robot choreography and human dance INVISIBLE CITIES

A collaborative performance of computer music, dance, and robot choreography.

Composer: Michael McNabb Choreographer: Brenda Way Robotics: Gayle Curtis

This full-scale dance performance integrates human dancers and robots and features a computer music score. Performed in Memorial Auditorium, Stanford, in 1985 and at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, in 1986, the piece was developed as a collaboration between artists and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Mechanical Engineering Design Division at Stanford, the dance company ODC/San Francisco, and the Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation R&D Center in Palo Alto. There is a video program showing excerpts from each of six movements of the piece, as well as development work done in the months before the premier. This video excerpt shows the choreographers and dancers as they work with the robot and the composer to create the work. The DC Powers lab, set in the hills above the Stanford campus, then home of CCRMA, was the site of this collaborative development. _1995 gayle curtis 7/96