Dance notation

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A dance notation is the symbolic representation of dance movements. It is a special form of movement notation , as it focuses on human movements in specific dance forms. People who deal with dance notation professionally are called choreologists .

history

A bourrée in Raoul Auger Feuillet's notation, 1700

Because dance , like music, was a symbol of the fleeting in the Christian-European tradition, it was always difficult to record it. Since it had no significant function in a religious context, there are no attempts at recording that would be comparable to medieval musical neumes . In contrast to music , in which a somewhat standardized and increasingly differentiated musical notation developed from its early beginnings , the history of dance writing is a history of constant reinvention.

With the emergence of courtly dance (see historical dance ) since the 14th century , there was an increasing need to fix the steps of current ballroom dances in writing. In the 15th century , Antonio Cornazzano and Guglielmo Ebreo tried to explain the "Basses danses" in tracts . In the 16th century , Thoinot Arbeau was the first to write a compendium of the ballroom dances of his time ( L'Orchésographie , 1589).

After several attempts in the 17th century , the time of the absolutist court dance around the French King Louis XIV. , The Chorégraphie (1700) by Raoul-Auger Feuillet summarized the dance knowledge of the Baroque age . Even Jean Favier was compared to this time a leading dancer and dance teacher at the court of the king, who held his choreography with a dance notation that Diderot with the Feuillets.

Considerably more problematic was the stage dance , which in the 18th century largely from ballroom dancing solved. The more varied the movements became, the more difficult it was to find a workable system for recording them. The ballet reformer Jean Georges Noverre condemned the dance script with the argument that it had to be deciphered and that spontaneous "leaf reading" as with texts and musical notes was not possible with it. Even without writing, as a collective memory, famous choreographies could spread throughout Europe and keep them in the repertoire .

In the 19th century Arthur Saint-Léon invented a dance script ( Sténochorégraphie , 1852), which was further developed by Friedrich Albert Zorn ( Grammar of Dance Art , 1887). The most important attempts at a dance script in the 20th century came from Rudolf Laban ( script dance , 1928) and from Rudolf and Joan Benesh (see choreology ).

Today's choreographers are mostly based on video recordings . The computer has created new possibilities for dance notation.

present

Primary areas of application for dance notation are the documentation, analysis and reconstruction of choreographies , dance forms or technical exercises. An approach to movement notation can often be found in directing books in the theater or in the storyboard in film.

Even today, dance notations are mostly mixed forms of image and writing. In addition to letters and words, graphic and musical notations, figurative representations and abstract symbols are used. With computer-aided notation, track or path recording and numerical systems are gaining in importance.

There are many different forms of dance notation, but the two most popular systems are movement notation such as Labanotation (also known as Kinetography ) and Choreology ( Benesh Movement Notation ). Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation and DanceWriting by Valerie Sutton are also used less frequently .

Some notation systems are tailored to specific dance forms, for example Shorthand Dance Notation for Israeli dances, Moriskentanz notation for Moriskentanz and the Beauchamp Feuillet notation for historical dances of the Baroque period .

The recording of dances as moving images is the predominant recording method today. Videos give a relatively accurate impression of a dance. More experienced dancers can learn dance moves from dance videos. The missing spatial dimension remains a drawback.

Pictorial, dynamic and three-dimensional recorded dances - for example through motion detection - also contain the spatial dimension. Effective methods of reproduction have so far been lacking in this area. Motion detection (English: motion capturing ) is characterized by body-worn motion sensors the movements of a human being digitally. In dance technology, motion detection is used to generate output data for animations .

Instead of graphically recording dances, the semantics can also be recorded: dance books try to describe movements in words, animation programs try to depict movements as rotations and displacements, analysis algorithms try to convert pictorial recordings into words.

Notation and computer

There are four research and development areas in the field of dance technology :

  • Editors for creating, editing and printing notation scores.
  • Machine- readable fonts for existing dance notations.
  • Machine-readable dance notation as a starting point for computer animation . It should also be possible to generate and use these at the same time without mechanical assistance.
  • Machine recording of dance movements, such as motion capturing .

See also

Dance notations:

Dance in general:

literature

  • John Cage , Alison Knowles : Notations. Something Else Press, New York NY 1969.
  • Henner Drewes: Transformations. Movement in notation and digital processing (= Folkwang texts. 2: Contributions to music, theater, dance. Vol. 18). Verlag Die Blaue Eule, Essen 2003, ISBN 3-89924-057-X (At the same time: Leipzig, University, dissertation, 2002).
  • Ann Hutchinson Guest: Choreo-graphics. A Comparison of Dance Notation Systems from the Fifteenth Century to the Present. Harwood Academic et al., Amsterdam et al. 1998, ISBN 90-5700-003-2 .
  • Claudia Jeschke: dance writings. Your story and method. The illustrated representation of a phenomenon from its beginnings to the present (= dance research. 2). Comes, Bad Reichenhall 1983, ISBN 3-88820-001-6 (At the same time: Munich, University, dissertation, 1980: Studies on dance notation. ).
  • Royce J. Neagle, Kia C. Ng: Machine-representation and Visualization of a Dance Notation. In: Proceedings of Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts - London July 2003.

Web links

Dance notations

Dance notation software

  • DANCE . Editor for step patterns of standard dances and Latin American dances for Microsoft Windows.

Dance technology and software for other areas

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.der-theaterverlag.de/tanz/archiv/artikel/workshop-choreologie-georgette-tsinguirides/