I recently wrote a Winger post about Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation, since I did an interview with EWMN expert Michal Shoshani for Israel Seen. Part of my interest in learning about EWMN stemmed from my own background in Labanotation, which is commonly used in the U.S. and which I studied in graduate school at Ohio State. In case you too are curious about Labanotation, here’s a tidbit for you!
In the video above, Greg Halloran discusses some basics of Labanotation, using the score of Sophie Maslow’s Folksay (1942) to illustrate his points. Always wanted to see what Labanotation looks like? There are some great close-ups of the score that show the intricacy of the notation, and Greg explains the movements that correspond to the symbols.
The goal of movement notation is not only to record a dance but to allow it to live again through reconstructions, and I’m embedding another video which covers this issue. In the clips below, Greg talks about the process of staging Folksay from score for CityDance Ensemble, a modern dance company based in Washington, D.C. and directed by Paul Gordon Emerson. Folksay is near and dear to my heart because I wrote about it and Sophie Maslow’s other dances in my undergraduate thesis, and CityDance has been on my radar for several years since the group performs not only new work but reconstructions of older repertory. Their production of Folksay will be at the Kennedy Center this Saturday night, and I wish I could see it!
Watching this video, I started thinking about all of the ways I have learned repertory in rehearsals: directly from the choreographer, from someone who previously performed the piece, from video, from someone reconstructing the dance from Labanotation score (and since I know Labanotation, from the score itself). I began to wonder if other Wingers - contributors and readers alike - have ever participated in a reconstruction from score. Have you? If so, how did that experience compare to learning repertory in other ways?
Have you ever seen a score of a dance? Did you even know that there is such a thing as dance notation?
I always knew that music was written down in scores, and my study of music notation began the same day I picked up a violin for the first time. But I can’t remember at what point I learned that there are scores of dances, and I don’t think I saw any examples of dance notation until I was in college - more than twelve years after I started studying dance. Musicians read scores, actors read scripts, but we dancers do not typically read dance notation. Indeed, I only started to learn Labanotation when I entered the MFA program at Ohio State - sixteen years after I took my first dance class.
Whereas I began my study of Labanotation late in my training - and while most dancers in the U.S. never learn any notation system at all - many dancers in Israel are exposed to movement notation at an earlier point in their education. Developed in the 1950s by the Israeli Noa Eshkol along with Avraham Wachman, Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN) is the most prevalent form of notation in Israel. Both the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and Seminar Hakibbutzim provide a rigorous background in EWMN for their students, who are studying to be dance teachers, and they in turn use EWMN with their younger pupils.
As someone interested in how notation systems aid in preserving and passing on our art form, I was intrigued by EWMN. All I knew at the beginning of my research was that EWMN could be used not only to document existing movement but to generate new dances (a major difference between EWMN and most forms of dance notation), and I wanted to find out more about how the system compared to Labanotation. The Jerusalem Academy’s Dafna Jones gave me an overview of EWMN and explained how popular it was with young students, showing me examples of EWMN used and even created by 5-year-olds. She also directed me to Michal Shoshani, who worked closely with Noa Eshkol until Eshkol’s death last autumn. Michal let me sit in on one of her classes at the Academy and then talked with me for a podcast, speaking passionately about Eshkol herself, the development of EWMN, the system’s principles, and her own interest in notation.
Want more resources on Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation? Check out these two sites:
-Directed by Tirza Sapir, Rikudnetto is a dance company in Israel which uses EWMN; its website includes information on the company and on EWMN.
-movementnotation.com has a wealth of information about EWMN as well as a discussion forum and an online course.
Also curious about Labanotation, the most common form of notation used in the U.S.? Try out Laban Lab, an interactive website which can walk you through the basics of Labanotation.
Yair Vardi. Photo by Gadi Dagon, courtesy of Yair Vardi.
The Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv
The Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (also called the Rubin Academy), in Jerusalem
My interview with Yair Vardi is actually third in the series I am podcasting on Israel Seen, but I decided to start with it here because it gives a great overview of the Israeli concert dance scene. After a notable career as a dancer, Yair Vardi became the director of Tel Aviv’s Suzanne Dellal Center, a gorgeous Lincoln Center-type complex with studios and theaters primarily used for dance. He also serves as the director of dance at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, one of the few institutions of higher learning in Israel that grants degrees in dance. Though these jobs and other advisory positions keep Yair very busy, he found some time to sit down with me and chat about Israel’s vibrant dance scene. If you want to know about the history and programming of the Suzanne Dellal Center, the curriculum in Israel’s premiere undergraduate dance program, and how Israeli contemporary dance compares to American and European contemporary dance, tune in at the link below! It’s worth listening to this just to hear how many performances there are at Suzanne Dellal each year (I’m not telling!) - plus if you’re interested in dance notation, there’s a little bit about Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation, which was developed in Israel and is taught at the Academy.
You can listen to my interview with Yair, see more photographs, and check out additional links at IsraelSeen.
Also, you can subscribe to IsraelSeen’s podcasts for free on iTunes. You may occasionally get a podcast on a non-dance subject, but who knows, maybe you will find it interesting!
