Artists Reach Out: Sloka Iyengar

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Sloka Iyengar

Sloka Iyengar
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Sloka Iyengar PhD, PMP is a neuroscientist and dancer passionate about using her science and dance training for public good. Born and raised in Ahmedabad, India, Sloka worked at a shelter for stray animals after her undergraduate studies in pharmacy. For her graduate and postdoctoral work, Sloka explored mechanisms of seizure generation. More recently, projects have been in the private and the nonprofit sectors. Sloka is involved in neuroscience outreach and advocacy. She has visited Capitol Hill several times to lobby elected officials for basic neuroscience funding. As an educator, she has developed curricula and taught neuroscience and forensic science to middle-school and high-school students. Presently, she teaches neuroscience and evolution to educators at the American Museum of Natural History. She developed the Basic Science section of www.epilepsy.com to communicate advances in basic epilepsy research to patients and caregivers globally.

Sloka is a professional dancer and performer of the classical Indian dance form known as Bharatanatyam. She teaches dance and has started a program to bring dance to residents of New York City nursing homes. Passionate about combining the arts and sciences, Sloka has developed Neuronatyam--a production to explore dance through the lens of neuroscience. You can find out more about her at www.slokaiyengar.net.

Sloka Iyengar
(photo: Michael Tanksley)

Iyengar teaches dissection to high school students
(photo: Stefin Woolever)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

Yes. I was scheduled to perform Neuronatyam--a piece exploring themes of movement, rhythm, and emotions from the lens of neuroscience. This piece brings together my two passions (and professions): dance and neuroscience. The original intent was to perform the piece as part of Brain Awareness Week on March 20th but, of course, it was canceled due to the pandemic. A few themes that I wanted to explore are: how the brain enables movement, how the brain can perceive rhythm, and why storytelling can be so moving.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I have been dancing for a very long time now! I started dancing at age 5 in India, thanks to my mother. She was a vocalist herself and had a deep interest in anything related to dance. Bharatanatyam--the classical indian dance form that I practice--has always been part of my life. I performed my debut recital (called Arengetram) at 13 and stayed on with my gurus to learn dance pedagogy and practice and theory of dance. After I came to the US for my PhD and postdoctoral work,  I stopped dancing for what seems now an eternity (but was only seven years), and picked it back up in 2012. Since then, I have been performing, practicing, teaching, and choreographing in and around New York City.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

Bharatanatayam is exceptionally versatile in that it has a broad vocabulary of movements, expression, and language that can be used to tell a variety of stories and convey a broad array of messages. While there are lovely themes of devotion in the dance form, I have been trying to experiment with two themes as follows: 1) an exploration of science through the lens of dance, and 2) using Bharatanatyam to talk about nature and conservation.

To explore the brain through the lens of dance, I developed Neuronatyam--an excerpt of which debuted in NYC in early March 2020. A larger version of this piece was supposed to be presented later in March. Passionate about nature and conservation, I have developed a piece that shows the death of an old oak tree. The death of the tree is not its death alone, the animals and birds and bats that used to seek refuge in the tree are also affected. These themes will be even more relevant as we will emerge out of the pandemic.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I try to bring together science and conservation in my piece. In a way, I am very lucky to be working in a dance form that offers a language for pretty much any story I want to say.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

Now, more than ever, the importance of science and arts is being understood and accepted. I think there is a need to (and interest in) explaining the sciences in a way that is relatable, clear, concise, and not condescending. I believe that arts--and specifically--dance provides us a way to do just that!

Self-care tip

I think there is sometimes a propensity to be “hyper-productive,” because there is an illusion of having so much time. I am trying to practice self-compassion, and being okay with not being okay.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Stars talk star stuff: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Robert Krulwich at 92Y

What's your hurry? Whatever.
Dr. Tyson's here to drop some science.
(W. W. Norton, 2017)

Since its 1935 opening, there have been five directors of New York's beloved Hayden Planetarium. Okay, class. How many can you name?

That's right: Neil deGrasse Tyson

L-r: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Robert Krulwich

And there you have it. A solid scientist---astrophysics, for heaven's sake!--with top-notch communication skills, irrepressible charm and the celebrity of a rock star. Raised in New York's very own Boogie Down Bronx by a Black father and Puerto Rican mother. Able to tap into his own life-long wonder and intellectual curiosity to help the rest of us mortals wrap our brains around stuff like the possibility of dimensions beyond the mere three we perceive with our puny, survival-oriented senses.

Last night, when Dr. Tyson strode out onto the stage of 92Y's Kaufmann Concert Hall, cheers went up from the audience, so much so that host Robert Krulwich (himself a celebrated broadcast journalist and co-host of NPR's Radiolab) had to wave us into silence so the two friends could get down to their conversation and the business of promoting Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Tyson's latest book.

While waiting for your morning coffee to brew, or while waiting for the bus, the train, or the plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.

Science and scientists have taken a severe beating in Trump's New American Order. In this toxic atmosphere, Tyson's educational mission, visibility and accessibility loom even larger, approaching heroic status. While no one, onstage or in the audience, broached political or needlessly politicized issues during the 92Y appearance, anyone who thinks Tyson shirks from speaking up for rational policy needs to look at this video. The informal and wide-ranging chat revolved around both men's interest in stripping science facts of their austerity and their abilities to approach all of this with a storyteller's ready wit.

Tyson: "I have a photon joke. Can I tell it?"

Krulwich: "Go ahead."

Tyson: "Photon checks into a hotel, and the bellhop asks, 'Do you have any luggage?' Photon says, 'No, I'm traveling light.'"

And if you ever run into Tyson, you must ask to hear the entire hot cocoa/whipped cream story, which I will not spoil here. No worries. Just thank me when you see me later.

To be honest, I'm more of a casual science geek (and Tyson fangirl) than a deeply knowledgeable one but, as a neo-pagan, I share the agnostic Tyson's sense of wonder and admire his dedication to a cosmic perspective that rescues spirituality from being defined, confined and ultimately smothered by religious orthodoxy.

Excerpts from "Reflections on the Cosmic Perspectives," Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.
The cosmic perspective is humble.

The cosmic perspective is spiritual -- even redemptive -- but not religious.

The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.

The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another.

The Virgo in me--sorry for the astrological reference, Dr. Tyson--completely gets his resistance to calling the color violet anything but "violet" as in "Roses are red, violets are...violet." The poet in me forgives him for that and grooves on the very idea of things called dwarf galaxies and runaway stars. The nosy person in me likes the question "What's going on between planets?" OMG, what, indeed?

I'm sympathetic to the notion that humans are simply not smart enough to figure out universes that might be trivial to the brain of a more intelligent species. I've seen what my fellow Americans are capable of unleashing on this planet. So, there's that. And how's this for real talk from Tyson? "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." Oh, yeah. That much is clear every. damn. day.

For information on Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, click here. And to learn about other cool programs at 92Y, click here.

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Oliver Sacks, 82

Oliver Sacks Dies at 82; Neurologist and Author Explored the Brain’s Quirks
by Gregory Cowles, The New York Times, August 30, 2015

Oliver Sacks, Casting Light on the Interconnectedness of Life
by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, August 30, 2015

Got rhythm?

IN 1890, the American psychologist William James famously likened our conscious experience to the flow of a stream. “A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described,” he wrote. “In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.”

While there is no disputing the aptness of this metaphor in capturing our subjective experience of the world, recent research has shown that the “stream” of consciousness is, in fact, an illusion. We actually perceive the world in rhythmic pulses rather than as a continuous flow. 

--Gregory Hickok

Read more:

It’s Not a ‘Stream’ of Consciousness
by Gregory Hickok, The New York Times, May 8, 2015

On the nature of climate change: Karole Armitage at AMNH

Two scenes from On the Nature of Things by Karole Armitage
(photos: Julieta Cervantes)

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in Field Notes From A Catastrophe, "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

Problems such as climate disruption, toxification of Earth, loss of biodiversity, loss of ecosystem services are solveable, but to do so human behavior must be basically altered.

In the twenty-first century we have created a civilization that is way out of step with the realities of our planet. 

--Paul Ehrlich, from text for On the Nature of Things

So our beloved American Museum of Natural History has funding from that climate change-denying Koch brother (click here). Well, last night's world premiere of On the Nature of Things, staged beneath the museum's iconic blue whale, felt like nothing short of an exorcism.

Choreographer Karole Armitage (Armitage Gone! Dance) filled Milstein Hall of Ocean Life with a multi-generational corps, including dancers from Manhattan Youth Ballet, as Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, performing live narration, laid down the science in layperson's terms. The message? Uncompromising: Climate is changing, we are responsible for it, and we are responsible for it.

And, no, I'm not merely repeating myself. We did it. Now we have to fix it.

Armitage and Ehrlich--a longtime friend of the choreographer's father, a biologist--fervently agree that the only way to engage most people with the complex science around climate and environment is through the heart, hence through the power of the arts. In that light, On the Nature of Things serves more as a supportive underscore, I think, than as educator or motivator--at least, up there on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The piece was made for the museum, but imagine the public service Armitage could do by touring it around the heartland and southlands before our next elections.

As a visual phenomenon, the work benefits, first, from its unique setting which places its uniformly-costumed dancers--a subliminal message in that coral color scheme?--in the midst of the museum's displays, encircled by onlookers there and on balconies. Armitage handles the hall's broad open floor with dramatic force, her deployment of dancers suggesting rising population, mounting tensions, collisions, competition for space and dominance. Her movement technique--a fusion of modern and ballet, meticulous, often showy--can hold the eye without necessarily spelling out matters spoken by Dr. Ehrlich. Unfortunately, the narration-dance overlay does not work. Luckily, I had the script and time to read it beforehand.

One wonders at the presence of a few dancers en pointe, especially when they use those pointe shoes for the clever but weirdly distracting trick of a quick slip across the floor. The dancers, though, are all in. They accomplish a handsome, coherent performance culminating in the choreographer's vision of serenity, hope and healing that we have yet to earn.

On the Nature of Things will continue with performances tonight and tomorrow at 7pm. For information and tickets, click here.

American Museum of Natural History
Central Park West and 79th Street, Manhattan
(Enter at 79th Street underneath staircase.)
(map/directions)

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Other American Museum of Natural History presentations of interest:


Our Earth’s Future: One-Day Course
Saturday, April 11, 9am–4pm
Free with application, available on amnh.org

In a special one-day offering, Dr. Debra Tillinger will lead an in-depth exploration of the science of the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and how changes in these two critical areas of Earth indicate and catalyze the impacts of climate change. Participants will hear from guest speakers on the geology, biology, and cultures of these beautiful and fragile parts of the world. They will also engage in discussions, take Museum hall tours, and enjoy a challenging game of geopolitics—SMARTIC, in which players must enact real-life solutions to the potential large-scale problems anticipated by the impact of climate change in the polar regions. Refreshments will be served.

Milstein Science Series: Sea Turtles

Sunday, May 3, 11am–4:30pm 

Free for Members or with Museum admission

Sea turtles are simply astounding! They lived alongside dinosaurs 150 million years ago, and still survive today. Playing a crucial role in our oceans’ ecosystems, this incredible animal group is now endangered due to climate change, poaching, habitat destruction, and accidental capture in fishing gear. Learn more about these resilient aquatic creatures and the conservation efforts in place to protect them with Eleanor Sterling, Chief Conservation Scientist, Center for Biodiversity & Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History; Wallace J. Nichols, scientist and New York Times-bestselling author of Blue Mind; and Michael Coyne, executive director of seaturtle.org. The event includes a live music performance by Bash the Trash, playing instruments made out of reused and repurposed materials.

For additional information, call 212-769-5100 or visit the Museum’s website at amnh.org.

So you think you can dance? What science says

Northumbria University conducted a study about the male dance moves that are attractive to women.

Here's what they found!

Artist collective's pop-up museum takes on Koch brothers on climate change

Ahead of the People's Climate March, Creative Time Reports Editor Marisa Mazria Katz speaks with the artist collective Not An Alternative about their Natural History Museum, a new project that confronts the unsavory influence of corporate cash on science institutions.

Clearing the Air: Artists Take on Corporate Influence in Natural History Museums
by Marisa Mazria Katz and Not An Alternative, Creative Time Reports, September 2, 2014

"The Natural History Museum" is a new museum that offers exhibitions, expeditions, educational workshops and public programming. Unlike traditional natural museums, it makes a point to include and highlight the social and political forces that shape nature.

Grand Opening 

Saturday, September 13

The Queens Museum

For more information, click here.

U of Oregon: Arts help shape response to climate change

College Classes Use Arts to Brace for Climate Change
by Richard Perez-Pena, The New York Times, March 31, 2014

Actor teaches scientists how to communicate with the rest of us

Do I think artists sometimes need similar training in how to communicate with civilians? Yes, I do!

Alan Alda, Spokesman for Science
A conversation with Claudia Dreifus, The New York Times, February 24, 2014

New York dancer's migration to Kansas on behalf of butterflies

A story and slide show from this past summer about New York ballerina Gwynedd Vetter-Drusch's dance project in the butterfly research gardens at the University of Kansas for Monarch Watch

Concern For Monarch Butterflies Inspires Dancer To Action

by Julie Denesha, KCUR.org, June 23, 2013

Candace Pert, 67

Candace Pert, 67, Explorer of the Brain, Dies
by John Schwartz, The New York Times, September 19, 2013

What's really behind creativity: teamwork in the brain

The Real Neuroscience of Creativity
by Scott Barry Kaufman, Scientific American, August 19, 2013

Why they swooned for Liszt and Jagger

Musicians' appearances matter more than their sound
Our judgements of quality depend more on how a musician moves than what they sound like.

by Philip Ball, Nature.com, August 19. 2013

A little songbird told me

Finding the brain's common language
by Erin Wayman, Science News, July 22, 2013

Open your eyes, find your way

For me, the search for meaning in the wake of tragedy led in an unpredictable direction, but the end result was an enriched view of the world. -- John Edward Huth, author, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way

Losing Our Way in the World
by John Edward Huth, The New York Times, July 20, 2013

Birds do it

Bird Night at the Disco
by Sindya N. Bhanoo, The New York Times, June 10, 2013

Where ideas live and move

Dr. Oliver Sacks (left) in conversation with Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, New York Live Arts (photo by Ian Douglas). Jones says of the dance community, "I wish we were more curious in the big discussion."

New York Live Arts is where thinking and movement meet the future. -- Bill T. Jones

For a healthy, viable future for the art of dance in American society, that art must meet its potential public--a public that is increasingly diverse; a public continuously plugged into numerous and growing sources of information and entertainment; a public caught up, ready or not, by issues of climate change, malfunctioning government, ruthless abuse of children and women, the devaluation of labor, the rise and risks of cyber-technology and more real world concerns and disasters.

New York Live Arts' visionary festival--launched this season as Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, in celebration of the 80th birthday of the great neurologist and author--establishes a toehold for this turbulent world-at-large in one of our city's historic, beloved venues for innovative, contemporary dance. I salute this integration of the outside with the inside and, personally, it tickles me to enjoy the possibility of taking in so much of what has always moved my life--from artistic research to scientific inquiry, from informed citizenship to activism--in one convenient location. The mix--which is not strictly new but is newly presented here at the famously former Dance Theater Workshop--excites me and offers hope.

Some of it is just plain fun: Watching a video of NASA astronauts playfully demonstrating how the absence of gravity radically alters execution of everyday movements, while their very funny colleague, Marsha Ivins, shares her own experiences (panel on Disembodiedness: Body Image & Proprioception) or waiting for steam and F-bombs to shoot from artist Miguel Gutierrez while a philosopher torturously labors to define what dance supposedly is and is not (panel on Minding the Dancing Body). Gutierrez  knows that, when it comes to research in consciousness, dance--a mode of perception, as he defines it--has been excelling at this work for a long time now.

Marsha Ivins, retired veteran of five NASA Space Shuttle missions

Imagine spinning and never getting dizzy. 

Or moving a 700lb object with just a touch of your fingers. 

For more fun with zero g, check this out.

Dance artists have information, strategies and even wisdom that the rest of us could benefit from. Jones seems bent on getting this word out to society as well as making some beneficial connections for the dance field. At times, the dialogue seems a little stilted, a little awkward and even prickly, but as long as the various parties are in the same room, talking, who knows what good might come of it?

On the Minding the Dancing Body panel, choreographer RoseAnne Spradlin spoke of making dances as a way to help people see what is usually hard to see, a purpose that Alva Noë and Colin McGinn--the philosophers on hand--readily identified as the goal of their discipline, too. Later that evening, Donna Uchizono's new dance--presented along with her 1999 trio, State of Heads--illustrated this mission.

Donna Uchizono in Out of Frame (photo by Ian Douglas)

Out of Frame, commissioned for the Live Ideas fest, takes as its inspiration the young Dr. Sacks' observations in 1969 of eighty people who survived the 1920s worldwide occurrence of a brain inflammation called encephalitis lethargica. Working from Sacks' accounts of these "recovered" patients in his renowned book, Awakenings, Uchizono distills the characteristic lingering distortions of body, personality and perception of time and space, even persistent immobility, into a solo performed on a tall ladder in the middle of a bare stage. On its own, this staging says so much--the rarity of the condition, the isolation of those who cannot look or function according to the norm, the extremity and precariousness of their situation even under medication, the mystery of a disease whose cause and prospects for resurgence remain unknown.

The solo is strangely beautiful and bizarre and fascinating; one of Uchizono's initial images presents her hand as if it were the clenched bulb of a carnivorous flower or a slowly rippling sea creature. The piece traps memory and heightened sensations within an altered state in which the body might not be perceived as a stable or singular entity...or even one's own. Josh Higgason's video layers an image of the dancer's body onto her flesh, helping us see what it's like to feel that something is very much, well, off.

Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks continues through Sunday evening, April 21. For information on all remaining events--including the encore of Donna Uchizono's dance program on Saturday at 4pm--click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Your brain on art

How Does the Brain Process Art?
New imaging techniques are mapping the locations of our aesthetic response
by Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2012

Jennifer Monson premieres "Live Dancing Archive" at The Kitchen

At the outset of Jennifer Monson/iLAND's Live Dancing Archive, the audience sits without benefit of light for a very long time. We hear tiny, ambient sounds of one another breathing, shifting, rustling, settling into an alive, soft darkness. Recalling that Monson recently told me that she had come to think of her audience as the ocean, I'm also remembering a time when I sat and watched the open sea at night, its awesomeness shading into something even more mysterious and compelling than usual and more than a little scary. What's in there? What's down there? 

Jennifer Monson (photo by Valerie Oliveiro)

Live Dancing Archive, presented at The Kitchen, serves as a way for Monson to embody a decade of her history of research and making, her sensitive and searching relationship with ecological systems of environments and communities, and her understanding of herself within all of this as a queer woman, activist and artist. It includes not only her hour-long performance--a collaboration with two brilliant artists, lighting designer Joe Levasseur and composer Jeff Kolar--but also a video installation by Robin Vachal and a digital archive designed by Youngjae Josephine Bae.  Levasseur and Kolar accompany her live for the journey, shaping and toning her austere surroundings: Levasseur striding here and there, adjusting the position and varying intensity of portable lights; Kolar sitting at his table of wonders, manipulating "external weather phenomena, wireless technology systems and human activity" through an array of handmade radio transmitters and receivers. If all of this seems like a pretty packed package, it is indeed, necessarily, packed and yet rendered with elegance.

Having seen a preview of part of the video last year, I limited myself to Monson's live show last evening. Even so, I came away feeling full and privileged to witness the skill and authority of this performance.

Jennifer Monson (photo by Ian Douglas)

In Live Dancing Archive, Monson presents herself as a hybrid creature of fur (fake pelt strapped to her torso, concealing her breasts) and human, womanly flesh (the wide mesh of her translucently pale, footless tights enclosing while revealing the nudity of her lower body). She initiates her dancing by pawing and pushing through the air, unfurling into and swimming into it. She endlessly channels organic forms, many presences coming and going in her movement and aspect. An inner wildness becomes external, and vice versa, all with precise control and calibration of pace, effort and coordination. A brief femme-drag sequence/lipsync to singer Antony's "Bird Gerhl" (with Monson ritually adorned by her costume designer, Susan Becker, in a completely uncharacteristic platinum wig, scarlet lipstick and saffron chiffon sleeves) serves as a solemn moment of vulnerability shortly before we experience, along with her, violent disturbance in the surrounding field of energy and sound.

There's so much more that transpires, in this ferocious, profoundly beautiful presentation, than I can say here. I hope you will jump at your chance to take it all in before Live Dancing Archive ends its run at The Kitchen tomorrow night.

Remaining performances: tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm. For more information and tickets, click here.

Vachal's video installation will be on view in the theater today (noon-6pm) and tomorrow (11am-6pm) for free viewing.

Browse, enjoy and subscribe to the Live Dancing Archive site: Click here.

The Kitchen
519 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Beauty on the brain

Why We Love Beautiful Things
by Lance Hosey, The New York Times, February 15, 2013