Collaboration and Workshop

Sept 2022 - May 2023 
# Multimedia Theatre
# Motion Capture
# Creative Coding
# Dance Choreography
# Experimentalism Pedagogy 

We think actively and act thoughtfully. We pursue research with purpose. Our work results in clear, tangible, meaningful applications. We teach in order to make better thinkers who transform ideas into reality        

Fig 1. Luma Theatre of Fisher Center of Performing Arts - a great place for experiments and sharing ideas.

Bard College Dance Workshop

The Bard College Dance Program holds the Dance Workshop every Tuesday during the school year - it is a time and place for all Bard Dance faculty and students as well as any enthusiasts to gather for a conversation on dance creation and performance. In March 2023, I (Rose Xu) am scheduled to lead a workshop session to share my ideas and tools in my adventure of finding the coalescence of science and art as well as building the technical planform to enable that. I plan to use two spaces - a camera-projector system will be set up in the Luma Theatre, allowing some choreographers to experience and experiment with the motion capture and visual rendering tools that I have developed for my past multimedia projects; in the Thorne Dance Studio, the other folks will have a conversation on any creative whim that they had in the past but couldn’t be realized using current technology, what tools are needed in order to bring their imagination to reality, impacts and consequences of introducing new technologies to the traditional dance world, and so forth. At the end of the session, we will go back to the Theatre to see what the choreographers create with the new technology provided. After the workshop, I will be happy to further discuss how to adapt my tools for any choreographer interested and develop new tools for their original needs.

Fig 2. (top center) Antonio Arvelo performing in Rose Xu’s dance piece Tārā.

Antonio Arvelo

Bard 23’ Computer Science Major
Programmer, Dancer, Multimedia Designer

Antonio and I (Rose Xu) have been collaborating on scientific research and crafting performances in the past years. As his senior thesis, Antonio is now leading a research project on the interdisciplinary possibilities of machine learning and dance performance. He is interested in using dance as both the input of his programs, as well as finding ways to generate dance as meaningful output of his original codes.

I, as Antonio's collaborator, am involved in the programming component of the project as well as the final dance performance scheduled in April 2023. The performance is designed to involve motion sensors, supported by softwares such as TensorFlow and OpenCV in Processing.