Documenting Dance: Keeping Score (2017)
adafrobinson.wordpress.com
adafrobinson.wordpress.com
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.
It may be that notation has a renewed utility by virtue of creating a copyrightable artifact.
That's simply not true. In the US choreographic works have been explicitly copyrightable since 1976, and things like the Balanchine Trust have existed for over 40 years. Written notation is not necessary - a video is sufficient.
What organizations like the Choreographer's Guild do is more change the cultural expectations around dance copyright than the legal possibilities. That is, in the dance/entertainment world, often times a choreographer is hired for peanuts and is simply unaware of their legal rights around copyright. But when it comes to what is legally possible/necessary, there is no difference really between what, say, a photographer who is hired to do a photoshoot can do vs. a choreographer hired to produce a work of dance.
I found this interesting article about a very well-known choreographer and his quest to copyright his works, including his famous "Single Ladies" choreography for Beyonce: https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/jaquel-knight-bey.... The thing I find weird/ironic about this is that the Single Ladies choreography famously copies a lot from Bob Fosse's "Mexican Breakfast" (the article I linked talks about this in detail). While I personally agree with the quote from the article, "You see the three ladies, you see the inspiration — but the funk, the stylized movement, they’re extremely different. I mean, how I got here as an artist is being inspired by those who came before me", in terms of copyright law, I think there is much more similarity between Mexican Breakfast and Single Ladies than there is between, say, the song Blurred Lines and Marvin Gaye's Got to Give it Up, which Blurred Lines was found guilty of infringing.
I also found it annoying that the article I linked stated "For a Black creator in an industry that has long appropriated Black culture..." but then goes on to argue that the amount of copying done from Mexican Breakfast is just "the creative process". To be clear, I think it is part of the creative process, but it's annoying the author can see none of the hypocrisy about taking about "cultural appropriation" while then devoting paragraphs to how the copying of Mexican Breakfast is somehow totally different.
Here's a decent explanation of Labanotation.[1] I once looked at it as a possible input language for an animation program. Bad idea.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220501031730/https://www.dance...
You might be interested in some of the work by Don Herbison-Evans. He lectured me in Computer Science, was a bit of a dance nut and into animation for choreography.
He was working on a project called MUSE, which was essentially CAD for choreography [1]. There was also an animation system, called NUDES [2]. At one point he was building a program to animate from Labanotation. I'm not sure if that was MUSE, NUDES or yet another program.
That said, I've never, ever seen it used in practice by people that use signed languages. Other than an oddity on the internet here or there.
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.
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
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-...
laban was commissioned in the 20s to use his method to optimize factory worker motion to increase early assembly-line productivity.
bat-sheva, a fairly known dance group in the 90/00 uses Eshkol Wachman movement notation and employ a dedicated team of dance notation writers to write and teach it to new dancers. maybe im behind the times, but i still find this magic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSHuhhO5VIU
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.