Let’s dance: Move together to heal a dislocated world

Back in the early 1990s, Nicholas Rowe was an up-and-coming dancer performing the role of a peasant with the Finnish National Ballet Company. Then one night, on stage, he had an epiphany. Classical dance was exclusive and elitist, he thought; crazily far from the real lives of real people. It wasn’t for him.

Instead, the then 24-year-old quit ballet, bought a motorbike and, over the next 16 years travelled through 76 countries, teaching dance to some of the world’s most traumatised and marginalised people – from Burma (now Myanmar) to Bosnia, the Philippines to Lebanon.

He saw the power of dance to bring people together when social dislocation or poverty or language might be tearing their communities apart.

“When you're dancing and when you're moving and other people are engaging their bodies with you, you feel this sense of not being judged, of not being assessed, of feeling actually everything about me is acceptable.” 

Rowe ended up living in the West Bank, where he met his future wife, Palestinian dancer Maysoun Rafeedie. They had two children and then the whole family moved to New Zealand, where Rowe started teaching and researching at Waipapa Taumata Rau The University of Auckland, and where he is now a Professor.

In 2019 he completed a documentary, Dancing7Cities. For the project Rowe worked with arts organisations in Laos, Fiji, Finland, Lebanon, Italy, Palestine and Australia, filming the work they did with people on the margins: refugees, street kids, older people with dementia.

“I wasn't thinking, ‘Oh, I'm being socially inclusive through dance’. It's just wow, dance is the thing, and the thing that's happening through it is all of these people are valuing each other and valuing being with each other and being in the space. 

“And increasingly, my passion came towards collaboration and how do we facilitate collaboration? How do we get people wanting to value the ideas of others and build off those ideas, and not necessarily just conform and all fit to one singular ideal, but see how those different ideas allow for a rich and deep experience of inclusion.”

It makes sense. Activities like sport and creative arts allow people to come together with others, without too much reliance on a common language.

But new research suggests the collaboration that's possible through dance is on a different level.

The emerging field of dance neuroscience uses brain imaging technology and sensors on the outside of people’s skulls to explore the connection between body and brain when people dance - particularly when they dance together.

And results have been astonishing. Not only does dance involve an unusually large number of brain regions — sensory, motor, cognitive, social, emotional, rhythmic, reward and creative – but dancers’ brains seem to be connecting with each other when they dance together.

As New York Times journalist Margaret Fuhrer wrote after interviewing Julia C. Basso, a performer, creator and director of Virginia Tech’s Embodied Brain Laboratory: “The brain in motion, scientists are now able to see, does its own kind of intricate dance. One of the hypotheses to emerge from this kind of research is what Basso calls 'intra-brain synchrony.'

"Dance doesn’t just activate several different areas of the brain... it helps them talk to one another.”

Global research led from Auckland

At the end of 2020, UNESCO established the world’s first Chair of Dance and Social Inclusion, shared between Rowe and his University of Auckland Dance Studies colleague Professor Ralph Buck.

Then last year, Rowe’s global Intracomp project was given almost $5.5 million from the prestigious pan-European research and innovation funding body Horizon Europe.

Intracomp imagines a future world where climate change has forced massive migration, and looks at the role of creative arts education in supporting a sense of belonging and value.

A billion people could potentially be affected, Rowe says. “We're going to have to figure out how to cohesively live with these diverse cultures in increasingly super diverse cultural contexts.”

In recognition of his leadership and research into dance, Rowe was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand., Ngā Ahurei a Te Apārangi.