Between Sleeping and Waking, an evening of Dance and Discussion
Image credit: Night and Sleep by Evelyn Morgan
Between Sleeping and Waking, an evening of Dance and Discussion
Featuring a performance by Yolande Yorke-Edgell and the Yorke Dance Project
Thursday 6 March 2025, 7.30pm
Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda's College
FREE and open to all. Followed by drinks reception with canapés.
Register via Eventbrite. Registration closes 3 hours before the start of the event.
Join us for an exciting collaborative event between the Sleep and the Rhythms of Life project, and Dansox, with live dance performance and panel discussion featuring experts from science, literature, music and history. Yolande Yorke and dancers from the Yorke Dance Project will perform a specially created dance on the theme of ‘Between Sleeping and Waking’.
Speakers include Sebastian Klinger, author of the newly-released Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929; Akanksha Bafna, researcher at Oxford’s Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute (and dance enthusiast); Eric Clarke, Emeritus Heather Professor of Music, and expert in the psychology of music; and Roger Smith and Irina Sorotkin, authors of numerous works on the history of dance, and also Kinaesthesia.
Yolande Yorke-Edgell in Robert Cohan's Canciones del Alma. Photograph Pari Naderi
Yolande Yorke-Edgell began her professional career dancing with Extemporary Dance Theatre and Rambert Dance Company before moving to Los Angeles to work with the Lewitzky Dance Company. She formed her own repertory dance company Yorke Dance Project in 1998 presenting works by artists such as Robert Cohan, Bella Lewitzky, Martha Graham and Kenneth MacMillan as well as presenting works by emerging artists. She continues to develop and direct Yorke Dance Company and is currently working with Christopher Bruce on a new work.
Yolande also co founded in 2015 the Cohan Collective, a composer and choreographer residency with Robert Cohan and Eleanor Alberga and continues to honour Cohan’s legacy with master classes and is currently developing a film book with archival footage of Cohan discussing the art of dance.
Since 2018 Yolande has been collaborating with filmmaker David Stewart. They have created seven short films of solos by Robert Cohan, Portraits, and went on to film Kenneth MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles. Both have received numerous film awards including Best Film for Sea of Troubles. Dance Revolutionaries, which featured both films, screened in over 80 cinemas Nationwide in 2024 and can be seen on screening platforms and on inflight entertainment.
Eric Clarke is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He was Heather Professor of Music at Oxford from 2007-22 and has published on topics very broadly within the psychology of music. He is a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Roger Smith is Reader Emeritus in History of Science, Lancaster University, UK, and Honorary Professor, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK. He took early retirement from Lancaster in 1998 and lived in Moscow, Russia, until the outbreak of war in 2022, where he was an Honorary Researcher of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.He has published in the history of science on topics related to the history of mind-brain and the intellectual history of human nature and the human sciences, most recently with reference to dance. Books include Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature (Manchester UP/Columbia UP, 2007). He has published, for wider audiences, The Fontana/Norton History of the Human Sciences (Fontana and Norton, 1997); Between Mind and Nature: A History of Psychology (Reaktion Books, 2013); Kinaesthesia in the Psychology, Philosophy and Culture of Human Experience (Routledge, 2023); and, with Irina Sirotkina, The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde: Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has been associated with the journal History of the Human Sciences (Sage) since its foundation in 1988.
Irina Sirotkina is Honorary Professor at the University of Durham, UK, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University College London. She specializes in the history of psychology, dance and movement culture. Her first book, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in
Image credit: Mark Wieschalla
Sebastian P. Klinger is a cultural historian and literary scholar based at the University of Vienna, as well as an Honorary Faculty Research Fellow in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. In 2022, when he was the Matthews Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford, he cofounded the TORCH network “Sleep and the Rhythms of Life” together with Sally Shuttleworth and Russell Foster. Sebastian takes interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to the study of European Literature. In his new monograph “Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899–1929” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), he explores the intersections of sleep, the sciences, the pharmaceutical industry, and the arts.
Akanksha Bafna is a researcher investigating sleep and circadian rhythms with a passion for music and dance. With 10 years of experience in the field of biological rhythms, she realised 'Rhythm is the essence of Life', and there is a deep connection between my scientific research and personal interest: folk dance.
Akanksha is a BBSRC Discovery Fellow at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford. After completing her PhD in Genetics from the University of Leicester, she moved to the University of Southampton as a Research Fellow for 3 years, followed by 4 years at the Medical Research Council as a Senior post-doc. Akanksha has investigated different forms of biological rhythms (seasonal and circadian) using a variety of models. Her research work and passion for dance has greatly helped her to understand the importance of ‘rhythm’ in our daily lives.
For more information please visit the website.
Find out more about Dance Scholarship Oxford (DANSOX) here; Find out more about the Sleep and the Rhythms of Life Network here.
