Dancecoding Collective

Interactive Dance Performance Experiments (And Hoping We Didn't Break Anything)

Let's put some creative people with different skills into one room and see what happens after one week?

This question, or something equally terrifying, likely motivated the initiators of the Szobart project to occupy an abandoned building in the center of Budapest. Because, you know, what's more comforting than spending a week in a derelict structure?

The premise was simple: combine dancers, sound artists, and programmers with a passion for live coding, and they'll probably start to improvise and collaborate.
And it worked.

Having previously explored the fusion of dance and code in interactive performances, the Dancecoding Collective was given a week in an abandoned Budapest building by Szobart, a German/Hungarian artist collaboration, for free experimentation. A bold move, in hindsight.

We chose to create a dance performance with interactive projections and generated sound. To make things worse, the team expanded organically during open brainstorming and improvisation sessions, incorporating new dancers into the original collective. On the final day of our week, we presented our performance as our contribution to Szobart. (the tyranny of deadlines)

The dance, music, and visuals were largely improvised on the spot, with the code generating the visuals being live-coded during the performance. The experiments were organized by Loes Bogers, who, it seemed, had the best grasp of the chaos.

Here's a shot from a past performance, because apparently, we only feel inspired in abandoned buildings. It's a thing. Don't ask.