About this demo

The company is invented

Icosa is a theme demonstration. The company, the dancers, the works and the venue are made up, and nobody is performing anything.

The notation is not

The kinesphere here is a real icosahedron: twelve unit vectors at the cyclic permutations of (0, ±1, ±φ), thirty edges derived by distance rather than typed out, and twenty faces by Euler. It was checked before anything was built on it — every vertex has exactly five neighbours, the six named pairs are true antipodes, and each of Laban’s three planes comes out as a rectangle whose sides are in the golden ratio.

The Effort table is Laban’s own: weight, time and space give eight combinations and all eight are named, with flow deliberately excluded from the naming because Laban builds the actions from the other three.

The photographs

All CC0. There are no portraits of the company anywhere on this site, and that is deliberate rather than an omission — every photograph here is of movement or of a stage, because a dance company is not a set of faces and because we could not use anybody’s face honestly in a demonstration.

The field

The moving background on the front page is a WebGPU compute pass over a buffer of twenty-four thousand particles, whose attractors are the projected reach points of the work’s own notated phrase. It falls back to a WebGL2 solve of the same field, and to the still photograph below that. WebGPU is a secure-context API, so a preview served over plain http will report webgl2 in the footer — correctly.