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MUSIC
Tonight you're going to see the result of a workshop that occurred between the UNL Dance senior majors,
and computer science students working with these robotically-controlled helicopters.
LAUGHTER
...with Pilobolus.
Well, Carrick Detweiler from Engineering, was a student at MIT,
so he was part of the seminal creation of the piece.
He got a job here. He contacted me. He said, "have you ever heard of Pilobolus?"
I fell on the floor. I said "of course."
And he said, "do you think we could bring them? Could we do this?"
We contacted the Lied Center, and all of the sudden we have this beautiful, unbelievably unusual collaboration.
We communicate mainly through movement. And we're going to be asking you to communication with your robots through movement.
So to get that started, we have some group warm-up exercises that we do.
I can't see them.
It's kind of a collaborative experience between dancers and engineers, interacting in each other's worlds.
I believe our advisor purposely told us that we were not going to be dancing, just to get us here. And we found out later that we were going to be dancing. But it was a lot of fun.
We really were looking at how we can give personality to this thing... this inanimate object.
So we got them to like... make them laugh.. .make them be sad... not just these cool things that fly around.
But they have these personalities that you just have to tease out.
If you put your hand under it, it's going to go up. So, it's going to go away from you.
which may be something interesting to look at.
I still have scars to this day from getting nicked from the robots.
But you would think that you'd feel alone on stage, but just as another human being, these robots have an equal amount of presence on stage.
Master classes are crucial for any graduate or undergraduate program
because it gives the students a taste of what's out there in the world.
So, it's really great that they're getting these international and national experiences
right here in their hometown, or their home "college town" and it just enhances their experience 100-fold.
MUSIC
I'm not worried about the dancers. I know that we all know what we're doing.
But there are time we have to improv at lot because we don't know what the robots are going to do.
Every time the dance is different. It's never the same, literally. Every time I've done it, it's been different.
But it's fun at the same time. It gives us a little bit of an edge.