Gorshey · སྒོར་གཞས།

A tiny animated pixel-art diorama of an imagined summer gathering on the Tibetan grassland. Gorshey (སྒོར་གཞས།) is a sung circle dance: the dancers form one ring and step around it while they sing, and each song has its own steps. Here twelve men, women, elders and children in chuba dance around a campfire at an evening lingka (a summer picnic); beside the ring a neighbour strums the dranyen on a khaden rug while a grandmother turns her prayer wheel, a white picnic tent and lungta prayer flags stand behind, a yak grazes and a mastiff keeps watch. The scene is a composite of a lingka picnic and a fireside gorshey: the fire and the lute belong to the evening, not to the dance, which is just as often danced in daylight around a jug of chang or to a speaker. Light theme is a golden afternoon; dark theme is a firelit night. Drag to turn the diorama.

Live: https://tenzdelek.github.io/Gorshey/

Style inspired by shawn (@zzzzshawn)'s Small plays series. Built with Claude Code.

How it works

• js/render.js renders the three.js scene into a low-resolution target (one texel = one art pixel), then upscales it with nearest sampling, banding the luma with a 4×4 ordered dither and shifting darks cool and highlights warm. The camera fits the patch to ~87 % of the frame width on square and portrait screens.
• The meadow base dissolves into the page with Bayer-dithered discards; grass is ~60k one-pixel blades.
• Every motion is a pure, integer-periodic function of time, so the 48 s loop (one full turn of the circle) is seamless.
• Modules: ground (meadow, grass, flowers), fire (pit, flames, sparks, smoke, firelight), dancers (rig, footstep planner, choreography), camp (tent, prayer flags, mani stones, sangbum, woodpile), life (musician, grandmother, girl, tea table, yak, dog). Shared helpers live in core.js.
• The circle's direction is one constant: DIR in js/dancers.js (1 = clockwise from above).

Run locally

python3 -m http.server 8787
# open http://localhost:8787/

Useful query options: ?mode=night, ?only=ground,fire, ?t=12&static=1, ?zoom=3&cx=0&cz=2, ?az=135.

Screenshots and video

npm install                       # playwright-core, drives your installed Google Chrome
node tools/shot.mjs --t 0,12 --out shots/frame --w 1080 --h 1080
node tools/capture.mjs --mode day --out gorshey-day.mp4      # one seamless 48 s loop, needs ffmpeg
node tools/capture.mjs --mode night --out gorshey-night.mp4
node tools/motion-probe.mjs --report-only                    # foot / hip / arm checks for the dancers

Cultural notes

ref/gorshey-culture.json and ref/gorshey-culture-review.md hold the research behind costumes, setting and movement (chuba wrapped left over right, men's chuba at the knee with the right arm out, women's sleeveless chuba over long-sleeved blouses, pangden, lungta order blue-white-red-green-yellow). The scene is a composite of a lingka picnic and an evening bonfire; the step pattern is a stylised approximation, since every gorshey song has its own steps.