A PDDL Representation for Contradance Composition

Classical planning representations such as PDDL are primarily designed for goal-oriented problem solving, but some tasks such as creative composition lack a well defined goal. Structured performing arts, despite lacking a specific goal for their composition tasks, can be sufficiently expressed as goal-oriented problems for their performance tasks. Using contradance as an example performing art, we show how to represent individual contradances as plans such that the composition task can be compiled into a performance problem that can be expressed in PDDL. That is, by accounting for additional properties that are useful in their composition, the solutions to the performance task also serve as solutions to the composition task. We conclude with some example contradances derived using a classical planner under various composition conditions.