During SZOB|A|R|T, a German/Hungarian artist collaboration that took place in an abandoned building in the centre of Budapest, resident artist Loes Bogers organised a week of livecoding and dance improvisation jams. The idea behind these jams was to facilitate a place, the knowledge, equipment, skills and a creative atmosphere for dancers and coders to get together and create synergies in improvisation...

Live coding is a type of performance where programmers show off their visual coding skills in realtime. Completely live, you see animated graphics come to life in projections, while a group of programmers punches in code to entertain their audience with a (audio)visual spectacle. A group of coders from Kitchen Budapest have been experimenting with this recently, especially with implementing the Kinect in the Fluxus environment. Kinect captures movement data in 3D using infrared cameras, which makes it a perfect combination with dance.

The aim of this project therefore, was to find a way to get these improvisers to work together and experiment freely during 3-hour jams, not entirely dissimilar to the jams that are common practice in a dance style known as contact improvisation. Eight local dancers – many of them with a contact improv or contemporary dance background – worked with us during the week, resulting in a demonstration at the opening of week 3 at SZOB|A|R|T.

This setup put no pressure on choreographing a stage performance, but stayed closer to the traditions of contact improvisation and livecoding: focusing on the live interaction between all the actors: live music, the several coders, a number of projections, and the moving bodies of the dancers. The group is now investigating the possibility of organising more jams and performance workshops in the future.

O R G A N I S E D BY
Loes Bogers

C O D E R S
Zoltán Csík-Kovacs, Krisztián Gergely, Gáspár Hajdu, Gábor Papp

D A N C E R S
Gábor Czap, Kornél Biharvári, Szilvia Németh, Maria Paz Ramirez T., Mária Roskó, Borbála Anna Simányi, Gábor Török, Dóra Zsámbokréty

M U S I C
András Molnar, Andrés Ortega, Tamás Marquetant

S P E C I A L T H A N K S T O

SZOB|A|R|T organisers and the Goethe Institute, Kitchen Budapest, Emöke Bada, Victor Diaz Barrales