| | Posted by Tony Schultz
Last month the students of the Sarah Lawrence College dance department performed Twyla Tharp’s The Fugue as the culmination of last semester’s performance project. This was done under the direction of Jennifer Way and Tom Rawe who both danced with Twyla Tharp Dance form the mid seventies to 1988. From time to time they had assistance from Sara Rudner, director of the Sarah Lawrence College dance and former Tharp dancer, and Rose Marie Wright, another former Tharp dancer and original performer of The Fugue.

The dance, originally choreographed in 1970, consists of several 20 count phrases which are recombined in spatial, temporal and logistic variation. In the spirit of The Fugue, Sarah Richison (one of our graduate students) and I created a piece of software called the Fugue Writer that generates new variations from the so-called “generic fugue material”. This choreographic interface allows the user to write their own fugue. The software enforces the restriction that only spatially continuous dances can be generated. This project was basically an interactive version of Dance Graph built around Tharp’s dance, with the added possibility of retrograde (time-reversed) movement.

Above is a picture of the interface. At the top, the lexicon of possible phrases are played. The center pull-down menu allows the user to choose possible phrases, in forward or retrograde. As new phrases are added the pull-down menu is repopulated with movement that is allowed to follow, to enforce continuity. Once the dance is written it can be played in the viewing window. During playback the current phrase is shown in the lower left of viewing window. This program is fun to play with. It definitely give me more ideas for other, more sophisticated, dance machines.

At the showing of The Fugue last month, Ginger Montel, the Associate Director of Twyla Tharp Productions, asked Sarah Richison and I to submit documentation of the Fugue Writer to the Twyla Tharp archives. Over the past month Sarah and I have been cleaning up the interface and rerecording the underlying fugue material. It has been great working on this project though both Sarah and I are glad it is over. Next week is spring break so we are ready to relax. We plan to display this work at The Joyce in May. I will keep everyone posted.

Since I do not own the intellectual property rights for The Fugue I cannot show any samples. You will just have to come see it for yourself in May. You will also be able to see the live performance. The Sarah Lawrence College dancers in this project are Hadar Ahuvia, Vivi Amranand, Laurie Benoit, Ashley Byler, Mary Chris DeBelina, Sarah Gottlieb, Alexa Hazelton, Belinda He, Moriah Mason, Jeremy Pheiffer, Ariel Pierce, Annie Rudnik, Jules Skloot and Jake Szczypek.

See you in May at The Joyce!