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Documenting Dance: Keeping Score (2017)

by mont_tag on 9/7/24, 12:26 AM with 26 comments

• by hn_throwaway_99 on 9/7/24, 4:59 PM

  These choreography notation systems are very interesting from a historical perspective, but their raison d'être went away with the advent of video.

  Dance (or at least ballet) is still largely passed down by oral tradition; dancers are coached by older generations who danced these pieces when they were younger (obviously not for new works). In fact, unlike in the music world, it's exceedingly rare to find anyone in the dance world who can read or understand any of these notation systems. They tend to be the purview of dance historians or those specifically tasked with coaching copyrighted works from dead choreographers. That is, even before video, they weren't really in widespread use like music notation was.

• by retrac on 9/7/24, 5:58 PM

  The only writing system for sign languages that has significant adoption ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting ) was developed not by a linguist like other systems had been, but by a dance instructor, who was inspired by such notation systems. It borrows many of the ideas about how to notate orientation and movement, and works somewhat like a phonetic alphabet. There is close transcription with every little join and variation precisely notated, and also a more abstract kind of transcription which assumes fluency where the reader can fill in the gaps.

• by toolslive on 9/7/24, 1:57 PM

  There's also a notation for gymnastics (used by judges) An introduction: http://www.nawgj-sc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Gym-Short...

• by kaz-inc on 9/7/24, 1:52 PM

  Beautiful notation. I found the first especially interesting, with the spatial mapping recorded in a kind of "parametric-function on a 2d plane" view, like a camera on a slow exposure looking at the entire dance from bird's eye view.

  The later ones are reasonable, as they map more closely to the music notation that has become standard, but for classical music of different cultures, notes don't often lie on a single place, but swing from one pitch to another, with blips and arcs in their paths from one place to another.

  The staff-based notations lose the first-hand flow of the notation in space. I wonder what could be done with color.

• by 8888888888 on 9/8/24, 9:42 AM

  Reminds of Scottish Country Dance crib sheets! [-1]

  Scottish Country Dance is a social dance often in groups in 6 or 8 people, where putting yourself in the right place at the right time is very important. Commonly people will use 'cribs' to remind themselves of the upcoming dances, some are written in shorthand code, but my favourites are the crib diagrams which I think demonstrate wonderful patterns.

  For a couple of examples, here's the popular ceilidh dance 'The Dashing White Sergeant'[0] and the more complex 'Radcliffe Square' [1]. Or to compare against the danced versions: The Dashing White Sergeant [2] and 'Radcliffe Square [3]

  [-1] https://www.scottish-country-dancing-dictionary.com/krdiagra...

  [0] https://my.strathspey.org/dd/dance/1562/#cribs

  [1] https://my.strathspey.org/dd/dance/5451/#cribs

  [2] https://my.strathspey.org/dd/dancevideo/7947/

  [3] https://my.strathspey.org/dd/dancevideo/10438/

• by yair99dd on 9/7/24, 7:08 PM

  [1989] Merce Cunningham used a software called LifeForms[1] (later DanceForms) developed in colab with SFU researchers. producing over a dozen pieces including Ocean and BIPED[2]. its still online and used to have (~10years ago) the license key as plain text on the download page. i see its now ~200$...

  so he did the reverse, start with digital notation and move to flesh.

  [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baBYHWI3wLY [2] https://www.sfu.ca/sfunews/stories/2019/11/sfu-software-key-...

• by TRiG_Ireland on 9/7/24, 8:57 PM

  I'm surprised that there's no mention of Sutton DanceWriting. I don't know how important it may or may not be in the world of dance notation (though I do know that Valerie Sutton worked with the Royal Danish Ballet, so it was used to some extent), but it's very important as the foundation of Sutton SignWriting, the only method of writing sign languages to have gained anything approaching widespread acceptance.

• by Rygian on 9/7/24, 12:50 PM

  Link to baroquedance.com in the article is dead. This is what I could find instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20240907125001/https://www.baroq...

• by encody on 9/8/24, 9:07 AM

  I'm a competitor in ballroom dancing which, though it is admittedly quite distinct from ballet, makes use of no such notation. Steps are usually explained like so: https://www.dancecentral.info/ballroom/international-style/s...

  There are a lot of learned acronyms (LOD: line-of-dance, HT: heel-toe, OP: outside partner) but not much in the way of custom notation.

  I did discover a custom figure linking notation on this website (https://ballroomindex.weebly.com/choreography.html), but I've not seen it used elsewhere.

• by ryukoposting on 9/7/24, 9:58 PM

  I'm a little surprised there's no mention of marching band dot charts, though I guess that isn't "dance" per se. It's an interesting case because a lot of people are exposed to it in high school, and it can't really be supplanted by video the way that these dance notation methods can.

• by twunde on 9/7/24, 5:44 PM

  Something adjacent is the Underscore dance's glyphs ( https://globalunderscore.com/underscore-glyphs/ ) which describe the patterns/phases of contact improvisation

• by bj-rn on 9/7/24, 2:52 PM

  made me think of https://motionbank.org