jbn@GLACIER.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) (06/17/88)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 88 02:06 EDT
From: John B. Nagle <jbn@glacier.stanford.edu>
Subject: Re: Dance notation
To: AILIST@KL.SRI.COM
Smoliar's comment that no dance notation provides sufficient information
for the exact reproduction of a movement is true as far as it goes, but
misleading. Modern dance notation, by which I mean Labanotation or,
as it is sometimes called, kinetography Laban, is designed to convey,
in a concise form, the constraints on a movement necessary to produce the
desired effect. Although the notation provides for detailed description
of arm and hand motions, for example, the choreographer will not ordinarily
specify these unless they are essential to the movement desired. Movements
not specified are left to the discretion of the dancer. Placing the
dancer under unnecessarily tight constraints will result in an unnaturally
stiff performance (it is an ideal in ballet to achieve fluidity
despite overconstraint by the choreographer, but the ideal is reached only
in the better professional companies and at high cost to both company and
dancers). Nor is it usually necessary. Thus the tendency to specify only
the necessary.
The discretion of the dancer in executing a movement specified only
in outline, or what is referred to as "motif writing" in Labanotation, is
not unlimited. There are defaults. Where forward motion is specified
without additional annotation, a normal walk is assumed. There are
sufficient conventions to produce a generally similar performance should
two dancers perform from the same notation.
As a technical tour de force, it is quite possible, by the way, to
record in great detail the positions of the human body during a dance.
Both the inventor of VPL's "Z-glove" and the MIT Media Lab have developed
systems for so doing. It is not at all clear, though, what one does with
the information so obtained. One can play it back through an animation
system, of course. But it is not likely to be useful to a dancer.
John Nagle