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.
Choreographers have almost no means to copyright their creative work and the Choreographer's Guild presently seeks to protect said work and get choreographers credited and paid.
It may be that notation has a renewed utility by virtue of creating a copyrightable artifact.
> Choreographers have almost no means to copyright their creative work
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.
You appear to be in favour of said Guild trying to change the cultural expectation for more copyrights, now extending to human movement. Needless to say this evokes the image of corporations like Disney ending up with those copyrights and going after people doing the zoomer dance long after the Mickey Mouse copyright will have expired. Are those worries warranted?
Not really, but then again anyone can basically argue the interpretation of anything in law. I would say that in many other professions creators have been paid for their works long after they've been created, but choreographers have basically been shafted for a long time, usually only being paid a daily or weekly rate for the original creation.
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.
True. Labanotation is sometimes taught to dancers. A published report card for Madonna shows she got a D in that class. But choreographers do not compose in dance notation.
Here's a decent explanation of Labanotation.[1] I once looked at it as a possible input language for an animation program. Bad idea.
> I once looked at it as a possible input language for an animation program.
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.
Interesting. I'm on my university's IT Governance council, and we were discussing who was using the most data storage. I presumed the film school, but, as you can guess, it's Dance, at about 70% compared to the entire rest of the university, for their video.
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.
As a sign language user, I wouldn't say it has anything near significant adoption, but I would agree in terms of writing systems for signed language, it's one of the most well known ones.
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.
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.
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]
[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.
also, this article misses a few notations and anecdotes.
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
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.
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.
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.
Choreographers have almost no means to copyright their creative work and the Choreographer's Guild presently seeks to protect said work and get choreographers credited and paid.
It may be that notation has a renewed utility by virtue of creating a copyrightable artifact.
> Choreographers have almost no means to copyright their creative work
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.
You appear to be in favour of said Guild trying to change the cultural expectation for more copyrights, now extending to human movement. Needless to say this evokes the image of corporations like Disney ending up with those copyrights and going after people doing the zoomer dance long after the Mickey Mouse copyright will have expired. Are those worries warranted?
Not really, but then again anyone can basically argue the interpretation of anything in law. I would say that in many other professions creators have been paid for their works long after they've been created, but choreographers have basically been shafted for a long time, usually only being paid a daily or weekly rate for the original creation.
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.
It's amazing what happens when one is incentivized to not see hypocrisy.
True. Labanotation is sometimes taught to dancers. A published report card for Madonna shows she got a D in that class. But choreographers do not compose in dance notation.
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...
> I once looked at it as a possible input language for an animation program.
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.
[1] https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/6/article/617766/pdf
[2] http://www.geocities.ws/donherbisonevans/
Interesting. I'm on my university's IT Governance council, and we were discussing who was using the most data storage. I presumed the film school, but, as you can guess, it's Dance, at about 70% compared to the entire rest of the university, for their video.
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.
As a sign language user, I wouldn't say it has anything near significant adoption, but I would agree in terms of writing systems for signed language, it's one of the most well known ones.
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.
I also immediately thought of Sutton SignWriting. (She also created a movement writing suite, including notation for insect movement.)
There's also a notation for gymnastics (used by judges) An introduction: http://www.nawgj-sc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Gym-Short...
That’s a bit more readable and reminds me of Aresti symbols as used in aerobatics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aresti_Catalog
Ah, you beat me to it. Here is the current IAC catalog of Aresti.
https://www.iac.org/aresti-catalogue-structure
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.
Agreed, beautiful indeed
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/
[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-...
also, this article misses a few notations and anecdotes.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
Something adjacent is the Underscore dance's glyphs ( https://globalunderscore.com/underscore-glyphs/ ) which describe the patterns/phases of contact improvisation
made me think of https://motionbank.org