TimeMap #3 Come see our show

Yesterday was the premiere of TimeMap #3, the recoil dance performance to open a new space in copenhagen, Dansehallerne.

Tina Tarpgaard and i have been working on the performance since december last year, and along with a team of dancers and helping hands we are now proudly presenting the show, and humbly hoping for a lot of people to show up. I’m really happy about the result, and the premiere was great.

I have been programming like crazy. In the show, dancers are dancing with words. Using Infrared tracking i make paragraphs collide, collapse, fall apart and fly when the dancers hit them. All words are written live on stage by Gritt Uldall-Jessen. She’s using her own laptop, connected to the Mac Pro via wifi, and writing in a custom text editor, that spews osc.

I’ve learned a lot. Very early we decided to use the open source real time physics simulation library bullet for the words. I am not schooled in math, so there’s been quite a lot to catch up on in the process, just to make things react to when they hit eachother. Rotations in 3d was one of the breakthroughs in my head, and now i know quarternions. i hope.

I’ve also learned that in a project this big, i was stupid to be the only artist without full-time assistance. I’ve had good help from Jonas jongejan in the early design phase, but since them i’ve been extremely busy, and had to move into the set for the last month of rehearsals. My apartment is a mess, and most importantly there’s a lot of artistic choises and ideas that i had to leave behind in the run-up, because i was the one person who cued the visuals, maintained the software, and tried to keep an artistic oversight. The light designer had both an assistant, and a dedicated cuer – and he’s ‘just’ blinking the lights and playing the music. So lesson learned.

Now everything works, and the code is frozen. And i can sit back every night and enjoy our wonderful dancers, great text author, music and light. Just pressing the spacebar in Qlab, while my dirty code does what it’s supposed to.