Meeting Place workshop

Today we delivered a one hour workshop for 15 Year 13 drama students (aged 17-18) at City and Islington College, London based on some of the compositional tools used in Meeting Place.

After a warm up and a short demonstration of how we used number sequences to structure simple movement, the class were set a task to create their own short pieces in small groups. The class then shared what they had made and discussed their observations as spectators. Continue reading

Unfolding an algorithmic formula

Meeting Place is a duet which plays with visually unfolding an algorithmic formula.

An algorithm is a step-by-step list of instructions that need to be followed to solve a problem. Algorithms are heard about in the context of computers, for example Google uses an algorithm to turn our search terms into a list of relevant links, and there was a lot of attention in 2011 on how algorithms are infiltrating more of our lives for example in the stock market. But there are much simpler algorithms that we use regularly, such as recipes which tell what ingredients are needed to make a dish and what steps to follow.

Systems music and algorithmic composition use such sets of instructions to make music with minimal human intervention and Meeting Place began by applying this approach to movement; with a simple algorithm that builds up a number of simple steps.

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