Performance Studies.indb

I am interested in the liminal area between science and the arts. Th e separation of the two is evident in our culture 1 : science, objective and logical; art, subjective and intuitive. For me this separation was always a bit strange. I am a performer, an actor in Playback Th eatre, an improvisation form based on real-life stories. 2 I am also a scientist, trained as a computational neuroscientist. In 2008, the last year of my PhD studies, I received an off er to bring together my two vocations. Prof Uri Alon, a renowned physicist and molecular biologist and a fellow Playback actor, invited me to explore with him the possibility to study performance from a scientifi c perspective. Th is was the beginning of a journey that started, as it oft en does in research projects, with a long time of wandering in ‘ the cloud ’ 3 while searching for the right research question and methodology. We met one evening to try to break our impasse. Sitting at the bar of our favourite place in Tel-Aviv, we had a moment of grace. As Uri is trying to gauge what I am really interested in studying, I found myself talking about the mirror game, a basic theatre exercise in which two actors mirror each other, creating coherent motions together. I recalled an experience from a time I was teaching theatre at a youth ward in a psychiatric hospital. A young man, who did not participate in other activities in the ward, had come to my class and had joined the activity only when we played the mirror game, and only when his favourite guide could play with him. It seemed that the game off ered this young man an opening which was not present elsewhere. Talking about this experience, we instantly realized that the mirror game could be a fascinating object for a scientifi c investigation. We felt