STOCOS

Stocos ends up stirring the sensory faculties of the audience down to their very innards, producing sensations which have yet to be identified. You have to hear it.

- BÀRBARA RAUBERT, TIME OUT (09/10/2011)

Muriel Romero, the former first soloist of Munich's Bayerisches Staatsballet and the Grand Théatre of Geneva, amongst others, has now created one of the most intriguing Spanish contemporary dance shows of recent times. Stocos is the closing work of a trilogy (which began with Acusmatrix and Catexis) focused on the connection between contemporary dance and new technologies. Stocos is an interdisciplinary project that combines randomly-determined processes and artificial intelligence-based simulations in order to create behavioural dependencies and aesthetic relationships between dancers, simulated entities, music, visuals and light. As a result, the stage becomes a responsive environment whose visual and acoustic properties emerge from the mutual interactions between the dancers, randomly-determined sound synthesis and the simulation of artificial intelligence specially designed for the production.

In Stocos, the dance element combines pre-choreographed and improvised sequences for both the human and virtual dancers. The music is generated via mathematical functions of probability which synthesise directly the different sounds of the piece. These functions define some of the movements of the dancers and affect the visual simulation of swarm behaviour. The spatial movements of the music are developed via a ring of eight loudspeakers which surround both the stage and the audience. The visual imagery is generated in real time and projected continuously on to the back of the stage, the stage floor and the dancers' bodies in an attempt to create a visual and behavioural continuity between the natural properties of space, its inhabitants and the simulated entities.

The artistry and energy of the work, accompanied by a visual force of stunning beauty, a purposefulness and impeccable sound achieve a perfect symbiosis between the movement of the dancing body, the audio artistry and the interactive, constantly-changing projected images which flood the stage.

http://www.pablopalacio.com/SONIC_DANCE.html