Immersion of Choice

The topic of my creative project centers on the question of "How can the audience's choices influence dancers' improvisation?" This dance work seeks to redefine the relationship between audience and performers through integration of audience, technology, and movement in real-time. This topic was derived from the fields of Computer Science and Dance. To answer my main question, I need to explore how I can interconnect the theory of Computer Science/fundamentals of a web application and the elements of dance improvisation. This topic interests me because it focuses on combining two studies that do not seem related. However, I find that when I am coding a web application, I can insert blocks of code. This relates to dance improvisation where I have a movement vocabulary, and I can insert different moves based on the context. The idea of gathering data from an audience in real time also interests me. I find that data is most useful when a story can be deduced from that data. To figure out how I can use dance to create and tell a story about the data that is collected, I find that to be intriguing as well. The main goals of my Creative Project are to learn the skills needed to develop a web application using the knowledge and theory that I am acquiring through Computer Science as well as learning about the skills needed to produce a performance piece. My object for the overall project is to create an audience-interactive experience that presents choices for dancers and creates a connection between two completely different studies: Computer Science and Dance. My project will consist of having the audience enter their answers to preset questions via an online voting application. The stage background screen will be utilized to show the question results in percentages in the form of a chart. The dancers will then serve as a live interpretation of these results. This Creative Project will serve as a gateway between the work that has been cultivated in my studies and the real world. The methods involve exploring movement qualities in improvisation, communicating with my cast about what worked best for the transitions between each section of the piece, and testing for the web applications. I learned the importance of having structure within improvisational movement for the purpose of choreography. The significance of structure is that it provides direction, clarity, and a sense of unification for the dancers. I also learned the basics of the programming language, Python, in order to develop the two real-time web applications. The significance of learning Python is that I will be able to add this to my skillset of programming languages as well as build upon my knowledge of Computer Science and develop more real-world applications in the future.