Blue Isomorph is a multimedia work for music, art and dance. It was conceived by twins, an artist and a composer who collaborate with a choreographer. The work uses slides of four of the artist's drawings as a sort of 'score' for improvised music and dance. The music was rehearsed many times and taped at its premiere performance, and while the original dance was also improvised, it has subsequently been choreographed. The music, art and dance are meant to be related to each other as isomorphs, or things of like shapes. In a sense, twins are isomorphs.

This proposal is for a lecture-performance. A brief lecture will be a discussion of how the visual 'score' is used as a stimulus for the improvised music, and then the music becomes the motivation for the choreography. The performance will include a tape of the original improvisation using piano, flute and percussion, projected slides, and dancers from the university's student dance ensemble.

"It is a cause for joy when a mathematician discovers an isomorph between two structures which he knows. It is often a 'bolt from the blue,' and a source of wonderment." (Douglas Hofstadter, in Goedel, Escher, Bach.) The word 'isomorphism' applies when two complex structures can be mapped onto each other, as well as to the relationship between these structures. The drawings explore the isomorphic relationships between certain geometric shapes and organic shapes in a progression that becomes increasingly more organic, or 'alive.' The music and dance go beyond simple analogous sounds and movement and participate in this progression, giving the shapes a most important attribute of organic things, that is, change - existence and growth in time. A few basic musical gestures, some 'geometric,' some 'organic,' occur repeatedly at many different levels of perception. The gestures of both the music and the dance interact, organically with each other and with the art in such a way that all become isomorphs of each other and of the individual infinitesimal gestures of each other. There are four sections to the work, each connected to a specific slide: Emergence, Searching, Struggle and Fulfillment.

This performance is best in a darkened space, as the dancers wear white, and the slides (which are abstract works of dark blues and purples) are projected on them, as well as on a screen in front of which the dancers appear. The technology needs are: a large screen, approximately 10' x 12', a Macintosh computer to run the' slide show' connected to a projector, and CD playback through a sound system. The dance floor space cannot be carpet, but wood or tile will do. The width of the floor space does not need to be much wider than the screen, but adequate depth is required. We may be able to provide the computer and projector.

The performance is 15 minutes, and the lecture will be 5-10 minutes.