As part of my Resident Directorship at Lucy Guerin in 2019 I have been looking into designing computer programs as a system to propagate and disseminate choreographic ideas. For two weeks in June I was joined by a group of 9 dancers and together as a proof of concept we prototyped a set of sentence generators based on improvisation tasks and choreographic instruction which we used as an aid for practicing group improvisations.

This kind of technology offers a new way, at least in my experience (being aware of Cunningham and Forsythe’s work among others, in similar fields), to engage and collaborate with dancers. I should probably mention that I have worked with generative systems in musical composition for a long time now, so it’s simultaneously new to me and also familiar and seamless to imagine working this way with the moving and performing body. There is a really tangible difference with dance though, separating my body and decision making from the process of creation and genesis by leaving my conceptual self in programmatic form subtracting ego, identity, affectation and actual physicality from the outcome of danced and performed ideas.

I plan to integrate this system in various forms, versions and rewrites into my choreographic practise for future works and even classes and workshops. I think it may become a part of my creative language for some time. A choreographic methodology that deserves a long term investigation. I wonder what the code would be like written as a solo, a duo, a work for 50 non-dancers, performed with secret earphones, set up as a game for high school dance students with silent disco headphones, used as a way to develop a set choreography piece, to make costume set and prop decisions, as a collaborative tool with designers, used with a computer generated voice based on my own or some specific chosen voice (like a famous deceased choreographer), as a way to develop scripts for spoken word sections in new works, as a spoken text improvisation tool, to make a work in a different city or country with a company or group? What a great world to explore. More to come….

-A

Direction / Coding / Sound - Alisdair Macindoe

Performers / collaborators / secondments - Miles lee, Angela Rae, Tahlia Klugman, Rachael Huf, Chris Chua, Joseph Newton-Keogh, Georgia Rudd, Pia Lauritz, Jaala Jensen

Videographer & Editor - James Lauritz

Supported by Lucy Guerin Inc LGI/WXYZ