smoliar@VAXA.ISI.EDU (Stephen Smoliar) (06/26/88)
Posted-Date: Sat, 25 Jun 88 09:21:39 PDT To: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu cc: jbn@glacier.stanford.edu Subject: more on dance notation Date: Sat, 25 Jun 88 12:21 EDT From: Stephen Smoliar <smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu> I accept most of John Nagle's response to my remarks on dance notation. However, I think we both overlooked one area in which, to the best of my knowledge, NO dance or music notation has served as an effective medium of communication: This is the matter of how the dancers (or moving agents) are situated in space and how they interact. Most notations, including Labanotation, make use of relatively primitive floor plans with little more than vague attempts to coordinate the notations of individual movements with paths on those floor plans. In addition, Labanotation has a repertoire of signs concerned with person-to-person contact; but these signs lack the rigor which went into the development of the notation of movement of the limbs and torso. The original discussion was provoked by the question of what could not be communicated by a formal system, such as mathematics. From there we progressed to physical movement as a candidate. That was what led the discussion into dance notation. However, whatever has been achieved regarding the movement of an individual has not served the problems with communicating the interactions of several moving individuals. I would stipulate that this is still a thorny problem which, in practice, is still handled basically by demonstration and imitation.