Dance

Dance is a performance art form consisting of purposefully selected sequences of human movement. This movement has aesthetic and symbolic value, and is acknowledged as dance by performers and observers within a particular culture. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoire of movements, or by its historical period or place of origin.

An important distinction is to be drawn between the contexts of theatrical and participatory dance, although these two categories are not always completely separate; both may have special functions, whether social, ceremonial, competitive, erotic, martial, or sacred/liturgical. Others disciplines of human movement are sometimes said to have a dance-like quality, including martial arts, gymnastics, figure skating, synchronized swimming and many other forms of athletics.

Performance and participation

Theatrical dance, also called performance or concert dance, is intended primarily as a spectacle, usually a performance upon a stage by virtuoso dancers. It often tells a story, perhaps using mime, costume and scenery, or else it may simply interpret the musical accompaniment, which is often specially composed. Examples are western ballet and modern dance, Classical Indian dance and Chinese and Japanese song and dance dramas. Most classical forms are centred upon dance alone, but performance dance may also appear in opera and other forms of musical theatre.

Randomness

Randomness is the lack of pattern or predictability in events. A random sequence of events, symbols or steps has no order and does not follow an intelligible pattern or combination. Individual random events are by definition unpredictable, but in many cases the frequency of different outcomes over a large number of events (or "trials") is predictable. For example, when throwing two dice, the outcome of any particular roll is unpredictable, but a sum of 7 will occur twice as often as 4. In this view, randomness is a measure of uncertainty of an outcome, rather than haphazardness, and applies to concepts of chance, probability, and information entropy.

The fields of mathematics, probability, and statistics use formal definitions of randomness. In statistics, a random variable is an assignment of a numerical value to each possible outcome of an event space. This association facilitates the identification and the calculation of probabilities of the events. Random variables can appear in random sequences. A random process is a sequence of random variables whose outcomes do not follow a deterministic pattern, but follow an evolution described by probability distributions. These and other constructs are extremely useful in probability theory and the various applications of randomness.

Wayne McGregor

Wayne McGregor CBE (born 1970) is a British choreographer of contemporary modern dance. His work is known for its particular vocabulary of movement, for its integration of dance with film and visual art, and for its incorporation of computer technology and biological science. He is the Artistic Director of Wayne McGregor Random Dance, Resident Company at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London and the Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet, appointed 2006; He is Professor of Choreography at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and holds an honorary doctor of science degree from Plymouth University. He was the government’s first Youth Dance Champion, appointed 2008. In 2004 McGregor was a Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge. His work continues to explore the relationship between movement and brain science.

McGregor has created new work for international companies including La Scala Theatre Ballet of Milan; Paris Opera Ballet; Nederlands Dans Theatre; San Francisco Ballet; Stuttgart Ballet; New York City Ballet; The Australian Ballet; and English National Ballet of London. He served as Movement Director for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and choreographed music videos for Radiohead ("Lotus Flower") and Atoms for Peace ("Ingenue"). Woolf Works for The Royal Ballet was his first full-length piece for the company, drawing on the writings of Virginia Woolf with music by Max Richter. McGregor premiered Tree of Codes, a new contemporary ballet created in collaboration with artist Olafur Eliasson and producer/composer Jamie xx at the Manchester International Festival (which commissioned the work) on Friday 3 July 2015. Inspired by the Jonathan Safran Foer artwork of the same name, Tree of Codes featured dancers from his own company with soloists from the Paris Opera Ballet.

K-pop

K-pop (an abbreviation of Korean pop;Hangul: 케이팝; RR: kei-pap) is a musical genre originating in South Korea that is characterized by a wide variety of audiovisual elements. Although it comprises all genres of "popular music" within South Korea, the term is more often used in a narrower sense to describe a modern form of South Korean pop music covering a wide range of styles including dance-pop, pop ballad, electronic, rock, metal,hip-hop music and R&B.

In 1992, modern K-pop was ushered in with the formation of Seo Taiji and Boys, whose successful experimentation with different music styles had sparked a paradigm shift in the music industry of South Korea. As a result, the integration of foreign musical elements has now become a common practice in the K-pop industry.

First gaining popularity in East Asia in the late 1990s, K-pop entered the Japanese music market towards the turn of the 21st century. In the late 2000s, it grew from a musical genre into a subculture among teenagers and young adults of East and Southeast Asia. Currently, the spread of K-pop to other regions of the world, via the Korean Wave, is seen in parts of Latin America,Northeast India,North Africa, the Middle East,Eastern Europe and immigrant enclaves of the Western world.