On May 23rd 2020 “U&I Robotic Dance”, a series of unique Flashmobs for Robots received its first Online edition in cooperation with the International-STEM-awards in Milano. It was a great way to blend art and technology. Please enjoy the 160 Seconds long video 🙂
Who could participate?
Just as in the Live event versions of U&I people were invited to participate with any kind of robot. All you had to do was to teach your robot at least the first three sections of the “160 Seconds” choreography.
From Sunday May 10th to Sunday May 17th participants sent a video of their your robot dancing to the melody of “160 Seconds”. The videos were then edited into the big video above. Unfortunately some videos arrived too late, so the video of the youngest participant with 7 years could not be included anymore.
We collect inspiring examples on our page with the videos of the first test robots.
So show us what you can do with your own
Dance Moves – Choreographic Explanations
Here you find the detailed description of the choreography.
The first column gives you a little muscial cue and the second column has the precise timing. Column 3 contains the counts as dancers all over the world would use them at work.
With simple music that’s divisible into multiple phrases of 8 beats, dancers count succeeding phrases of 8 with a so called BIG number at the beginning of each phrase:
- ONE-2-3-4-5-6-7-8
- TWO-2-3-4-5-6-7-8
- THREE-2-3-4-5-6-7-8
- FOUR-2-3-4-5-6-7-8
The 4th column contains the detailed info.
| Phase of Dance | Time | Beats | movement for Robots |
| Intro (steam pipe rising) | 00:00 | 4 x 8 | Robots move from off-camera to point C – the Center of the Robot Dance Floor |
| Theme 1 (metal hammering sounds) | 00:16 | 2 x 8 | Pulsing movements of robots left and right |
| 00:24 | 2 x 8 | Pulsing movements of robots up and down | |
| 00:32 | 2 x 8 | Tilt the robot to the left or move only its right arm / extremity | |
| 00:40 | 2 x 8 | Tilt the robot to the right and move only its left arm | |
| Theme 2 – plastic sounds | 00:48 | 2 x 8 | spinning clockwise (to the right) in a small cicle as fast as possible 360 ° (or more) – stop the movement in the last moment |
| 00:56 | 2 x 8 | spinning anti-clockwise (to the left) in a small cicle as fast as possible 360 ° (or more) – stop the movement in the last moment | |
| 01:04 | 2 x 8 | “Eye to Eye” – Move towards the camera as close as possible (point F) – robot looks in the camera like for a selfie – if your robot can “make a face” do that 🙂 | |
| 01:12 | 2 x 8 | move back to point C |
Partners and Collaborators
“160 Seconds” is short version of “600 Seconds”. Both pieces were composed by the Swiss composer Christian Schaaf. In 1990 “600 Seconds” was created especially for a highly acrobatic pas de deux TeeKay choreographed for the Hannover Ballet, Germany. It was danced by Sonia Santiago and Matthias Warncke.
This Pas de Deux was extended into a Pas de Six with the title “Digits 1” performed by Malmö Ballet, Sweden. In 1991 an even more elaborated version “Digits 2” was presented at the International Choreographic competition in Tokyo.
If you would like to learn more about amazing combinations of arts and sciences just click here. 🙂
If you have questions or want a Robot Flash Mob at your event, feel free to send us an email to robotic-dance@kreissig.net.
Have a great day and stay safe and healthy in these crazy corona times !
This website is continuously improved. The last time this specific subpage has been updated was April 20th 2020. In case you are able to spot any typos or a blocked link, please do not hesitate and let us know by sending an email to regie(at)kreissig(dot)net including a link of the specific subsite. I appreciate your feedback and hope you will have a wonderful day :- )
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