For Patricia

For Patricia

Dance and Music Performance + AI

  • Choreography: Sarah Fdili Alaoui 
  • Composition: John Sullivan 
  • Dancers: Sarah Fdili-Alaoui and Bartek Ostrowski
  • Musicians: John Sullivan and Léo Chédin 
  • AI development: John Sullivan, Sarah Fdili Alaoui and Léo Chédin
  • Technical Mentorship and development support: MIREVI (mirevi.de)
  • Graphic Design: Diane-Line Farré
  • Video and Documentation: Mircea Topoleanu
  • Production and Tech support: CNDB (https://cndb.ro/)

“For Patricia” is an ode to postmodernism in Dance. “For Patricia”, or for Trisha, is in honor of one of the inventors of postmodernism Trisha Brown (1936-2017) whose choreographic style challenged traditional notions of dance and pushed the boundaries of dance by expanding what movement and choreography meant. 
Just like Brown explored choreographic structures such as accumulation, repeating, and reversing, etc., we explore ways to use compositional structures generated through Artificial Intelligence (AI) to organize simple choreographic and sonic patterns. We see AI as providing scaffolding to the piece rather than taking on the role of an interactive scenography. It creates the score that the dancers and musicians perform on stage. Each show is a renewed piece where both dancers and musicians perform a new score that the AI conducts them to perform. These scores are displayed visually on stage for the audience to decipher how the dance and the music unfold while maintaining a sense of ambiguity that provides an aesthetic experience of movement and music for their own sake. The piece is a quartet between two dancers, Sarah Fdili Alaoui and Bartosz Ostrowski, and two musicians, John Sullivan (piano and electronics) and Léo Chédin (drums and electronics).

Video of the trailer : 

Video of the whole performance (work in progress)  : 

Video of the making off  : 

Video of the artists talk : 

With the support of 

Modina Consortium, Winner of the Modina residency program : https://modina.eu/projects/for-patricia/

INRIA, Université Paris Saclay, CNRS, Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London

Performed at :