Wearing skullcaps equipped with sensors, UH dancer-choreographers John Beasant III, Teresa Chapman, and Becky Valls played a variation of Exquisite Corpse, a collaborative, chance-based game made famous by the Surrealists in the 1920s — but they were dancing rather than drawing.

Held on Feb. 12, 2016, the event was part of a groundbreaking collaboration between Blaffer Art Museum, Houston-based artists, and the University of Houston’s Noninvasive Brain-Machine Interface Systems Laboratory, seeking clues to what happens in the brain as people create, perform, and contemplate art. For this event, we also partnered with the School of Theatre & Dance.

The demonstration was followed by a discussion of the dancers’ process and the goals of the research — funded by the National Science Foundation (#BCS 1533691) and led by engineering professor Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal — to study connections between the brain and creativity, expression, and the perception of art.