Aperiodic patterns are not quite random but never quite repeat either. They have cropped up in art, maths and science for centuries. They have been found in the tiling on ancient Muslim temples and the crystalline microstructure of a meteorite, and they have been explored by intellectual greats from Johannes Kepler to Hao Wang and Roger Penrose.
Here we take our audience across the world and through the ages - from the world of shapes, sums and mathematical abstraction to the lab with experiments and simulations of quasicrystals - to feast your eyes, ears and mind on beautiful ideas using ballet, breakdancing and the pretty fractal patterns of Hofstadter's butterfly. Think Misty Copeland meets Beat Street, Penrose, graphene and gorgeous ancient middle eastern tiling.
With Aperiodic we are aiming for a kind of maths and physics panto, meaning that it is intended to work on a number of levels – those a little more familiar with the ideas might make more connections with the ideas laid out in the pre-show briefing (there are visuals to nudge these) others may make fewer, and even if all the maths and physics goes straight over your head we would hope you walk away feeling you have seen something beautiful that came from some beautiful ideas.
Aperiodic is performed a the Trinity Centre in Bristol Thursday 11th July and the Mission Theatre in Bath Friday 26th July.
Workshops precede both performances (5:45-6:45pm in Bristol and 5-6pm in Bath) for those who would like to have a go at maths and physics by way of Hofstadter's butterfly for themselves. All ages and levels of expertise in all things welcome.
Here's a snippet of Wave-Particle Duality, which introduces a flavour of the quantum effects that come into play when aperiodic structures get tiny
This replaces the intermediate/advanced classes we’ve holding at the studio. Exercises are based in classical Cecchetti technique (waxing a shade contemporary at times) and set to a playlist of guilty pleasures from pop, classical, world, rock and soul.
Join us on zoom every Friday at 11am to feel strength, grace and joy – link:
A quaranH.I.T workout working with dancers for stability, balance and strength, each 10 second break please pause the video and then come back, And apologies for certain lags in sound, But get the burn and enjoy!!
Snippets
If you just want a quick taste of dance theatre before you get back to the grind or other endeavours, you might like to check some of these out (more trailers and festival appearances on our channel)
2020 is our tenth anniversary – this is some snippets from what we got up to when we first formed 10 years ago: https://youtu.be/UBRdH9181Rk - oh those days...
Bristol to Broadway
– snippets from our first narrative production, first touring (first came Bath to Broadway) and our first bookings in full spec theatres:
Our WW2 commemorative piece seemed to send our audiences on a rollercoaster of tears and tenderness. We weren’t able to film the any of the performances themselves but thanks to Roger Barnes we have some great footage from the tech run:
In partnership with Breathing Fire we focused on bringing our audiences the tumult of emotions the lead characters experienced. Again no coverage of the live performance and unfortunately we didn’t have Roger help so the video quality’s not the best but if you missed it and your curious here’s a never-before released, warts n all version for sneak peek:
We collaborated with the Trinity’s Edson Burton for script and Visual Thinking’s Sandra Barefoot for the BSL input to produce, as well as additional direction from Ben Nash as dramaturg and Mark Smith from Deaf Men Dancing for tips on choreographing with sign language. Shakespeare’s plays are notoriously enduring but this performance came shortly after the Brexit referendum and proved particularly true to contemporary life. Thanks Matt Seow for the footage.
photos: courtesy Derwood Photography