By Verena Specht-Ronique

We used a sorting network for a street performance that was performed in front of the Frankfurt stock market. The idea was to juxtapose the homeless of the city with bankers. The slogan of the performance was: It‘s always worth looking behind the façade. Our aim was to look for a way to unmask or break both the social roles of the homeless and the bankers. We showed by very simple means a theatrical metamorphosis from a homeless person to a banker and vice versa.

One major concern of the conference of Creative Mathematical Sciences Communication Computer Maths: Curiosity Art, Story held at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia in August 2013, was to strengthen the importance of communicating maths sciences to children, teachers and interested people and discussing innovative methodology by other means than school curricula. One possible method of exploration that I am interested in is that of Story Telling and Performance; using theatrical elements (body, expression, language, emotion). By putting a simple performance into the framework of a sorting network I tried to go beyond its functional level by creating a story line around the algorhythm used. Even political implications could be shown through this combination of maths and theatre. I used the sorting network with 6 input lines, 6 output lines and on each comparator node were 2 input and 2 output lines.

Metamorphosis from a homeless person to a banker and vice versa
In November and December 2013 I worked with a group of 12 apprentices for office administration. One part of their apprenticeship was a workshop for ,Creative Learning‘ that I was asked to run. The aim of this workshop was to develop strategies and tools for ways of learning beyond their training base of office accountancy, bookkeeping, personnel management or computer applications etc. Theatre work promotes personal development on various levels. Not only creativity is furthered, but also communication and rhetoric skills, learning about body posture, developing confidence and emotional intelligence. Best applied: in a performance.

Within this workshop we developed a street performance that was performed in front of the Frankfurt stock market. Since it was just before Christmas the apprentices wanted to do something about charity. The idea was to juxtapose the homeless of the city with bankers. Through this idea the place of performance was chosen. The slogan of the performance was: It‘s always worth looking behind the façade. Our aim was to look for a way to unmask or break both the social roles of the homeless and the bankers. By working out a choreography we tried to show by very simple means a theatrical metamorphosis from a homeless person to a banker and vice versa. For this I chose the sorting network as a perfect tool to bring across our message, also because the performance took place in front of the Börse. Through choreographed movement the young women were moving through the network portraying first the homeless people then transforming into business women on each comparator node within the network.

In front of the Frankfurt Stock Market
One must imagine a square with lots of people crossing, a Christmas atmosphere, right in front of the Frankfurt stock market. One by one six of the girls appeared from different directions each with a white mask over their face and a blanket over their shoulders. In their hands they had placards, on which a number from 1 to 6 was written (required for the sorting network) but used within a sentence that one could possibly find on a placard from homeless people, e.g. Need money to feed my 3 children etc.

After the 6 girls had crouched close to each other on the floor I asked for a volunteer from the audience/public that had started to form around the performance space. I announced that „This is a ,Homeless Sorting Network‘ – We have too many of them in Frankfurt, but you‘ll be surprised to see what happens once the homeless have gone through this specific but wonderful and very special sorting process.“ So I asked one person to take one masked homeless person after the other and place them mixed up at the starting point of the network.

Once they stood in a row loud music started and the 6 girls in the sorting network started their choreography. Within the movement they were only allowed to look at each other’s placards (not talk) with their numbers, and since someone from the audience could place them in any mixed order they had to be sure of the rules of the network. So as in the sorting network used in Darwin when doing Maths on the Green, regardless of how a pair of values arrived at a comparator node, the smaller value went one way, the higher value the other way. So being in a rhythm the girls had no time to talk to each other; just to look at the other person’s sign and to take either left or right, depending on their number. They were bound to a very strict movement.

The theatrical elements: On each comparative node they changed their appearance slightly. A smartphone appeared from below the blanket, the blanket was taken off, finally the mask, etc. Having emerged at the final stop being in the correct sorted order of 1 to 6 they were all dressed as business women (all in black costumes with yellow ties). On a specific count within the music they held up their cardboard signs, turned them around where our slogan was written for the audience to read: It‘s always worth looking behind the façade.
While these 6 girls stepped down from the network and started giving away little papers with Christmas messages to the audience, the 6 other girls, dressed as business women right from the start and who until this point were a part of the audience had started to put on their masks and stepped onto the network in the opposite direction. Instead of getting sorted, they moved back into mixed numbers, while putting on blankets, taking the placards etc. ending up as homeless again and disappearing one by one into the public in the Plaza.