning a challenging new work that had a distinctive movement vocabulary, and wouldn't it be interesting to have a look at all of our brains as we learn this complex new work? I was expecting him to give me a list of reasons why it would be impossible to actually study this in an empirical manner. To my surprise, he was very interested and encouraged me to design a study that would allow me to start looking at the dancers' brains as soon as possible.

Those next several days were a blur of filming stimuli, programming an fMRI experiment, and begging my fellow dancers to come in every week for the next six weeks so I could scan their brains as they watched Skylight’s movements. Looking back now, I am amazed that any of this worked - that I was able to get the experiment together in record time, that all the dancers agreed to take part, and even more astonishingly, that the study actually worked! We found that as the dancers acquired performance expertise across the weeks of training, several key regions of the human mirror neuron network (a network that matches observed with executable actions) showed increases in activity. This was my first taste at how rewarding it could be to combine one's greatest passions in life, and throughout the rest of my PhD career I continued to work on projects that examined the various aspects of dancers' brain functions as they learn dance.

The absolute crowning moment of my graduate career, however, came just after I defended my dissertation. The Dartmouth Dance Ensemble organizes an international tour once every 4-5 years, and this year was a scheduled tour year. I was overwhelmingly excited when the director mentioned to me last August that he was thinking about New Zealand as the tour venue for 2008. I was, of course, 110% behind this idea, and while writing my dissertation, I engaged in the most fun and productive procrastination of all - helping to organize a dance tour to New Zealand!

Dartmouth Dance Ensemble limber up for their performance in Wellington's Civic Square

Fulbright New Zealand was instrumental in helping to make this tour successful. Not only did they offer generous financial support, but they also put us in touch with Jennifer Shennan, a New Zealand Fulbright alumna, world-class dancer and dance historian who presented a captivating lecture on the Turnbull Library dance archives to the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble during our time in Wellington. We had incredible experiences performing our repertory (including Skylight) for audiences of all ages at Waiwhetū Marae in Lower Hutt, the Memorial Hall in Kaikoura, the Teacher's College in Dunedin, and perhaps most excitingly of all, outside under the sun, clouds, and suspended fern sphere in Civic Square in Wellington.

Back at Otago, I was invited to present a lecture on my dance research. It was amazing to present the Skylight study to an audience comprising my former advisor, professors, colleagues, and the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble. I certainly felt like my time in New Zealand as a Fulbright fellow who danced and did brain research had come full circle, and I am exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to bring both dance and science back to my most favorite place in the world!