“For Patricia” is an ode to postmodernism in dance. “For Patricia”, or for Trisha, is in honor of one of the inventors of postmodernism Trisha Brown (1936-2017) whose choreographic style challenged traditional notions of dance and pushed the boundaries of dance by expanding what movement and choreography meant.
Just like Brown explored choreographic structures such as accumulation, repeating, and reversing, etc., Sarah Fdili Alaui & John Sullivan explored ways in which compositional structures generated through AI can be used to organize simple choreographic and sonic patterns. They see AI as providing scaffolding to the piece rather than taking on the role of an interactive scenography. It creates the score that the dancers and musicians perform on stage. Each show is a renewed piece where both dancers and musicians perform a new score that the AI conducts them to perform. These scores are displayed visually on stage for the audience to decipher how the dance and the music unfold while maintaining a sense of ambiguity that provides an aesthetic experience of movement and music for their own sake. The piece is a quartet between two dancers, Sarah Fdili Alaoui and Bartosz Ostrowski, and two musicians, John Sullivan (piano and electronics) and Léo Chédin (drums and electronics).
The three-year project Movement, Digital Intelligence and Interactive Audience (MODINA) unites three academic institutions and five dance houses in six European countries. It aims to expand the creative possibilities for contemporary dance performances and to improve the audience experience through the use of digital technology – with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI) research and the interaction with the audience, both on-site as well as online.
MODINA is co-financed by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.
