A winter school in Freiburg from February 20th to 26th was the starting point for “Störung / הפרעה”, a unique German-Israeli project on movement and movement disorder with dancers, scientists, and people with Parkinson’s, designed and organized by the outreach team of BrainLinks-BrainTools (Oliver Müller & Sabrina Livanec) in cooperation with Theatre Freiburg. The interdisciplinary project wants to encourage medical and neuroscience students to gain a wider view on the topic of movement disorder in neurological diseases, and at the same time establish fruitful collaborations with artists and fellow researchers.
16 junior scientists (eight each from Germany and Israel), who had successfully applied for participation, met with choreographers/dancers and people with Parkinson’s in order to develop ideas of joint research projects and to reflect upon art and science as two approaches to the phenomenon of movement. To give the participants a broad spectrum of input, the program included not only lectures by scientists of BrainLinks-BrainTools (Ad Aertsen, Christoph Maurer, Volker A. Coenen, Robert Schmidt) and by experts from Israel and the Netherlands, but provided also discussion rounds with junior scientists and dancers, mentored by experts of BrainLinks-BrainTools (Ulrich Egert, Andreas Schulze-Bonhage, Michael Tangermann). And every morning dance workshops and gatherings with people with Parkinson’s took place.
Over the course of 2015, the junior scientists will participate in weekly workshops, where they will meet with dancers/choreographers and experts from different fields of the neurosciences and humanities. These workshops will be the basis for the junior scientists’ sub-projects that will be presented at two big final public events in Tel Aviv and Freiburg in December 2015.
The Israeli filmmaker Maya Rothschild will accompany the entire project. The collaboration with Maya Rothschild provides the opportunity to open the idea of “Störung / הפרעה” as well as the research of BrainLinks-BrainTools to a broader public. The film team made shootings during the winter school and interviewed scientists of BrainLinks-BrainTools (Thomas Stieglitz, Volker A. Coenen, Christoph Maurer). The documentary film will be presented at the final public events in Tel Aviv and Freiburg in December, too.
The project and the documentary film are funded by Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Stiftung Deutsch-Israelisches Zukunftsforum and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
The ongoing research process and exchange between scientists and dancers can be followed at: https://hafraah.wordpress.com