Birds, Bodies 

Lead artist/researcher: Jane Turner
Sound & Visual Designer: Nick Rothwell
Dancers: Alexis Bradburn, Tor Spencer, Sam Bell,
Emma James, Katie Mutton, Albertina Marfil, Suzy Harvey

The dancers create new performance work from somatic material networked by individually created command triggers that generate unpredictable performance patterns. This liminal space between the known and the unknown, improvisation and choreography, is supported by an audio-visual matrix of sampled feedback responding to the performance happening. This Vj/Djing uses the latest digi-performance software Isadora with MaxMSP.

Emergence is a scientific theory that has particular relevance to interdisciplinary practice and research as it describes complex systems that organise from the bottom up, are subject to local interaction, feedback and indirect control.
This work responds to the following research questions:

• To stage a performance where the main body of the performance is 'self-generating' in compositional structure (time, spacing, ordering).
• Where the commands that trigger and respond to performance events happening in real time are stored in dancers' heads (as opposed to relayed via a computer mainframe as with eMerge (2004) described below).
• That these commands are individually derived by each dancer - are self-generated.
• To explore integrating interactive audio-visual systems into the live performance matrix.