In this short essay I would like to present several latest research in the attempt to invent a complete dance notation system. I will also look at the historical background, i.e. - Laban and Hodson Archer. The research include Emio Greco's Cover Project / Capturing Intentions and William Forsythe's Synchronous Objects. As an examples I will present Chunky Move's Glow, and the tools used for movement editing in Darren Aronofsky's movie Black Swan.
Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) was invented by a Hungarian Rudolf Laban and first published in 1928 as Kinetographie Laban. LMA describes movement - not only dance, but any kind of human movement (hence its wide application from sport to physiotherapy) - in four dimensions, each of which can be measured on a scale between two opposite qualities. Susan Leigh Foster lists them in Reading Dancing: space - direct and indirect, time - quick and sustained, weight - light and strong, flow - free and bound (77).
A choreographer and dance historian Millicent Hodson and her husband Kenneth Archer, who is an art historian, are a team of "dance archaeologists", famous for their reconstruction of Vaslav Nijinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) for Joffrey Ballet in 1987. The team, known simply as Hodson Archer [1] investigates the origins of lost ballet works and their context, they interview witnesses and search for notes and pictures from the original productions. In an interview with Suzanne McCarthy, Millient Hodson outlines five basic criteria for dance reconstruction:
1. Is the ballet a masterwork by one or more of the artists involved;
2. Is it a challenge from the point of view of dance and design;
3. Does it have a particular relevance to theatrical history;
4. Does it have resonance with contemporary issues and tastes;
5. Is there sufficient evidence for at least a 50% facsimile? (McCarthy)
These systems may be combined to preserve works and bring them to light in the future. However, they can not be considered - even when combined - a complete flawless method for dance preservation such as universally recognised and relatively easy to master musical notation or text. There have been numerous attempts to create, or at least advance the work on, a more perfect system. These combine technology to compensate for the previously used all-human recorders.
William Forsythe's Synchronous Objects is a multimedia research where data gathered from top and front videos serve for a 3D visualisation of not only the movement but also the cues and alignment systems. The system was created in 2009 on Forsythe's One flat thing, reproduced and I encourage the reader to visit the interactive website [2], which is the complete documentation of the process, as there is not enough space here to go into details. In short, the scientists and artists, dancers and choreographers worked together and used alignment annotations, visual noise, cue visualiser, difference marks, center sketch (accumulation of the dancer's motion over time), movement density map, concept threads (animation of a Forsythe's essay), counterpoint tool and video abstraction tool, to create an all-encompassing registration of a dance work. Although this is probably the most advanced (and expensive) dance notation system up to date, it owns a lot to numerous other research that focused on specific aspects of technology usefulness for dance.
One such research is Capturing Intentions by Emio Greco, which started in 2004 with an interactive installation Double Skin/Double Mind and concluded as Inside Movement Knowledge project in 2010 [3]. During this time Emio Greco cooperated with various international artist and scholars, including residency at the Amsterdam School for the Arts, and used various techniques such as "documentary film making, existing dance notation systems, interactive media design, gesture analysis and insights from cognition studies" to explore "themes related to reproduction and authenticity, new systems of notation and dance idioms" (ICKamsterdam). His work was accomplished in four stages. The first one focused on perspective, and used a three-wall box made of two large screens on the sides and one projection screen with a video of Emio Greco giving instruction and a real person in front of it. This step explored the relation of the information space and the real physicality of the performer. The second phase was devoted to learning and teaching, and next to the video projection used a so-called "talking head" - a smaller screen in the upper far corner with detailed explanations of the instruction coming from the front video, as well as two small screens on the sides with close-ups of the interest details. The performer inside the box is moving according to these information, while two speakers at the back create a sound-scape following his movements. The third phase dealt with customising the system according to the performer's wishes. While the system is watching the movement with a tracking camera, it sees its qualities, distinguishes between breathing or jumping, and gives hints by visualising the values. The dancer is by himself without a representation in front. The fourth phase subsumes the three previous ones into an interactive performance, with a visual representation of the performer's movements, and a special sound-scape related to it.
While the project, with the Double... installation at its core, is a great way of teaching Emio Greco's idiosyncratic movement, it does not provide a tool for archiving his complete work. Nevertheless it gives an insight to one aspect that Synchronous Objects overlook - the intentions behind movement creation. Jonathan Burrows mentions one such episode in his Choreographer's Handbook: "Susanne Linke sent a videotape of her solo Wandlung to Paris for the performers [of Jerome Bel] to learn, but it wasn't working, they had followed the moves but it didn't look right. Susanne went to Paris and watched. 'It was so funny', she said, 'they weren't counting'" (104).
The most stunning example of the use of tracking technology in dance is probably Glow [4] by Chunky Move from 2006, whose novelty and simple strong aesthetics are comparable to Hans van Mannen's Live at its time. The choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, in an interview for Stagenoise.com explains:
Glow is a half hour dance solo on the ground, viewed from a very high angle, and lit by a data projector from the ceiling using real time generated graphics to work with the movement of the dancer. That is possible because of an infra-red camera that is watching the dancer in the space and informing the computer where the dancer is, how fast they are moving, where they are moving, what part of the body they are moving. From that data the computer runs a series of algorithms that are cued up through the show, and which generate the graphic response to that data, or to that dance. (Obarzanek)
Another advanced system, which can also serve for dance notation and archiving is the technology used in Darren Aronofsky's ballet film Black Swan. The film makers tracked dancers' arms using planar patches in order to animate on-skin make-up and growing feathers, tracking markers and 3D match move to correlate Natalie Portman's face with the substitute ballerina - Sarah Lane's body. Although I would love to indulge in detailed descriptions of these technological advances, due to the word limit I have to refer the reader to a short video about the special effects [5] used for movement editing. I anticipate that this short account of dance capturing systems is far away from complete. I also hope that - with the fast technological progress - we might one day see an emergence of the perfect dance notation system.
Works Cited
Burrows, Jonathan. A Choreographer's Handbook. New York: Routledge, 2010.
International Choreographic Arts Centre Amsterdam (ICKamsterdam) Web Page. "Dance Notation | Capturing Intentions". 30 March 2010.
<http://www.ickamsterdam.com/?art=854>
Foster, Susan Leigh. Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986.
McCarthy, Suzanne. "Putting the Pieces Together: The Work of Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer." Ballet Magazine. September 2002. Ballet.co.uk Magazine online. 30 March 2011.
<http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_02/sep02/interview_millicent_hodson.htm>
Obarzanek, Gideon. Interview. Stagenoise previews the innovative 'Glow' from dance company Chunky Move. By Diana Simmonds. Copyright 2008, Stage Noise. Stage Noise with Diana Simmonds Web Page. 30 March 2010.
<http://www.stagenoise.com/video/video.php?id=26>
Notes
[1] http://www.hodsonarcher.com/
[2] http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/
[3] http://insidemovementknowledge.net/
[4] video, description, credits and touring dates available on Chunky Move's website:
http://chunkymove.com.au/Our-Works/Current-Productions/Glow.aspx
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n71sjmd-bM
A choreographer and dance historian Millicent Hodson and her husband Kenneth Archer, who is an art historian, are a team of "dance archaeologists", famous for their reconstruction of Vaslav Nijinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) for Joffrey Ballet in 1987. The team, known simply as Hodson Archer [1] investigates the origins of lost ballet works and their context, they interview witnesses and search for notes and pictures from the original productions. In an interview with Suzanne McCarthy, Millient Hodson outlines five basic criteria for dance reconstruction:
1. Is the ballet a masterwork by one or more of the artists involved;
2. Is it a challenge from the point of view of dance and design;
3. Does it have a particular relevance to theatrical history;
4. Does it have resonance with contemporary issues and tastes;
5. Is there sufficient evidence for at least a 50% facsimile? (McCarthy)
These systems may be combined to preserve works and bring them to light in the future. However, they can not be considered - even when combined - a complete flawless method for dance preservation such as universally recognised and relatively easy to master musical notation or text. There have been numerous attempts to create, or at least advance the work on, a more perfect system. These combine technology to compensate for the previously used all-human recorders.
William Forsythe's Synchronous Objects is a multimedia research where data gathered from top and front videos serve for a 3D visualisation of not only the movement but also the cues and alignment systems. The system was created in 2009 on Forsythe's One flat thing, reproduced and I encourage the reader to visit the interactive website [2], which is the complete documentation of the process, as there is not enough space here to go into details. In short, the scientists and artists, dancers and choreographers worked together and used alignment annotations, visual noise, cue visualiser, difference marks, center sketch (accumulation of the dancer's motion over time), movement density map, concept threads (animation of a Forsythe's essay), counterpoint tool and video abstraction tool, to create an all-encompassing registration of a dance work. Although this is probably the most advanced (and expensive) dance notation system up to date, it owns a lot to numerous other research that focused on specific aspects of technology usefulness for dance.
One such research is Capturing Intentions by Emio Greco, which started in 2004 with an interactive installation Double Skin/Double Mind and concluded as Inside Movement Knowledge project in 2010 [3]. During this time Emio Greco cooperated with various international artist and scholars, including residency at the Amsterdam School for the Arts, and used various techniques such as "documentary film making, existing dance notation systems, interactive media design, gesture analysis and insights from cognition studies" to explore "themes related to reproduction and authenticity, new systems of notation and dance idioms" (ICKamsterdam). His work was accomplished in four stages. The first one focused on perspective, and used a three-wall box made of two large screens on the sides and one projection screen with a video of Emio Greco giving instruction and a real person in front of it. This step explored the relation of the information space and the real physicality of the performer. The second phase was devoted to learning and teaching, and next to the video projection used a so-called "talking head" - a smaller screen in the upper far corner with detailed explanations of the instruction coming from the front video, as well as two small screens on the sides with close-ups of the interest details. The performer inside the box is moving according to these information, while two speakers at the back create a sound-scape following his movements. The third phase dealt with customising the system according to the performer's wishes. While the system is watching the movement with a tracking camera, it sees its qualities, distinguishes between breathing or jumping, and gives hints by visualising the values. The dancer is by himself without a representation in front. The fourth phase subsumes the three previous ones into an interactive performance, with a visual representation of the performer's movements, and a special sound-scape related to it.
While the project, with the Double... installation at its core, is a great way of teaching Emio Greco's idiosyncratic movement, it does not provide a tool for archiving his complete work. Nevertheless it gives an insight to one aspect that Synchronous Objects overlook - the intentions behind movement creation. Jonathan Burrows mentions one such episode in his Choreographer's Handbook: "Susanne Linke sent a videotape of her solo Wandlung to Paris for the performers [of Jerome Bel] to learn, but it wasn't working, they had followed the moves but it didn't look right. Susanne went to Paris and watched. 'It was so funny', she said, 'they weren't counting'" (104).
The most stunning example of the use of tracking technology in dance is probably Glow [4] by Chunky Move from 2006, whose novelty and simple strong aesthetics are comparable to Hans van Mannen's Live at its time. The choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, in an interview for Stagenoise.com explains:
Glow is a half hour dance solo on the ground, viewed from a very high angle, and lit by a data projector from the ceiling using real time generated graphics to work with the movement of the dancer. That is possible because of an infra-red camera that is watching the dancer in the space and informing the computer where the dancer is, how fast they are moving, where they are moving, what part of the body they are moving. From that data the computer runs a series of algorithms that are cued up through the show, and which generate the graphic response to that data, or to that dance. (Obarzanek)
Another advanced system, which can also serve for dance notation and archiving is the technology used in Darren Aronofsky's ballet film Black Swan. The film makers tracked dancers' arms using planar patches in order to animate on-skin make-up and growing feathers, tracking markers and 3D match move to correlate Natalie Portman's face with the substitute ballerina - Sarah Lane's body. Although I would love to indulge in detailed descriptions of these technological advances, due to the word limit I have to refer the reader to a short video about the special effects [5] used for movement editing. I anticipate that this short account of dance capturing systems is far away from complete. I also hope that - with the fast technological progress - we might one day see an emergence of the perfect dance notation system.
Works Cited
Burrows, Jonathan. A Choreographer's Handbook. New York: Routledge, 2010.
International Choreographic Arts Centre Amsterdam (ICKamsterdam) Web Page. "Dance Notation | Capturing Intentions". 30 March 2010.
<http://www.ickamsterdam.com/?art=854>
Foster, Susan Leigh. Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986.
McCarthy, Suzanne. "Putting the Pieces Together: The Work of Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer." Ballet Magazine. September 2002. Ballet.co.uk Magazine online. 30 March 2011.
<http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_02/sep02/interview_millicent_hodson.htm>
Obarzanek, Gideon. Interview. Stagenoise previews the innovative 'Glow' from dance company Chunky Move. By Diana Simmonds. Copyright 2008, Stage Noise. Stage Noise with Diana Simmonds Web Page. 30 March 2010.
<http://www.stagenoise.com/video/video.php?id=26>
Notes
[1] http://www.hodsonarcher.com/
[2] http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/
[3] http://insidemovementknowledge.net/
[4] video, description, credits and touring dates available on Chunky Move's website:
http://chunkymove.com.au/Our-Works/Current-Productions/Glow.aspx
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n71sjmd-bM