‘Mud Water IV’ Imagines Turfing in an AI-Pushed Future

The solid is made up of a few of the most extraordinary dancers within the Bay Space turfing neighborhood, together with Alante “Tae-Ninja” Corridor, Arthur “Dopeyfresh” Gardner, Gary “Icecold3000” Morgan, Jarell “Skeeter” Boyd, Charlie, Michael “Noname” Chicago II, Shaka Perdue and Telice Summerfield. Le requested her solid questions on their experiences within the turfing neighborhood, changing into an middleman for his or her reflections as they ready for the present over the previous yr. She thought of how their perceptions, their participation within the motion, would possibly probably feed into DanceGPT — and the way algorithms, in flip, may change or rework the tradition.

At Dance Mission Theater, the ultimate manufacturing consists of turfing, storytelling and movement graphics projected behind the dancers on stage. The whole construction of the present is documentary-esque, a purposeful response to the fast pace of information and image-consumption by each social media and machine-learning platforms. Audiences watch because the dancers try to supply — in the end — a definition of turfing.

As I sat by a rehearsal, each motion modified barely with each repetition, which was refreshing and barely unnerving — a selected glide or articulation was particular to every second. Equally, the sheer great thing about turfing comes from the shortcoming to include it. May an AI seize and doc, with precision, the historical past and cultural influence of turfing? The brief reply is: by no means.

‘It takes the entire neighborhood’

If know-how can not maintain a dance motion, possibly a dancer’s physique can function a kind of archive? The physique remembers — nevertheless it additionally forgets. It inevitably evolves and ages, which could not make it probably the most dependable entity for storing recollections and actions. As dancers and dance kinds evolve, actions develop into second nature or are omitted, particularly if a gesture doesn’t really feel prefer it has a soul to it.

Le got here up within the popping scene of San José, nevertheless it was a inventive setting, she says, of a selected time, place and folks. “You may placed on the clothes and the apparel. You may play the music of the ’80s or ’90s, however primarily you’ll be able to’t recreate it,” she says. “You may’t reenact it as a result of it takes the entire neighborhood for a tradition to exist. After we speak concerning the archive being the physique, sure, it’s the physique. However it’s also the our bodies — the numerous, throughout the neighborhood.”