Contemporary Dance
- Title: For Claude Shannon
- Concept: Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard
- Collaboration: Music Composition – Sound Design – Computer Music Design
- Duration: ~70mn
- For: Four Dancers
- World Premiere: Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson, Paris, the 22nd and 23rd of January 2016
- Performance: The Kitchen, New York, US, the 18th to the 20th of February 2016
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Performance: ArtDanThé, Théâtre de Vanves, Vanves, France, the 26th of March 2016
This new “choreographic machine” by Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard broadens research into the link between movement and text by drawing on the musicality of syntax. As suggested by the title, which is an homage to the father of information theory, the choreographers also draw inspiration from the proximity between the notion of information and that of redundancy and noise. Repetition allows them to work toward a physics of attention and attempt to leave a mark on the memory of the spectators. It is by playing on the uncertainty of this repetition, by “inserting disorder where order reins, and vice versa,” that they achieve a strangeness in their dance, whose almost mechanical quality constantly spirals toward other dimensions.
I programmed a music synthesizer, that produces new music every performance. The music is created with clicks and noises and old radio effects, which brings us back to the time of Claude Shannon, pioneer of the first communication channels. The synthesizer is controlled by high-level features like the entropy, for example, that produces unissons or disorders in the music.
