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| Posted by Tony Schultz
This week I participated in a panel discussion at Sarah Lawrence College with Kathy Westwater and Rose Anne Thom on documenting and notating dance. To be honest I was terribly nervous though once I got started talking I really enjoyed it. Kathy Westwater moderated the discussion. Rose Anne Thom talked about Laban notation and software packages Labanwriter and Labanreader, developed at Ohio State University. I primarily talked about my thesis research and how it can be applied to the problems of notating and documenting dance. My research uses computer vision algorithms to represent the body as a set of chromatic particles. Once the body is reduced to numbers it becomes possible to automatically recognize different poses. Once these landmarks are identified the computer can generate a map of the movement space in the form of a dance graph.
It was interesting to talk about my work in this context. It is in this space between dance and writing that we can get a deeper understanding about what choreography is. The word “choreography” literally means body (choreo) writing (graphy). The closely related term was coined in Thoinot Arbeau’s 1589 Orchesographie, one of the most famous dance manuals of the Renaissance. Arbeau was dance master, Jesuit priest and mathematician. Its cool to think that the project of symbolically representing dance was of interest to mathematicians over 400 years ago.
), and I think Tharp has a book out now?…
