Dance the audience can feel — through their phones’ vibrations

Shriya Srinivasan danced with precise steps, using graceful flicks of her wrists to depict a heroine holding a mirror and applying makeup and perfume, her expressions lit by hope and excitement. Behind her, centuries-old Indian watercolors depicted similar heroines.

The assistant professor of bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences was performing a bharata natyam dance about a common archetype in Indian paintings and dance — a vasakasajja nayika, or heroine eagerly preparing to meet her lover — for a recent event at the Harvard Art Museums. Before the dance, she explained to the audience how the brain’s prefrontal cortex heightens feelings of excitement and anticipation in love by tapping into memories and activating reward centers.

“As a dancer, I aim to enter the emotional and physiological state of the character I am playing, inducing a faster heart rate or slowing the breath, to simulate anxiety or deep loss, for example,” she said. “Mirror neurons in the viewer then assimilate these cues and allow them to resonate with the emotional experience and catharsis of the character.”

Srinivasan combines her passions for science and dance as director of Harvard’s Biohybrid Organs and Neuroprosthetics Lab and co-founder and artistic director of the Anubhava Dance Company, an Indian classical dance ensemble that performs nationally.

A recent collaboration between the lab and Anubhava led to the creation of an app that allows audience members to feel dancers’ movements through a smartphone’s vibrations, a project featured this month on the PBS Nova docuseries “Building Stuff.”

“The scientific question at hand was: How can we enhance the experience of dance, reaching beyond just audio and visual input into tactile or other forms of sensory input?” Srinivasan said.

Her research and development team, which included Isabella Gomez ’24 and Krithika Swaminathan, Ph.D. ’23, developed custom sensing devices that are placed on the ankles of Anubhava dancers to capture and classify their complex footwork into patterns. A smartphone app transmits the movements into audience members’ hands. Srinivasan says the technology has the potential to make dance performances more accessible for the lay viewer, as well as visually- or hearing-impaired people.

“Choreographing a piece is akin to designing a system — both involve carefully crafting elements to achieve a specific effect.”

Shriya Srinivasan

To make the haptic feedback stimuli convey the feel of the footwork, researchers set the vibrations to different intensity levels. Light, flowing movements were represented by vibrations targeting surface-level mechanoreceptors in the skin, while more intense, punchier movements penetrated to deeper skin layers, Srinivasan explained. The project culminated in a dance titled “Decoded Rhythms” for an audience at the ArtLab, where Srinivasan did a 2023-2024 faculty residency.

“For me, dance and engineering are similar in process,” Srinivasan said. “Choreographing a piece is akin to designing a system — both involve carefully crafting elements to achieve a specific effect. Just as engineers design a system to meet certain requirements, dancers create choreography to evoke a particular emotion or reaction from the audience. It’s about problem-solving and design.”

Srinivasan, who grew up dancing bharata natyam under the tutelage of her mother Sujatha Srinivasan, established Anubhava in 2015 with co-founder Joshua George in the hopes of creating a space for Indian forms in the American dance world while also merging arts, science, and humanities onstage.

“There’s a high level of rhythmic and mathematical complexity that goes into the choreography that we produce that might not always translate to an audience if they’re not familiar with the style of music that we utilize, or if they’ve not been trained in the dance form,” George said.

Since this collaboration, Srinivasan said Anubhava has been diving deeper into neuroscience, psychology, and mental health, incorporating portrayals of emotions such as fear and anxiety, which she said are not commonly explored in Indian classical dance tradition, into their recent performances.

“I find it immensely fulfilling to engage in work at the intersection of disciplines,” Srinivasan said. “Exploring a problem from different perspectives can help you envision solutions that aren’t visible from traditional silos.”

Srinivasan is especially interested in further research on how physiological changes in the body of a dancer portraying emotions onstage might evoke a similar response in audience members.

“There are vast opportunities to study why the world makes us feel the way we do. When I experience art, it evokes a certain emotional response in me. Understanding why is deeply fundamental to the work of an artist, but doing so with the lens of science gives me this tangible way to say, ‘OK, if I modulate ABC, I can get somebody to feel XYZ.’ To me, that’s nuanced insight.”