Author Description

American dancer and choreographer Richard Siegal is famed for his mergings of bodies and systems. In 2005 he created "If/Then," a piece for two dancers structured as a flowchart organized around gamelike rules: "If I do x, you do y or z," etc. The following year, Siegal collaborated with Hillary Goidell and Florent Berenger to create "If/Then Open Source," an online platform--"predicated on the belief that the beauty of systemic complexity resides in relinquishing individual control to the infinitely more qualified organizational abilities of community development"--whereby visitors can manipulate or add to the basic flowchart of a performance, creating new actions or dragging into new positions existing modules such as "Slap table with both hands simultaneously. Forearms on the table... Justification: An escape" and "Slap the other player as hard as you can. Justification: Violence is never justified." This DVD uses video and text excerpts to examine Siegal's work.