Contra dances are easy to dance but difficult to choreograph. To write good dances, choreographers must consider timing, positioning, flow between moves, and the complicated geometry of ensuring that the dance will work for groups of any size, whether 8 or 800 dancers. The Dancerator’s algorithm uses Markov chains, recursion, backtracking, and a host of heuristics to generate new, “legal” contra choreography. The newly generated dance is presented alongside a visualizer for users to preview what the dance would look like in real life. Each dance is saved to a database as it is created so that users can bookmark it for future use.
Dances written by the app were performed at Kinetech Arts’ Dance Hack Day 2015.
Tech Stacks
SQLite, SQLAlchemy, Python, Flask, Jinja, Javascript, JQuery, Bootstrap, NetworkX.