Dance Your Emotion

British Science Festival / Julia F. Christensen / MPIEA

This video accompanies our article:

· Christensen, J. F., Khorsandi, S., & Wald-Fuhrmann, M. (accepted). Iranian Classical Dance As A Subject For Empirical Research: An Elusive Genre. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

We are introducing our collaboration about our empirical aesthetics research on dance at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany (https://www.ae.mpg.de). We were invited to the British Science Festival in 2019 to kick off our research projects, and in this video, we show some of our conversations that resulted from that event. The pandemic changed many things for our projects; we had to reorient, and maybe we’d express some of our ideas differently today than how we did back then. The world has evolved, and so have we and our research.

Two additional publications that have resulted from our work in the meanwhile are theoretical:

· Christensen, J. F., Vartanian, M., Sancho-Escanero, L., Khorsandi, S., Yazdi, S. H. N., Farahi, F., . . . Gomila, A. (2021). A Practice-Inspired Mindset for Researching the Psychophysiological and Medical Health Effects of Recreational Dance (Dance Sport). Frontiers in Psychology, 11(3849).
· Vartanian, M., Khorsandi, S., Sancho-Escanero, L., Acedo-Carmona, C., & Christensen, J. F. (2023). Human Flourishing through Dance Practice (Chapter 10, pp. 181-198). In T. C. Elvira Brattico, Lone Overby Fjorback & Laszlo Harmat (Ed.), Teaching Humanity: The Arts and Meditation for Human Development. London:Routledge.

“Dance Your Emotion” is an international team of researchers from various disciplines including psychology, neuroscience, filmmaking, dance, computer science, and anthropology. They are researching dance from an empirical aesthetics point of view. Their research is about why we like the dances of the world, what we find beautiful, and how and why both watching and doing dance can make us feel good.

Core team: Dr. Julia F. Christensen and Shahrzad Khorsandi with 3FISH (http://3fish.co)
Film makers, story, editing, postproduction: Sina H. N. Yazdi, Fahima Farrahi, Dr. Julia F. Christensen, Bilquis Castaño Manias, Holger Stenschke
Camera: Fahima Farrahi, Susana Bravo Serra, Mansur Nazarli
Sound: Fahima Farrahi, Sina H. N. Yazdi, Stefan Redeker
Lead scientist: Dr. Julia F. Christensen (MPI for Empirical Aesthetics)
Funders: Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Germany and formerly British Academy London Mobility grant (PM160240).
Music and Stock footage: Evato, PIXABAY, Videvo

Interviewees:
· Prof. Dr. Joseph Devlin, University College London, UK
· Dr. Anna Selmon, City, University of London, UK
· Simon Selmon, Director of SwingDanceUK, UK
· Shahrzad Khorsandi, Director of Shahrzad Dance Academy, San Francisco, USA
· Dr. Julia F. Christensen, Max Planck Insitute for Empirical Aesthetics, Germany
Thank you to: Dr. Keyvan Sarkhosh, Felix Bernoully, and all colleagues from the MPIEA who have helped throughout this project.
And a special thank you to Prof. Dr. Emily S. Cross for proposing us to the British Science Festival selection committee.

Dance scenes in blue by Shahrzad Dance Academy, full video available here:    • Progeny - excerpt  
Title: Progeny
Choreography: Shahrzad Khorsandi
Performers: Shahrzad Khorsandi and Marta Serra
Music: Kamkars
Location: San Francisco City Hall
Videography: Sabereh Kashi, Roozbeh Jafarzade, Azadeh Afra