No one response to Antarctic landscape can convey all that can be known and experienced there.
Gestures and drawings are being made by individuals responding to words, images and data composed by people who have measured and experienced Antarctic landscape.
Selected texts are being used as scores for movement improvisations.
Drawings are made in turn by movers and movement observers, to capture different uses of space, time and energy.
Preliminary experiments have been done with different ways of visually marking a body’s passage through space and time, and its use of energy.
Already there is evidence of variation in the movement and drawings, that reflect the different movement and drawing signatures of participants. Sometimes there are more similarities within the material than differences.
Animating with these drawings can reveal differences, as well as augment and validate individual responses.
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What can movement notations already devised offer an inquiry into animating Antarctic landscape?
Rudolf Laban devised and arranged visual symbols to notate use of space, time and energy, and a ‘scale’ of movements to be performed within a crystal form.
His aim was to sharpen perception of human movement, and to extend the expressive vocabulary of dancers and non-dancers.
Animating with his symbols and moves could offer a lexicon of gestures with which to interpret, record and communicate gestural responses people have made in response to Antarctic texts.
However, limiting interpretation within such a system may not allow for the dialogue between responders and texts that can happen within an improvizational approach. Individual voices, and their impact on each other, could be lost.
Other methods of notation include some less prescriptive approaches, opening up possibilities for more individual expression and interpretation.
Laban’s methods, combined with other ways of visually interpreting movement, may allow for seeing more.
Some of the more recent systems have used computers to display scores, sometimes randomly generated, for improvised performances. Such scores can be as prescriptive as those more consciously structured, determining individual and group use of time and space and energy. Others can actively invite performer responses.
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In my early publications on this subject I have always stressed the point that the endeavour to describe the movements of a dance in special symbols has one main purpose. That is the creation of a literature of movement and dance. It is obvious that notation or script facilitates the communication of movement ideas to other people. When, ages ago, mankind woke to the idea of standardising pictures and signs in order to communicate certain ideas to one another, bodily actions and gestures were of course included from the very beginning. Early forms of writing are full of signs or symbols for action or movement. No form of writing could possibly omit the enormous number of verbs which, to a great extent, are always bodily actions involving movement. In my search for primary action signs, I found fascinating examples of movement description in the mantric symbols invented by ancient Tibetan monks and in the cuniform characters of the Assyrians and Babylonians. In Egyptian and Chinese scripts I found a rich variety of movement symbols which are, in a sense, the archetypes of dance notation signs.
Rudolf Laban,
Addlestone, Surrey
1954
From the Foreword to Labanotation, or Kinetoography Laban:
the system of Analyzing and Recording Movement,
Ann Hutchinson
Illustrated by Doug Anderson
A Theatre Arts Book, New York, 1973
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An action; Two actions, one after the other; Two actions occurring simultaneously
(Hutchinson, 1973; 20)
Iver Cooper developed a system that builds upon Laban and traditional music notation, which he uses in his teaching:
Within a staff, symbols to the left of the staffline refer to the left limb, and those to the right, to the right limb. The inner columns carry the solid action strokes from which this notation system takes its name. A straight line stroke is a step, a downwardly curved stroke is a touch-gesture, and an upwardly curved stroke is an air-gesture. Dotted step or touch signs indicate passive retention of weight or contact. Symbols above the touch strokes indicate which part of the body, if any, is touched. The outer columns indicate the direction, flexion and rotation of the limb in question.
Graphic notation for dance is analogous to musical graphic notation. Using abstract symbols, words, colour or any other method of visual representation to document dance movement. Differing from other forms of dance notation by its lack of a set Lexis or syntax it is sometimes referred to as choreographers scribbles or drawings.
Graphical dance notation is used as an alternative to other dance notations for speed of writing, the ability to represent abstract and complex ideas, and the retention of the choreographers conceptual process.
Mostly used by choreographers making contemporary dance, avant-garde, experimental, generative, conceptual, and dance technology performance works, it serves as dance script rather than as a method for documentation and reconstruction. Graphical dance notation is also used by dance scholars as a method for examining a choreographer’s creative process.
Wikipedia: Graphic notation (dance)
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A stick figure based system was developed in 1956 by ballerina Joan Benesh and her mathematician husband Rudolf. Ann Hutchinson observed that its analysis of movement is limited…
…because it is based on the visual result of movement as seen by the outside observer. While this method cleverly solved the problem of three-dimensional representation for general purposes, it did little to improve timing problems inherent in a stick based notation.
(Hutchins, 1973; 4)
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Another stick figure based system was used to notate movement beyond human gesture:
Eshkol-Wachman movement notation was intended to notate any manner of movement, not only dance. As such, it is not limited to particular dance styles or even to the human form. It has been used to analyze animal behaviour as well as dance (Golani 1976)…
Eshkol-Wachman movement notations treats the body into a sort of stick figure. The body is divided at its skeletal joints, and each pair of joints defines a line segment (a “limb”). For example, the foot is a limb bounded by the ankle and the end of the toe.
The relationship of those segments in three dimensional space using a spherical coordinate system. If one end of a line segment is held in a fixed position, that point is the center of a sphere whose radius is the length of the line segment. Positions of the free end of the segment can be defined by two coordinate values on the surface of that sphere, analogous to latitude and longitude on a globe.
Limb positions are written somewhat like fractions, with the vertical number written over the horizontal number. The horizontal component (the lower) is read first. These two numbers are enclosed in brackets or parentheses to indicate whether the position in being described relative to an adjacent limb or to external reference points, such as a stage.
Eshkol-Wachman scores are written on grids, where each horizontal row represents the position and movement of a single limb, and each vertical column represents a unit of time. Movements are shown as transitions between initial and end coordinates.
Wikipedia: Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation
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At the age of fifteen, Valeries Sutton began developing a stick figure to assist with documenting her own dance training.
She developed the system known as Sutton Movement Writing (lately also entitled the International Movement Writing Alphabet (the IMWA), subdivided into five sections:
1. DanceWriting, which records dance choreography
2. SignWriting, which records signed languages
3. MimeWriting, which records classic mime and gesture
4. SportsWriting, which records such activities as gymnastics, ice skating, skateboarding and karate
5. ScienceWriting, which records physical therapy, body language, animal movements, and other forms of movement
Wikipedia: Valerie Sutton (B. NY 1951)
Iver Cooper developed a system, Action stroke dance notation:
Designed for speed of writing the notation is primarily formed of action strokes that represent one of three basic actions:
* a support gesture which takes weight (hop, step, etc )
* a touch gesture (makes contacts without taking weight)
* an air gesture (makes no contact)the score has five sections:
1. General section – describing the general movement of the dancer
2. leg section (or staff) – indicating movement of the legs and feet
3. arm section (or staff) – indicating movement of the arms and hands
4. trunk section – indicating movement of head, neck, chest and pelvis
5. notes section – detailed explanations of the movementbased on the work of Rudolf Laban and Labanotation the score read from bottom to top. The horizontal dimension of the score represents the symmetry of the body, and the vertical dimension the time dimension. Making use of abstract symbols Action Stroke Dance Notation is visually similar to Motif notation, a subset of Labanotation that is also designed for speed of writing.
Wikipedia: Action stroke dance notation
William Forsythe (b. 1949) has developed a computer application.
William Forsythe (born December 30, 1949 in New York City) is an American dancer and choreographer resident in Dresden in Saxony. He is known internationally for his work with the Frankfurt Ballet and his reorientation of classical ballet….
In 1994, Forsythe virtually reinvented the teaching of dance with his pioneering and award-winning computer application “Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye” which is used by professional companies, dance conservatories, universities, postgraduate architecture programs and secondary schools.
Wikipedia: William Forsythe (dancer)
See:
Hutchinson Guest, A. 1989. Choreo-Graphics: A Comparison of Dance Notation Systems from the Fifteenth Century to the Present. New York: Gordon and Breach.