
Read a good dance lately? - Tomte
http://dancenotation.org/lnbasics/frame0.html
======
RobertoG
A while ago, I wanted to annotate martial arts movements so I asked to a
professional dancer friend of mine. She didn't know any way to do it. That
surprised me.

Seeing this, I can't avoid to think in formal languages. Maybe, even it's
possible to define, formally, a particular dancing style as a grammar that
doesn't admit movements from other styles.

~~~
logfromblammo
Mostly for dance:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labanotation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labanotation)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eshkol-
Wachman_movement_notati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eshkol-
Wachman_movement_notation)

For sign language:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting)

Those systems, designed for different purposes, lack essential elements
necessary for martial arts movements, like weight distribution, facing,
weapons, footing, and opponents. You would probably have better luck examining
the code for mocapped animations, particularly for 3-D fighting games and
movies.

But you'll have to come up with your own abstraction. There are just too many
degrees of freedom in a human body to have a one-size-fits-all kinetography
system that is also easy to read and write. That's probably why some martial
art systems have so many names for positions and movements. The periodic table
for atomic martial art movements is huge, especially now that MMA has spurred
so much cross-disciplinary study.

~~~
Chris_Newton
_You would probably have better luck examining the code for mocapped
animations, particularly for 3-D fighting games and movies._

I think mocap has a lot of potential (though I’m biased here[1]).

For example, there have been some interesting experiments capturing
performances by sportspeople of different levels and comparing them. These
might be looking for patterns in what the better performers do differently,
which might then give some ideas for how to train less experienced performers.

Some elite sports teams and athletes also use mocap technology to analyse
their form and look for details that are difficult to see with human eyes in
real time.

The challenge is that even state-of-the-art mocap technology is still a very
long way from modelling the full complexity of the human musculoskeletal
system. Remember that a lot of what you see in games, and particularly in big
budget movies, was originally based on mocap data but then manually refined by
skilled people for a considerable period of time. The mocap is certainly a
useful starting point and it’s getting better all the time, but there’s a long
way to go before it will get the fine details right.

That said, even with today’s systems, the amount of data you get from a decent
mocap set-up means there is a lot you can investigate, as long as you know
what you want to look for. As you say, there are a lot of degrees of freedom
in a human body, and coming up with the right abstractions to capture the
important details is a challenge in itself.

[1] I help to run www.ballroomgenie.com, which is a training aid featuring
animations of ballroom moves using mocap-driven CGI instead of traditional
live video footage. This lets us show various useful effects that live footage
can’t, typically because of physics or because in our little niche market no-
one can afford movie-level camera set-ups and editing to record the same
action from many different perspectives simultaneously. On the other hand,
even working with high calibre performers and studio as we do, it still takes
a lot of work to get acceptable quality, and we’re still a long way from being
able to reproduce truly lifelike footage. This is partly because we don’t have
a Hollywood budget and a whole team of people to get each animation just
right, but it’s also because as far as I know the technology to model a human
body accurately enough that things like contact and pressure are spot on
simply doesn’t exist yet.

~~~
arafalov
I'd love to talk geek and marketing about this project of yours. I have ideas
for a _very_ similar (but not competing) one, but was not ready to jump on it
until I see some validation. Your link just did that. If you are interested, I
am 'arafalov' pretty much everywhere.

------
ipince
Awesome, I didn't know such notation existed.

I dance and teach (Cuban) salsa, and I've been wanting to write down a
"repertoire" of moves that I know and teach, to give it some structure. Here
the system I'm inclined to use:

The space of patterns/figures you can do in salsa is really not very big. You
can break each figure into a sequence of positions at which to be on beats 1,
3, 5, and 7 (I guess you can choose higher or lower granularity, but I think
this level of granularity is just right for most people). Then, in my mind, a
figure is merely a directed path through a graph where each node is a "known"
position (~20?). Assuming you know how to get from one arbitrary position to
another one (safe assumption for anyone in an intermediate level), then you
can just read and write any figure you want.

I think this kind of structure would allow students to learn much much faster
(and is basically the method I used to improve my own skill very quickly,
except I used a spreadsheet instead of graph). You'll realize that most of the
new stuff you learn is simply:

\- composite paths made out of other paths you already knew.

\- existing paths where you take detours and do something else in the middle.
Those detours always start at a node, so now you can use the detour in any
other path that goes through that node.

\- new ways of getting from one node to another. Similarly, now you can apply
this new knowledge to any move that utilizes that node, not just the move that
you're learning at the time.

Where I also think this shines is in developing the dancer's (esp. leader's)
creativity, which I think is one of the hardest part for most people
(technical stuff is easy, creative stuff is hard!). Having such paths laid out
makes it really easy for someone to mix and match, and to create potentially
endless combinations by simply choosing a different path forward once you get
into a known shared position.

And for fun, I'm sure you could just draw out a random path and see if you can
make it work into something that looks reasonably good :)

~~~
Tomte
You'll need to notate hands as well, I think.

While hand drops etc. may be more New York style, crossed hands (which arm on
top) happen in lots of turns.

------
leni536
I found how it handles turns:
[http://labanlab.osu.edu/Turnfolder/turns_expframe.html](http://labanlab.osu.edu/Turnfolder/turns_expframe.html)

I couldn't find notations for partner dances, however designing notations for
contacts shouldn't be difficult. Notations for lead and follow more so.

~~~
Chris_Newton
_I couldn 't find notations for partner dances, however designing notations
for contacts shouldn't be difficult. Notations for lead and follow more so._

It depends how far you want to go down the rabbit hole.

For example, in ballroom, there is also a well-established way that formal
technique is documented in books. For each step within a figure, it specifies
in considerable detail things like which part(s) of the foot you’ll step on
(heel then toe, for example), which way that foot will be pointing (roughly
speaking using compass points), how the upper body will rotate relative to the
lower body, and what kind of rise and fall you have through the legs and feet.

There is a whole system of teaching and examinations based on this technique,
and consequently most teachers really will teach the same basic technique to a
beginner learning the same figure in their classes. Of course, this is very
useful for a social style where people might dance with someone else from
another school the next day!

However, even in the standard technique books with all their detailed
notation, that systematic approach doesn’t tell the whole story. There are
often notes on how to dance some figures that explain details not captured
effectively by the formal notation. Then, once you go beyond the basic
technique and standard syllabus figures that almost everyone learns, as with
many activities you find that performers and teachers develop their own styles
and their own personal ways of explaining more advanced technical points.

At that stage, even though the actions you’re talking about are usually
consistent with the traditional technique, there is still a lot of scope for
interpretation. So, I doubt you could ever have a systematic notation that
captures all the subtleties of the actions that set apart a world champion
from a quarter-finalist. It would take more than a lifetime of study, and by
then the art would have evolved anyway.

~~~
leni536
I'm not expecting the notation to catch every subtlety. That's not happening
in music either, still one can write down very complicated musical pieces and
it's still very helpful.

------
kevinblohm
Merce Cunningham famously used a choreography software called Life Forms [1]

[http://articles.latimes.com/1995-06-02/entertainment/ca-8554...](http://articles.latimes.com/1995-06-02/entertainment/ca-8554_1_merce-
cunningham)

------
beat
My wife is a choreographer. She's more or less developed her own notation to
communicate with her dancers. She works in a combination of bellydance and
modern dance forms, so she has to notate both layered movement and
expressions. It's an interesting challenge!

