| | Posted by Tony Schultz

This past Sunday the Sarah Lawrence dance department participated in College Showcase: Works by Tharp, at the Joyce. The project brought together dancers from five New York colleges to perform works by Twyla Tharp. The picture above was taken during the Sarah Lawrence tech rehearsal using a slow exposure to capture the movement.

Barnard College, Eight Jelly Rolls (Jelly Roll Morton)
Hunter College, Country Dances - Excerpt (Traditional American)
The Julliard School, Deuce Coupe - Excerpt (The Beach Boys)
Marymount Manhattan College, The Fugue
Sarah Lawrence College, The Fugue (lecture demonstration)

This was a fun project to be a part of. Read the New York Times review here.  Sarah Richison and I presented a video from a computational project we had been working on. I describe this project in a previous post. The video was shown in the lobby as the audience entered. It looked good on their fancy HD screen and I was happy that Sarah and I had re-shot all the footage to make everything look as crisp and clean as possible. Unfortunately I didn’t post about my showing beforehand since it was unclear, up until the last minute, whether we would be able to show the work. Intellectual property issues clouded things and the work had to be renamed Dancing Markov Networks. I didn’t mind the change however since it gave a more scientific description of what the project actually was.

Earlier in the week Sarah and I had the pleasure of presenting our project at the Joyce Soho during the last part of a Dance Talks presentation by noted dance historian and critic Marcia Siegal. Talking with Marcia Siegal was an honor and a pleasure. She is an incredibly accomplish writer, academic and thinker in the field of dance and dance studies. We were a bit star struck. Sarah even brought one of her books for Marcia to sign. It was great to talk about our work with such an engaged audience. I definitely hope to keep in touch with Marcia Siegel in the future. She had a great enthusiasm for exploring ideas about dance through computational methods. It always feels good when people take genuine interest in your work.