Chaos by Design
As studio directors know all too well, it is not. Hundreds of students in dozens of routines guarantee that designing a program with no dancers in back-to-back numbers and with enough time for costume changes can be a nightmare in itself.
Tale as Old as Time
2002 was in the Middle Ages of dance studio software capability. It was a time when artistic directors would still spend hours with 3×5 cards spread out on dance floors, trying to determine recital orders based on much squinting and hope.
That’s when the original Recital Conflict Manager was born, first as a raw computer algorithm to help one dance school and then as a fledgling program that could be used by studio staff with no handholding.
Spread the Love Around
The newly-minted program, capable of condensing days and weeks of trial and error into a single design session, was shared with other dance schools, maturing in capability as its user base grew across countries and continents.
The need for such a valuable tool was clear, and the program was widely appreciated. But there was one frequent request that the Recital Conflict Manager could not fulfill: “Can it create a recital order by itself?”
Invented It
Twenty years after the introduction of the Recital Conflict Manager, a new challenge was undertaken: can an automated recital order generator indeed become a reality? The first one, even though dance software is eons past its Middle Ages?
The answer is yes. It’s RCM AutoSeq, the next generation and rebranding of the original Recital Conflict Manager that will, at the click of a button, create recital orders that meet an artistic director’s exact specifications.
Here’s hoping that it will be equally well-received and appreciated by the dance world.
