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Susan Marshall: My goal is to just to find out what does happen. We’ve never done it with more than 20 people.
Naomi Leonard: We're going to get some things that are quite unpredictable tonight.
Naomi Leonard: She sent me an e-mail asking me you know maybe this was a crazy idea, but would I be interested
Naomi Leonard: in trying out some of these ideas with dancers… people who have been trained to be physically
Naomi Leonard: aware? I love ideas like that, so I said yes.
Naomi Leonard: I think that we were inspired by the beauty and the complexity of animals in motion and
Naomi Leonard: bird flocks and fish schools. The basic rules of flocking are ones that have to
Naomi Leonard: do with cohesion and repulsion. So this is the way biologists understand that animals
Naomi Leonard: stay together in a group and avoid colliding. And then when there’s more information in
Naomi Leonard: the group, say some of the animals see a threat approaching or are attracted to a food source,
Naomi Leonard: then you can see this beautiful ripple through the group. So, the first to respond maybe make
Naomi Leonard: a sharp move and that affects their neighbors, and that affects their neighbors, and so on.
Naomi Leonard: Some of the things that we'll learn tonight have to do with the fact that you take these
Naomi Leonard: ideas, and you put them in a different space with a larger number of people -- with people
Naomi Leonard: who’ve been trained and people who haven’t been trained for more than five or 10 minutes
Naomi Leonard: on the basic rules of flocking -- and you get something very different.
Susan Marshall: So, the Atelier is this wonderful program at Princeton that allows professional artists
Susan Marshall: to collaborate on a work, on a creative process, in the company of students. And the Atelier
Susan Marshall: enters into this with the idea that the process of creating an artwork is going to be rewarding
Susan Marshall: for these students at whatever level they engage with it. The students have heavily
Susan Marshall: shaped and designed what we’re doing here tonight and they’re performing in it as well.
Naomi Leonard:: So, we actually used a sort of a computer simulator that a student, Willa Chen, developed this summer.
Willa Chen: When I started creating the simulator,
Willa Chen: the whole class was just a spark of an idea. So, I helped to shape the class in many ways
Willa Chen: as we experimented with dancers to see how they followed rules, how they responded to
Willa Chen: rules. I am a dancer. I’ve been dancing since the age of six. And, that’s partially
Willa Chen: why I got interested in this project. I thought, "Wow, I love dancing, I love computer programming,
Willa Chen: and this just combines the two perfectly."
Susan Marshall: The whole process with the students was a big artistic exploration. Obviously, we are
Susan Marshall: not fish; we are not birds, so we have limitations and strengths that are different from those
Susan Marshall: populations. The wonderful thing that happens with fish and birds, of course, is they
Susan Marshall: get to occupy three-dimensional space so that even simple patterns take on this beautiful,
Susan Marshall: complex patterning that feels like space is folding.
Susan Marshall: Were on one plane and we’re not silvery
Susan Marshall: on one side. And when you look at us from above, we only have a point. We’re not long
Susan Marshall: and wide. So, we have different physical attributes, and so that is one of the things we needed
Susan Marshall: to investigate: How can we create something that’s visually exciting with the attributes
Susan Marshall: that we have on a single plane?
Susan Marshall: This is a pretty rare opportunity to be able to have a creation supported of this nature
Susan Marshall: in a university setting where you can take a risk on an unknown creative outcome with
Susan Marshall: the support of students, and that be a course.
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