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When a new contemporary dance premiered at Sadler's Wells in London late last year, the name - and thoughts - of UWA anthropologist James Leach appeared in the program.But what did a social anthropologist whose research is based mainly in Papua New Guinea have to do with a production at one of the most prestigious dance theatres in the world?

Professor Leach, ARC Future Fellow in the School of Anthropology and Sociology, used his knowledge of how people understand things differently to transform scientific descriptions of the brain into an organic body-like digital object, which inspired the dancers to respond to it with movement, which eventually became a new dance, Atomos .

He worked with cutting-edge choreographer Wayne McGregor and his company Wayne McGregor|Random Dance .

"McGregor stimulates the choreographic process in novel ways," Professor Leach said. "He has had a long relationship with scientists and had asked for descriptions about the way the brain works to be presented in a digital image (a choreographic language agent or CLA) so he and the dancers could create movement in response to it."

But the experiment didn't quite work and McGregor called in Professor Leach who has also had a long relationship with him.

"I was interested in how these two knowledge systems - those of the scientists and the dancers - interacted. I had to work out why the digital technology that was supposed to inspire them was not working.

"As an anthropologist, I am interested in how we can make different kinds of understanding about the world, different forms of knowing and knowledge, available and comprehensible.

"I brought something of my understanding of Papua New Guinea to the collaborations around the making of these ways of seeing and understanding dance.

"I realised that the cognitive scientists had assumed that all decisions are made by the brain. But dancers and choreographers are continually talking about ‘bodily intelligence' and thinking with their bodies.

"It's a kinaesthetic experience, emphasising the intelligence of physical movement. Based on the premise that all problems are solved in the brain, then the information transferred to the body, the scientists were missing the point.

"The dancers are actually solving problems with their bodies."

Professor Leach and McGregor realised the digital entity inspiring movement in the dancers needed to be in a form closely related to a body, as it is bodies and their proximity that elicit responses in the dance studio.

"We needed to find a way to make the CLA a body, that is, something that elicits a kinaesthetic response. Once we knew what we needed, we went back to the digital artists and handed them what sounded like a difficult brief.

"It needed to be life-size so the dancers could relate to it as they moved, it had to have a presence and be compelling, all of which the original software wasn't," he said.

The dancers watched the resultant creation wearing 3D glasses as they responded physically and, together with McGregor, created Atomos , a new dance piece which broke down stimuli into ‘atoms', then built them up again into a dance form.

"The project created a new vocabulary of movement specific for the piece, and Wayne McGregor put that vocabulary into phrases. The final work on stage was fantastic," Professor Leach said.

He was also involved in an exhibition around the work and everything that had gone into its creation.

Watch the dancers from Wayne McGregor|Random Dance  perform Atomos here .