February 27, 2007

Dance Heritage Coalition Publishes "Documenting Dance: A Practical Guide"

Washington, DC-based Dance Heritage Coalition (DHC) just published "Documenting Dance: A Practical Guide," which was written by Libby Smigel who is now the organization's project director.

DHC emailed me a review copy and they will soon post this publication in PDF format to their website. I'll include a link as soon as they do.

In this post, I'm including an overview of "Documenting Dance." And then in my next post, "Expanding Dance Documentation to the Internet," I follow with some thoughts on how the Internet can be leveraged to enhance and sustain the process of documenting and preserving dance.

First, some background: DHC, founded in 1992, helps preserve and document dance in the US by producing standards, projects and publications related to this field. This group is a coalition of organizations with major dance collections such as the Library of Congress, Jacob's Pillow and others (see complete list on their website).

Overview

I thought that "Documenting Dance" was fascinating and inspiring. The process of documenting dance so that it can be studied, archived and performed at a later date may sound boring and tedious, but it isn't to me. One of the things that struck me as I was reading this 64-page document is the many ways that it might be possible to leverage the Internet and the global dance community to document and preserve dance in many new and worthwhile ways.

"Documenting Dance" is a well-written guide that describes the key methods for documenting dance, the frameworks or environments in which this documentation takes place, and includes eight case studies. Plus you'll find recommended best practices that you can use for your own efforts to document your dance performances.

The value of documenting dance is described as follows:

"In the bigger picture, the documentation of dance ensures availability to students, scholars, cultural commentators, and others for performance, study and analysis. Some methods of documentation enable a dance to be reproduced in future times and contexts. In the short term, documentation may serve as a tool for audience-building, publicity, grant applications, rehearsal aids, and other uses."

I'm not sure about the last sentence of the above quote. How does a specific focus on dance documentation help to build audiences, improve publicity and the likelihood of getting grants?

And I'm also not sure about this related premise either - although it would be nice if it were the case:

"Ultimately, great and more reliable access to dance [through better documentation] will affect public support for and funding of concert, commercial and social dance forms."

Tools for Documentation

"Documenting Dance" does a good job of describing the main tools that are used for documenting dance and the pros and cons of each.

The three tools are:

1) Dance notation systems
2) Motion Capture systems
3) Film and video

Overall documenting dance performances is difficult because the available toolset has many limitations.

Notation systems like Labanotation - similar to musical notation but used for recording the movement of each part of the body in space and time - are difficult to learn, there are not many notators and colleges and universities are cutting back on notation classes. Bottom line is that it's expensive to notate a dance and a tremendous amount of time and energy must be devoted to this process. So only a very small number of dances can be notated.

Motion capture - where multiple markers are placed on a dancer's body so that a 3D animated computer rendering can be generated of movement through space - is very expensive and very limiting. You can only track one or two dancers at a time, and very few dance organizations have the budgets to pay for this technology.

The third option - film and video - is the best and most accessible approach, and can even be done with a low-budget using the latest digital camcorders. But, as "Documenting Dance" points out, video has it challenges too when it comes to capturing a performance in all of its complexity. How for, example, can you make a good quality video of a performance if the lighting is optimized for a theater audience and not for the camera? This is just one of many challenges that have to be dealt with.

For an excellent resource on how to use video to document dance, I encourage you to visit the Dance Documentation site of Professor Tim Glenn of Florida State University. He has a thorough overview of the many technical and staging issues that need to be addressed when documenting dance performances. Glenn is participating in the "Paul Taylor Repertory Preservation Project," which is one of the case studies in "Documenting Dance."

Frameworks in Which Documentation Takes Place

The process of documenting dance can take place in different frameworks or contexts as described in "Documenting Dance":

- The creative process - documenting how a dance is made from an initial idea or movement.

- A performance where you document both the dance and the audience response.

- Transmission - documenting dances that are passed on via an oral tradition or in a kinesthetic manner.

- Ethnographic study - an outside observer such as a cultural anthropologist records dances in different cultures.

- Documentaries for TV or film - examples in and of themselves of a type of documentation.

- Archival - where staff at libraries, museums and archives collect, inventory and catalogue artifacts dealing with a specific work or body of work.

- Reconstruction - recreation of a dance work that has incomplete documentation.

Case Studies and Best Practices

I found the case studies very interesting and they help give you a concrete idea of what is meant by the frameworks I describe above.

I just want to briefly describe a few of the case studies which I'll get back to when I discuss how the Internet can be integrated into this dance documentation process:

- Preservation of Buddhist sacred dances in Bhutan: In addition to reading the case study, you can visit the Core of Culture website (nice site) to learn about this ethnographic effort to preserve sacred dances that have not been influenced by external influences.

- Capturing the creative process: A 55-minute video documentary was created that showed how Merce Cunningham's "Points in Space" was created during its initial stages.

- Archive project at Library of Congress: The Martha Graham collection was received by the Library of Congress in 1999. This documentation effort includes archiving the existing body of work and creating new materials such as video interviews with her former dancers.

Next Post

In my next post, I'll offer suggestions for how the Internet can be used to expand and enhance the process of documenting all types of dance.

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