1. Marwa Muhammad's Senior Project

2. Visualizing Dance Formations: The Choreographer's Tool

2.1. Project Proposal

Adviser: Dianna Xu

The goal of this project is to develop software to help in dance choreography in making and visualizing formations (the position of the different dancers) that are an essential component in many dance forms like hip-hop, bhangra etc. The software is meant to help choreographers who are making dance pieces for a team of several people; it will help the dancers understand where their positions should be and how they should move in different parts in the dance and what each formation is supposed to look like.

Figure 1 shows an initial idea of how the software might look1. The user will enter the maximum number of dancers that are to be in a dance, and that number of dancers (represented by colored circles) will show up on the left-hand side. Based on that number, the right-hand side will give suggestions for common formations – this will take symmetry into consideration and it might be fed some common and popular formation ideas as well. The bottom will show a bar for each dancer, and it will be possible to view the movement of a particular dancer instead of everyone, if desired. The interface will be a drag and drop interface, where the user can place the dancers in certain positions in the main screen in the middle. The interesting part will be in creating transitions for changing from one formation to the next. For example, if the user wants 10 dancers to be in two straight lines for 8 seconds, and then have another 8 seconds to transition into a formation of a triangle, the software will suggest the transition based on certain rules the user can set up (no collision, each dancer takes the shortest available path, etc.)

Since the graphics will be relatively simple and in 2D, I believe it is not necessary to use OpenGL. I will look into Processing programming language and hope to be able to use that to create the software. Thus, the end product is a software to help choreographers and dancers visualize dance formations.

1 Image taken from Sunthar Premakumar, University of Pennsylvania

2.2. Weekly Project Progress

2.2.1. Week of 02/06:

Progress:

• Started making the program in Processing
• Can display circles for the dancers (not positioned completely accurately though)
• Met with Linda Caruso Haviland, realized I should bring down the maximum number of dancers by a lot (she suggested to 6)
• Pitch

Failures:

• Can't figure out how to take user's input from the screen
• Contacted Ira Greenberg, no response yet
• Found a similar software created by Rahul Kak, but it does not work anymore. Contacted him multiple ways multiple times in vain
Lessons learned:
• Narrow down scope of project

Next steps:

• Being able to get user's input

2.2.2. Week of 02/13:

Progress:

• Got Ira's response. Now am able to get user's input and have the circles show up in the right part of the box
• Met with Professor Donnay from Math Department
• Met with Mady from Dance department

Failures:

• Still no response from Rahul Kak

Lessons learned:

• I need to sit down and really think about how to make the transitions work - whether I want it to be the easiest math solution, or a more aesthetically pleasing outcome. I will probably go with the more easily computable solution.

Next steps:

• Drag and drop interface

2.3. Week of 02/20

Progress:

• Drag interface

Failures:

• No dropping, it is just a drag interface currently

Lessons learned:

• My algorithm is not going to work. I have to create objects out of each of the "dancer dots" - otherwise dropping will not work.

Next steps:

• Change the algorithm completely.

2.4. Week of 02/27

Progress:

• Object-oriented * Each dancer has a different color (max 9)
• Drag and drop
• Cannot drag dancers out of bounds

Failures:

• Did not write as much of the thesis as I wanted to

Next steps:

• Thesis
• Time stamps